Scientists say Netanyahu government and its US backers are trying to construct a history shorn of all complexity

When the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, visited Jerusalem this month, the itinerary his Israeli hosts laid on involved more archaeology than anything else. On his first day, Benjamin Netanyahu took Rubio underground to excavations near the Western Wall. On the second day, Israel’s prime minister gave his American visitor the honour of inaugurating a tunnel burrowed under a Palestinian district, along a Roman-era street nicknamed the Pilgrimage Road, in a “City of David” archaeological park established by an Israeli settler organisation.

Both events were intended to emphasise Jerusalem’s Jewish roots and its status, Netanyahu stressed, as “our eternal and undivided capital”.