Am I wrong in thinking that Jews tend to have greater familiarity with the archaeological record of Israel/Palestine than Palestinians do?

Even though I am a non-Zionist, I won't disagree that Jews do indeed seem to have a more academic understanding of the material culture in the Holy Land, at least from what I have personally encountered.

Whenever I talk with Jewish people about the region's history, I notice they tend to be much more familiar with archaeological periods, ancient inscriptions, material remains, and the different civilizations and peoples who inhabited the land throughout antiquity. Obviously, I am not saying that every Jewish person is knowledgeable about archaeology or that Palestinians are somehow ignorant of their own history. I am talking more about what seems to be a difference in general historical culture and what people are exposed to.

For example, amongst my Jewish friends, they will often bring up things like the Merneptah Stele (c. 1207 BCE), the Mesha Stele (c. 9th century BCE), the Tel Dan Stele (9th century BCE), the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III (c. 825 BCE), Nimrud Tablet K.3751 (c. 733 BCE), the Siloam Inscription (late 8th century BCE), the Lachish Letters (late 7th–early 6th century BCE), the Dead Sea Scrolls (3rd century BCE–1st century CE), the Beit She'arim necropolis (primarily 2nd–4th centuries CE), and the Arch of Titus (c. 81 CE).

The Merneptah Stele contains the oldest known extra-biblical mention of a people called “Israel,” dating to around 1207 BCE, roughly seven centuries before the earliest known Greek geographic use of Palaistinē (“Palestine”) in Herodotus. Nimrud Tablet K.3751 contains the earliest known archaeological reference to the Kingdom of Judah, mentioning Ahaz of Judah among the rulers who paid tribute to Tiglath-Pileser III, while the Beit She'arim necropolis preserves extensive evidence of Jewish life in Roman-period Galilee, including Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Palmyrene inscriptions and burials associated with Jews from communities across the ancient world.

In contrast, out of all the Palestinians I know, only a few of them are particularly familiar with the Jewish material culture of the Holy Land, while only one of them explicitly sees that material record as evidence that Palestinians share a homeland with the Jews rather than as something that contradicts Palestinian belonging. With the rest, however, I have noticed that their historical knowledge tends to become much stronger beginning with the Muslim conquest of the Levant, particularly the Rashidun and Umayyad periods, and then increasingly so with the later Islamic, Ottoman, Mandate, and modern Palestinian periods. Again, this could just reflect the particular Palestinians I happen to know, but it makes me wonder whether Jewish and Palestinian historical consciousness simply tends to emphasize different chronological layers of the same land.

Whenever I have shown some of my Palestinian peers examples of Jewish material culture from the region, the reactions have also been pretty mixed. Sometimes it is met with hostility, sometimes with something along the lines of, “don't talk about that, it will fuel the Zionist narrative,” while others acknowledge the archaeology but seem uncomfortable with the political implications they think other people might draw from it.

However, as someone who puts history and archaeology before my own leftist politics, I am not going to deny or minimize evidence of ancient Israelite, Judean, and Jewish presence simply because that evidence can be incorporated into a Zionist narrative, because acknowledging the archaeological record is not the same thing as accepting every political conclusion someone might draw from it. Likewise, recognizing that Jews have an ancient and continuous historical connection to the land does not require denying Palestinian history, identity, or connection to the same place. If anything, I think the more interesting question is why archaeological evidence itself has become so politically sensitive that simply discussing certain periods of the region's history can be interpreted as taking a side in the modern conflict.

I have pissed off both some of my Jewish friends and some of my Palestinian friends because I apparently seem too “centrist” within this context, because I don't think acknowledging one people's historical connection requires weakening or denying the other's. I acknowledge that the ancient Israelites/Judeans were real peoples whose material culture is extensively attested in the archaeological record, that Jewish communities maintained connections to and presence in the land across many later periods, and at the same time acknowledge that Palestinians also developed deep historical, familial, cultural, and material connections to the same land over many centuries. I don't understand why accepting both has to be treated as some kind of political compromise rather than simply taking the historical record seriously.