Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948-2012

1. Jerusalem, a Colonial City under Construction

1 1 Jerusalem, a Colonial City under Construction I have often noted that the deprivations of the colonized are the almost direct result of the advantages secured to the colonizer. . . . To observe the life of the colonizer and the colonized is to discover rapidly that the daily humiliation of the colonized, his objective subjugation, are not merely economic. Even the poorest colonizer thought himself to be—and actually was—superior to the colonized. This too was part of colonial privilege. —Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 1965 This is a bleeding process with a vengeance. —Karl Marx, “Letter to Nikolai Danielson,” 1881 In 2004, in a festive ceremony, Israeli authorities broke ground on the Museum of Tolerance (MOTJ) in Jerusalem. The $100-million initiative is sponsored by the Los Angeles–based Simon Wiesenthal Center and is supported by funds raised internationally. This enormous cultural project is currently under construction in the center of Jerusalem, a city Israel has claimed an exclusive right to govern against the weight of world opinion and the historical claims of the indigenous Palestinians. The museum’s website features the structure’s varied facets and celebrates the purported contributions it will make to “healing” this divided and conflict-ridden urban landscape. Dedicated, as its literature announces, to “human dignity ,” the MOTJ’s founders declare that this elaborate representational 2 ◆ Colonial Jerusalem space will serve as “a great landmark promoting the principles of mutual respect and social responsibility.”1 The stated aims of this place of “tolerance” have certainly appeared innocent, even deeply humane, to many Israeli Jews and their supporters abroad. However, this initiative has proven anything but innocuous since plans for it were first unfurled a decade ago. For one, this structure of glass and polished stone is beginning to emerge just a short distance from a string of former Palestinian neighborhoods in West Jerusalem, whose inhabitants were expelled by the new Israeli state in 1948. Further, and perhaps most critically, the museum is being established atop a segment of the Ma’mam Allah (or Mamilla) Islamic Cemetery, a centuries-old Arab burial ground. Despite lofty assertions about this institution’s peaceful character, as construction commenced Israeli building crews were compelled to acknowledge that they had dug up the bones of those buried in the cemetery . Soon thereafter, an embarrassing international scandal arose as news of the violation of these tombs drew predictable responses of protest and indignation from Los Angeles to Lahore, including from thousands of Israeli-Jews dismayed by their government’s actions.2 1. See the MOTJ’s website: http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=lsKWLbP JLnF&b=5505225#. Access date November 20, 2013. If one acknowledges, as I do, the force of Zizek’s (2010) and Brown’s (2006) critiques of the liberal discourse of “tolerance ,” the name of the Wiesenthal Center’s museum is less ironic than it might initially appear. 2. For a trenchant critique of the MOTJ see Khalidi (2011). The Wiesenthal Center answered protests in curious ways. One standard response claimed that the locale was not that of a cemetery at all but rather a parking lot. A picture of the parking lot accompanied this explanation and was meant to assert, in one of the most effective ideological ploys, a claim to the self-evident: “Look, there is obviously only a parking lot here.” “Cemetery? What cemetery?” For more on such ideological tactics, see Zizek (1994, 11–12). One problem confronting those who deny the burial site and its Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim heritage is the fact that it is noted on innumerable pre-1948 cartographic and textual representations of Jerusalem—British, Ottoman, Palestinian, and even those of Zionist organizations. The nascent Jewish state paved the parking lot over one segment of the Jerusalem, a Colonial City ◆ 3 Who, many demanded, justifies the despoiling and disturbing of graves? Of all the places to establish a cultural center with the avowed aim of documenting the history of anti-Semitism, why had the Israeli government and its American affiliates insisted on the burial ground of another people? And yet, despite these desecrations, digging continued implacably, applauded by U.S. and Israeli politicians and a slew of celebrity endorsers. The project has been bolstered since 2008 by the legal sanction of an Israeli Supreme Court ruling supporting the museum’s organizers and affirming their right to build at this locale. This, while voices within the Israeli press...