Knesset panel fast-tracks West Bank antiquities bill seen as de facto annexation

Legislation aims to create new civilian body beyond Green Line, as heritage minister pushes to appoint ideological ally with limited experience to run Israel Antiquities Authority

The Knesset Education, Culture and Sports Committee is racing to advance a controversial bill seeking to establish the State of Israel’s direct responsibility for antiquities in the West Bank, which, according to many, amounts to de facto annexation.

Last year, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) rejected a bid to assume responsibility for the West Bank.

The committee, chaired by MK Zvi Sukkot (Religious Zionism), met on Monday to begin preparing the bill for its second and third readings in the Knesset plenum, which is necessary to enshrine it in law. Additional meetings were scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday.

Amit Halevi, a Likud MK who sponsored the bill, said he hoped that it would be approved in the coming week.

Proceedings to dissolve the Knesset are expected to start this week, after the coalition submitted legislation on May 13 to dissolve parliament and trigger elections, competing with opposition parties that had submitted their own bills for dissolution. A preliminary vote on the legislation could take place as early as Wednesday, after which it could be rushed through the legislative process. Once completed, the Knesset’s dissolution would halt the process of passing permanent legislation until after the elections.

If approved in its current form, the West Bank Antiquities bill will change the decades-long status quo in the West Bank by establishing a civilian “Judea and Samaria Heritage Authority” (named after the region’s biblical name) to assume responsibilities currently held by the Defense Ministry.

This would establish provisions, including in land management and expropriation, directly affecting Palestinians living in the West Bank.

“We are doing two things,” Halevi said during Monday’s committee meeting. “One is creating an organized body in charge of our spiritual and cultural treasures in Judea and Samaria, and another is doing it through Israeli legislation.”

The person responsible for the file is now a staff officer of the Archaeology Unit of the Civil Administration, a branch of the Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), which is responsible for civilian affairs in the West Bank.

“The bill would essentially create a new situation in Judea and Samaria in which Israeli governmental authority will be exercised directly, not subordinate to the military commander in the area, but to the heritage minister,” attorney Ayala Roash, from the legal office at the Defense Ministry, warned at the committee meeting.

“In essence, this proposal removes the authority of the military commander, taking away his powers,” she added. “This is essentially a contradiction of the paradigm according to which Israel manages the territories of the region. I must also say that we have not previously encountered such a model.”

Roash also noted that the scope of the proposal includes areas A and B, where Israel has transferred civilian responsibility (and, in the case of Area A, also security responsibility) to the Palestinian Authority, creating further legal difficulties.

“The fact that we approach this as if Israel was occupying its own land and the whole application of international treaties, as if they are relevant to the Jewish people in Sebastia or the Cave of the Patriarchs, is unacceptable, and I think there is a large majority in this Knesset, even among the representatives of the opposition, that agrees,” Halevi said. (Sebastia, near Nablus, is thought to have been the capital of the northern Israelite kingdom in the 9th and 8th centuries BCE, but the site features remains from across history, including from the Roman, Crusader, and Ottoman periods.)

While the vast majority of archaeologists agree that antiquities in the West Bank have been significantly impacted by looting, vandalism, and neglect, the proposal has faced backlash from the outset.

Many archaeologists say the new system would not help care for the antiquities, in light of the complexity of the area, but would rather further expose Israeli academics to boycotts and cuts to international funding. Others pointed out how, according to prevalent interpretations of international law, Israel is not allowed to conduct academic excavations in the disputed areas, but only salvage excavations.

Many also charge the coalition with using the field of antiquities to advance its annexation agenda without explicitly labeling it as such.

An earlier version of the bill proposed that the IAA, the body responsible for overseeing archaeology in Israel’s sovereign territory, would also oversee antiquities in the West Bank. After the IAA rejected that proposal, Halevi presented the new version establishing a parallel authority.

If the bill were passed into law in its current form, the new authority would have the power to excavate, conserve, restore, manage, and develop archaeological sites and ancient artifacts; conduct research; and acquire or expropriate land for the purpose of protecting, conserving, researching, and developing sites.

New IAA chief, like her predecessors, has no background in archaeology

The bill passed its first reading on May 12, on the same day that Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu (Otzma Yehudit) announced he had selected Esther Schreiber, who is ideologically aligned with him but has limited experience, to run the IAA.

“The Israel Antiquities Authority safeguards within it the physical evidence of our existence as the biblical people who returned to their land. When we embarked on this path, I was guided by a vision that demands we move from managing antiquities lying in storage rooms to creating a living, breathing mechanism of heritage stories,” Eliyahu said in a statement. “Esti Schreiber is the right person to lead this vision.”

The ministry statement said that Schreiber holds a bachelor’s degree in Jewish history and cognitive science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a master’s degree with honors in public administration and policy from the University of Haifa, and that she was CEO of the INEXTG group, managing “an annual budget of approximately NIS 100 million ($34 million)” and overseeing “an organizational structure comprising around 700 employees.”

No other former professional positions held by Schreiber were mentioned in the statement.

However, documents published on the website Guidestar, operated by the Corporations Authority of the Justice Ministry, which includes information about for- and not-for-profit organizations, show that in 2024 INEXTG’s budget was slightly under NIS 26 million and the NGO had 60 salaried employees (in addition to 324 volunteers).

A report by i24news on Sunday said that in her resume, Schreiber claimed to have experience managing real estate transactions worth tens of millions of shekels, but that she actually dealt only with one individual transaction, acquiring a building in Jaffa for her NGO in 2024 that, it turned out, had been expropriated by the municipality in 2022. The group was therefore unable to use the building.

The IAA has an annual budget of hundreds of millions of shekels and employs around 800 people.

Schreiber, like the current IAA head Eli Escozido and his predecessor, Israel Hasson, does not have a background in archaeology.

According to the ministry, she was selected by a search committee chaired by Heritage Ministry Director-General Itai Granek, which also included Prof. Joshua Schwartz, emeritus professor of historical geography of ancient Israel at Bar-Ilan University, former Wix EMEA general manager Batsheva Moshe, former Rehovot Municipality director-general Moshiko Erez, and IAA senior archaeologist Avi Salomon.

Schreiber’s appointment still needs to be approved by the government and by the IAA council. If confirmed, she will be the first woman to head the organization.