JERUSALEM // Israel seems to have little time for the irony that
a modern Jewish shrine to “coexistence and tolerance” is being built on the
graves of the city’s Muslim forefathers.
The Israeli Supreme Court’s approval last week of the building of
a Jewish Museum of Tolerance over an ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem is the
latest in a series of legal and physical assaults on Islamic holy places since
Israel’s founding in 1948.
The verdict ended a four-year struggle by Islamic authorities
inside Israel to stop development at the Mamilla cemetery, which lies in the
shadow of Jerusalem’s Old City walls, close to Jaffa Gate.
After the judgment, Jerusalem’s mufti, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein,
called the museum’s building “an act of aggression” against the Muslim public.
The furore from both religious and secular Palestinians has
apparently bemused most Israeli observers.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, initiator of the project, dismissed objections
last week as cover for “a land grab by Islamic fundamentalists, who are in
co-operation with Hamas”. His view that Muslim concerns are really an attack on
the Jewish state’s sovereignty is shared by many.
Such sentiments have confirmed to most Palestinians the degree to
which Israeli authorities make decisions while oblivious of Palestinian
religious and national rights.
Although Muslim leaders angrily warned from the outset that the
Museum of Tolerance would require the disinterring of graves, they were ignored
until spring 2006, when it was reported that dozens of skeletons had been
unearthed during the early excavations.
The local media also revealed at the time that state
archaeologists had been secretly trying to move the skeletons without alerting
the local Muslim authorities, as they should have done, and that many of the
skeletons had been damaged in the process.
When several months of arbitration between the developers and
Muslim leaders proved fruitless, the courts stepped in.
Ostensibly, the driving force behind the museum, which is to cost
US$250 million (Dh918m), is the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a private Los
Angeles-based Jewish human rights organisation. But the venture is being pushed
through with equal vigour by Israeli officials from the government, Jerusalem
municipality and Lands Administration.
For many years it has been their priority to obscure all
indications of the Muslim presence in the western part of Jerusalem – as well as
in many areas of Israel – that predate the Jewish state’s founding in 1948.
The treatment of the Mamilla cemetery, which is said to include
the burial sites of the Prophet Mohammed’s companions, stands in stark contrast
to another ancient cemetery, nearby on the Mount of Olives.
Since East Jerusalem was illegally occupied by Israel in the 1967
war, the Jewish cemetery on the Mount has been carefully renovated and expanded
as a “heritage site”.
In contrast, the Mamilla cemetery, which lies just inside West
Jerusalem and was captured by the Israeli army in the 1948 war, was immediately
removed from Muslim control. Classified as refugee property, it was passed on to
a new Israeli official called the custodian of absentee property.
This was far from an isolated incident. Before the creation of
Israel, as much as one-tenth of all territory in the Holy Land was managed as
part of an Islamic endowment known as the waqf, bequeathed by Muslims for
religious and charitable purposes.
After 1948, however, Israel seized all waqf property – in
addition to private land belonging to refugees – and transferred it to the
custodian.
Under pressure from the government in the 1950s, the custodian
passed most of the undeveloped land, particularly farmland, on to a state-run
body known as the Development Authority, which was charged with using it for the
“public interest”. That usually meant using the profit from the land for the
benefit of the Jewish public.
Other waqf property – mostly land on which holy places, including
mosques and cemeteries, were located – was managed by special Islamic trusts
established by the state.
This has provided the main defence adopted today by Israeli
officials in justifying the siting of the museum. They say that an Islamic trust
deconsecrated the Mamilla cemetery in 1964, thereby freeing up the land for
development.
What they fail to point out, however, is that the Islamic trusts
have no legitimacy among Palestinian Muslims in Israel, nearly one-fifth of the
country’s total population, let alone among Palestinians in the occupied
territories.
The Islamic officials on the trusts are widely seen as corrupt,
appointed by the state because of their willingness to do the government’s
bidding rather than because of their public standing or Islamic credentials.
They earned that reputation by rubber-stamping many land
transactions of waqf property desired by the state. One of the most notorious
occurred in the early 1960s when Muslim officials approved the sale of the large
Abdul Nabi cemetery in today’s Tel Aviv for the building of a hotel and several
Jewish housing developments.
This abuse of waqf land has provoked a simmering resentment among
Israel’s Palestinian minority.
Last year Palestinians in the historic city of Jaffa, now little
more than a suburb of Tel Aviv, tried to challenge the role of the Islamic
trusts by petitioning the courts to turn control of waqf property over to
genuine representatives of the Muslim public.
The government, however, refused to divulge what waqf property
existed in Jaffa, claiming “the requested information would seriously harm
Israel’s foreign relations”. This was presumed to refer to the damage that might
be done to Israel’s image abroad should it be revealed to what uses the waqf
property had been put.
Actual holy places have fared little better, with most now
inaccessible even to Israel’s Palestinian citizens.
Some, such as the 900-year-old Hittin mosque built by Saladin in
the Galilee region, have been fenced off and left to crumble. Others are used by
rural Jewish communities as animal sheds. And yet more have been converted into
discos, bars or nightclubs, including the Dahir al Umar mosque – now the Dona
Rosa restaurant – in the former Palestinian village of Ayn Hawd.
Similar dubious practices occurred with the Mamilla cemetery.
From the 1950s, during a period of military government that imposed severe
restrictions on all Palestinians living inside Israel, the graves and tombs
belonging to Jerusalem’s most notable families began to decay. Part of the land
was turned into a car park.
After the 1967 war, as Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of
Jerusalem, has noted, the Muslim authorities lobbied to be allowed to
rehabilitate and maintain the graves, but were refused permission.
Instead, in 1992 the custodian transferred the site to the
Jerusalem municipality, which used the land to establish an Independence Park,
named for Israel’s victory in the 1948 war. Then a few years later the
municipality transferred a parcel of the land to the Wiesenthal Center for its
Museum of Tolerance.
As Mr Benvenisti points out, over the years many Islamic sites in
Jerusalem have been “turned into garbage dumps, parking lots, roads and
construction sites”.
What makes the latest fight over the Mamilla cemetery different
is that in the past decade a new breed of Muslim leader has emerged in Israel to
overshadow the Islamic trusts. In particular the struggle over the fate of the
holy places has been taken up by the leader of the Islamic Movement inside
Israel, Sheikh Raed Salah.
Last week he warned: “We will mobilise in the Arab and Muslim
world so that it puts pressure to halt the project.”
Tolerance, after all, has its limits.
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