Some experts, according to Professor Talia Einhorn, senior research fellow of T.M.C. Asser Instituut for Private and Public Law, in the Hague, have suggested that, at least as regards the return of illegally exported objects, the State addressed should be allowed to decline return thereof so long as the requesting State cannot guarantee that the object will be well preserved and maintained after its return. Even peace treaties do not seem to remove all hostilities. There are yet significant parts of the population that oppose the peace process. Israelis point to the Jewish holy sites that the Palestinians have desecrated in the past as evidence that the Palestinians cannot be trusted to protect Jewish cultural artifacts. But there are other factors in addition to the doubts over whether a Palestinian state will properly care for the scrolls.
Geographic proximity is another factor.
The closer the objects are to the current borders of the state claiming them, the stronger the claim. In several cases, artifacts have been returned to the ethnic groups that created them for example, in 1971 Denmark returned to Iceland 55 crates of Icelandic manuscripts long held in Denmark. As one noted authority has stated, Cultural property is most important to the people who created it or for whom it was created or whose particular identity and history it is bound up with. In the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls, there can be no question that that is the Jews. As a prominent British scholar has explained, Every single object has its own particular history, its own peculiar circumstances of acquisition, and the merits of each case must be weighed.