Row over plan to build Jewish museum of tolerance on site of Muslim cemetery

[stranger81]

A group of Palestinians descended from 15 of Jerusalem's oldest Arab families lodged a protest with the UN today in a fresh effort to prevent the construction of a "Museum of Tolerance" on the site of an ancient Muslim cemetery.

The project, run by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, has been dogged by controversy since its launch in 2004. Islamic groups and individual Palestinians complained that the site, in west Jerusalem, was the ancient cemetery of Ma'man Allah, also known as Mamilla, which housed thousands of graves dating back hundreds of years and where even today there are still many gravestones and tombs.

*** *** *** *** ***

After legal battles, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in October 2008 that building could go ahead. But the Israel Antiquities Authority's chief excavator for the site, Gideon Suleimani, found the site was a cemetery in use for the past 1,000 years that "abounded with graves" and should not be open to construction without a full excavation, which never happened. He said his assessment was ignored by the court. Then late last year Frank Gehry, the celebrity architect working on the project, withdrew.

*** *** *** *** ***

"This tolerance museum to us is a museum of intolerance," said Dyala Husseini, who has ancestors from her family and her husband's family buried in the cemetery. "It is very inhumane, it is very humiliating and it ignores our existence as Palestinian families here in Jerusalem. Our families are here in Jerusalem and have been here for centuries," she said.

Jamal Nusseibeh said one of his ancestors, the former governor of Jerusalem Burhan al-Din al-Khazraji ibn Nusseibeh, was buried in the cemetery in 1432. "It is part of the rich fabric of Jerusalem which always has been a symbol of tolerance," he said. "The fact that anybody could wish to wipe out such a structural part of this fabric in order somehow to promote tolerance is very hard to understand."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/10/jewish-museum-tolerance-muslim-cemetery

[Jackpine Radical]

1. What better way to symbolize modern Israeli

(NOT, let me emphasize, Jewish) tolerance than by building a museum to it on the bones of Arabs?

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. Just drips with irony, doesn't it?

[Igel]

3. Odd.

I keep reading the stories over the same issues. That's not what's odd. That's simply become commonplace.

What's odd is that the stories continue to allocate similar amounts of space to the Israeli and the Palestinian sides. However, as the Israeli side of the story continues to accrete developments, the Palestinian side continues to have the same kind of thing--just novel tokens of it.

The consequence is that much of the history and context that were in earlier accounts and helped make sense of those accounts gets deleted, so that narrative is bleached and reduced to a series of bureaucratic actions, while the other side remains rich in human emotion and drips pathos. Much of the background and context would put that human emotion in a rather different light.

It makes it very difficult to evaluate the stories that I read. I've come to assume that there's massive amounts of information simply omitted, information that would make for a rather different view if it were included.

[Violet_Crumble]

4. But if you keep on reading stories on the same issues, then you should be able to evaluate...

See, I remember the argument on this one back when the plans were announced, and I'm not sure how anyone could think it's acceptable for a museum of tolerance to be built in such an intolerant manner. Nor am I sure what history and context you think is missing from earlier accounts.

[Scurrilous]

5. LATimes: A Museum of Tolerance we don't need

The Simon Wiesenthal Center should abandon its plan to build a facility on the site of a Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem

<snip>

"The Simon Wiesenthal Center's plan to construct an outpost of Los Angeles' Museum of Tolerance atop the most important Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem is temporarily in disarray. This presents an opportunity to call on the center to abandon this outrageous project once and for all.

The site in question is Ma'man Allah, or the Mamilla Cemetery, which had been in continuous use for centuries until 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or driven into flight and their private property, including Ma'man Allah, was handed over to Jewish users.

Like Muslim and Christian sites throughout Israel -- which, as a 2009 State Department report pointed out, implements protections only for Jewish holy sites -- the cemetery has long been threatened. Parts of it have been used as a roadway, parking lots, building sites and Israel's Independence Park. Among the trees in the park, Palestinian tombstones can still be seen, eerily and all too appropriately.

In 2002, the Wiesenthal Center -- which had been given part of the cemetery by the city of Jerusalem -- announced that architect Frank Gehry would design a complex to be called the Center for Human Dignity-Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem. Ground was broken in 2004. Palestinian and Muslim concerns were ignored until a lawsuit led to the suspension of excavation in 2006. In 2008, the Israeli Supreme Court -- dismissing the appeals not only of Palestinians with relatives buried there but also the protests of Jews appalled by desecration of any cemetery -- cleared the way for the project.

The center claims to see nothing wrong with erecting what its leader, Rabbi Marvin Hier, calls "a great landmark promoting the principles of mutual respect and social responsibility" on top of what remains of another people's cemetery. It has resorted to endless dodges to support its claim.

To those protesting construction on ancient cemetery land, the center says it's merely using a part of the site that has been a parking lot for years. To Jews outraged at desecration, it says, in effect, that different standards apply to Muslim cemeteries than to Jewish ones. To Muslim clergy and legal scholars who insist on the inviolability of cemeteries in Islam, the center disagrees, in essence claiming that it knows more about Islamic jurisprudence than they do. To those who protest today, the center asks where they were in 1960, when an Islamic judge approved Israel's construction of the parking lot (it does not, however, mention that he was a state employee, nor that he was subsequently removed from office for corruption).

To archaeologists who say the site should be spared construction, the center says that only a couple hundred bodies needed to be moved. And with reference to Palestinians who have filed legal actions and persisted in expressing anxiety over their families' remains, Hier had this message just last month: "The case is over; get used to it."

more

[Donald Ian Rankin]

6. A perfect symbol of Israeli attitudes to tolerance. N.T.