The UNESCO logo on display at the organization’s Paris headquarters. Photo: Reuters / Philippe Wojazer.

News coverage of Israel regularly follows the pattern of inverting cause and effect, or victims and the perpetrators. Justin Klawan’s August 3, 2026, article at The Week, “The politics of archaeology: Israel digs in on control of ancient West Bank sites,” offers a clear illustration of how this process works.

Klawan’s article attempts to build a narrative of Israel “attempting to seize the land around archaeological sites,” such as Sebastia – the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Israel – as part of “Israel’s movement in the region” to “extend” its control over the West Bank. The controversy, the article implies, began with an Israeli bill empowering a new body to manage archaeological sites there, purportedly to protect said sites. The carefully selected commentators suggest, however, that the bill is an “overzealous” ploy to “expand control” and “annex…occupied land,” forcing the Palestinian Authority (PA) into a “political battle” to protect the sites, namely its effort to declare the ancient Israeli capital a “Palestinian” site at UNESCO.

But this narrative is backwards. It relies on omissions to rhetorically reverse cause and effect.

“The next major fight,” as the article puts it, is not over “Israel…attempting to seize the land,” but precisely the opposite.

Consider several crucial and highly relevant facts which undermine Klawan’s narrative.H

Israel Already Administered the Site

The Sebastia site is in Area C of the West Bank. As Klawan acknowledges a few paragraphs in, that means it is “under full Israeli civil and security control according to the Oslo Accords,” referring to the internationally endorsed agreement between Israel and the PA signed in 1993 and 1995. Yet, the second sentence of the article tells us “Israel is currently attempting to seize the land…”

Casual readers could be forgiven for missing that Klawan is confusingly suggesting that Israel is trying to “seize” land it is already legally permitted to control, anyway.

The Palestinian Authority’s Destruction of History

But it gets worse.

Klawan completely omits that three years ago the PA paved a road on top of the Sebastia archaeological site, destroying a Herodian era wall and enabling the looting of burial caves. Sadly, this is far from an isolated incident.

Israeli officials have cited incidents like that as necessitating the bill to protect the sites. Indeed, there is a long, documented history of Palestinians damaging and desecrating Jewish heritage sites. Perhaps Israel’s “claims,” as Klawan puts it, that the legislation is necessitated by the “deliberate and systematic destruction” of these sites by the PA are true.

This plainly relevant fact upends Klawan’s entire narrative. The PA, not Israel, tried to seize land by illegally building a road on territory not under its administration designated in Oslo. The PA, not Israel, tried to control the archaeological site by destroying it. Israel, not the PA, is trying to protect the region’s cultural heritage. Indeed, the same year the PA was destroying ancient walls and burial caves, Israel was pouring millions of dollars into restoring and developing the area.

The Cynical UNESCO Gambit

The author also describes the PA’s decision to go to UNESCO as an effort to “stop Israel’s movement in the region” by designating Sebastia as a “World Heritage site.” Here, too, The Week omits crucial context that flips the narrative. The PA has long used its automatic majority at the United Nations to try and disconnect Jews from their own heritage. Whether by designating Jewish holy sites as “Palestinian World Heritage sites” or adopting resolutions outright denying the Jewish connection to their holiest site, the Temple Mount, UNESCO has been an offensive weapon in the hands of the PA, not a defensive tool for protecting cultural heritage.

When the full context is given, the story looks more like one of an Israeli effort to protect the archaeological sites from the Palestinian Authority. But in The Week’s curated recounting of events, readers are given the exact opposite impression.

It’s hard to imagine a more perfect example of journalism failing at such a fundamental level.

David M. Litman is a Research Analyst at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).