Jordan to ask US and Italy to seize visiting Dead Sea Scrolls

Jan 14, 2010, 17:20 GMT

Amman - The Jordanian government, in an ongoing effort to regain the Dead Sea Scrolls from Israel, will ask the US and Italian governments to seize the 2,000-year-old artefacts when they are exhibited in the two countries later this year, Tourism Minister Maha Khatib said Thursday.

'We will be writing to the US and the Italian governments to seize the Dead Sea Scrolls, which Israel took from an East Jerusalem museum upon its occupation of the holy city in 1967,' Khatib told German Press Agency dpa.

'Our message to all states is quite clear: all signatories to the 1954 Hague Convention, which provides for the protection of cultural property during armed conflicts, should honour their commitments under the agreement and help Jordan restore the artefacts,' she said.

She pointed out that the scrolls, which include the earliest written sources for the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old Testament), came under the control of the Jordanian government at the end of the 1940s after Bedouins found them in a cave near the Dead Sea.

Khatib said that the scrolls were scheduled to be exhibited in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, starting January 22 and later in Italy.

She acknowledged that a similar effort with the Canadian government at the end of 2009 seemed to have failed.

'We got an ambiguous reply. They told us that the issue should be settled between Jordan and Israel,' she said.

Jordan made the petition to Canada last month when the scrolls were displayed at a Toronto museum. The Canadian government also reportedly refused a similar request from the Palestinian Authority.

Israel has adamantly refused the Jordanian plea. Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said that the scrolls were an 'intrinsic part' of the Jewish heritage and had nothing to do with Jordan.

Khatib said that an earlier Jordanian complaint to UNESCO also failed, apparently because the UN organization 'lacks the power' to ensure the return of the scrolls to Jordan.