How a peace process meant to calm the land left too much of Jewish memory exposed, renamed, and neglected

The older I get, the more I find myself drawn not only to Israel’s battles and breakthroughs, but to its stones.

Not stones in the abstract. Not archaeology as a museum hobby. I mean the living stones of Jewish memory: the City of David, the old arteries of Jerusalem, the Western Wall tunnels, the Judean Desert, Jericho, Solomon’s Pools, the ancient pathways that once carried pilgrims up toward the Temple Mount. These are not decorative fragments of a romantic past. They are part of the biography of a people.

That is why one of the most disappointing aspects of the Oslo era, for me, is not only what it did to Israeli security assumptions or diplomatic expectations, but what it helped normalize in the realm of heritage. Too much of the Jewish story in its own homeland was treated as negotiable, peripheral, or administratively inconvenient. Too many sites of enormous historical, biblical, and civilizational value were left exposed to neglect, distortion, division, or outright narrative theft.

And that, I must say plainly, is a tragedy.

I wrote recently about Yitzhak Rabin, Oslo, and Israel’s unfinished peace. I meant every word of respect I expressed for Rabin the soldier-statesman. He was a serious man, and serious men are increasingly rare in political life. But seriousness also demands honesty. If Oslo was, in part, a diplomatic wager, then one of its most unpalatable side effects was the casual way in which Jewish heritage in Judea, Samaria, and around Jerusalem seemed to be treated as an afterthought.

That still astonishes me.

How does a nation so ancient, so textually rooted, so conscious of memory, sleep at the wheel while some of its most significant heritage sites drift into political gray zones, physical vulnerability, or hostile reinterpretation? How does a country whose very existence is intertwined with history allow the renaming of its historical landscape to proceed with so little urgency? How does the Judean Desert become linguistically airbrushed? How do the Hasmoneans begin to disappear from the public vocabulary? How do the Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran get pushed to the margins of a story in which they are central?

This is not merely a quarrel over labels. It is a struggle........

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