"Dig a centimeter beneath the debate over antiquities...and you hit the debate over whom the Mount belongs to, and a centimeter beneath that is the war over whom the entire country belongs to."

They really don't have to try and make the point that Jerusalem is Jewish. It has been since David took it from the Jebusites around 1000 BC, though occupied by various other peoples down through the centuries. What is another major concern is the calculated destruction of all evidence around the Mount, now controlled by the Arab/Muslims, so as to destroy the historical fact that Jews *ever* lived there. Archaeologists from around the world are working to sift through every bucket load that is thrown out to search for any thing that would tell us more about the region's history. It's a fascinating place.

How could a piece of earth, a physical matter, be Jewish, or Muslim or Christian? I'm baffled.

I too am baffled arifsali. It all seems so damn childish IMO, and yet people having been willing to fight, die or kill over this pile of sand and rocks since ..........
And its all about religion, seeing that both sides were originally Semites.

So bloody sad, so pointless.

Nationalism generally requires a sense of a mystical bond between physical territory and citizenship ("blood and soil"). Archaeology helps by actually finding the nation physically in the ground. It also provides a kind of historical precedence for modern states--"the first Europeans", "the first Americans", etc. It's especially politicized in Israel, where territorial claims are justified on the basis ancient history.