Israel’s destruction of Mamilla cemetery part of effort to remove Palestine from Jerusalem
Tombs in the historic Mamilla cemetery in West Jerusalem. In the
background the construction site of the Israeli Museum of Tolerance set
to open in 2017. (Photo: Pablo Castellani)
Mamilla cemetery
does not exist anymore. What exists now is a hotel, a school, a parking
lot, a public garden, a nightclub and the US consulate. Also a museum to
celebrate tolerance. But the meaning of tolerance in West Jerusalem, a
few steps away from the Old City, is surreal — to build the story of a
new Jerusalem, the Israeli authorities are erasing its past. Mamilla
cemetery is a prominent cornerstone of the Arab, Islamic and Palestinian
identity of the city. But today it’s a forgotten place.
Since the creation
of the State of Israel, the Israeli government has worked to remove the
graveyard from the heart of West Jerusalem. “In 1948, the year of Nakba,
the catastrophe of the Palestinian people, the upper part was
immediately transformed into a public park, renamed ‘Independence Park’,
aimed at celebrating the victory in the ’48 war. They created the
garden, uprooting and removing dozens of ancient tombs.” explains Nader
Dajani as he walks between what remains of the cemetery of his
ancestors. The Dajani family is one of the most ancient and wealthy
families in Palestine, several of its members are buried in Mamilla.
“In the Israeli
project the only things that deserve to survive in Mamilla are two
shrines: one belongs to a famous local scholar, and one to Ahmad Dajani,
a well known sheikh.
The only reasons behind this decision is the archeological importance
of the shrines and also their sizes: it’s easy to remove a small tomb, a
stone; it’s harder to uproot a huge one”.
Tombs
in the historic cemetery of Mamilla in West Jerusalem, in the
background the construction site of the Israeli Museum of Tolerance set
to open in 2017. (Photo: Pablo Castellani)
Today, the graveyard
has almost disappeared. A few ancient tombstones are relegated into the
lower part, covered by grass and trash. It’s not easy to estimate how
many gravestones were located there but, according to an investigation
by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, at least 1,500 tombs were
removed by bulldozers and the human remains just thrown away. “The
Palestinian residents of Jerusalem have to ask the Israeli State for the
permission to clean and take care of the cemetery,” Dajani says. “And
every time they refuse. If we come and do some work, after a while they
destroy what we build to protect the tombs”.
“Even the old pool
of the cemetery is abandoned and empty and it will be removed. It’s
heartbreaking, this pool was the means in ancient times for the
Jerusalemites to distribute water to the city. The water was coming from
the Hebron district through a pipe system, collected here and then
allocated to the different neighborhoods. Actually the name ‘Mamilla’
originates from that: in ancient Arabic it means ‘water of God’ or
‘benefit from God’. Do you see? They are not just uprooting the
gravestone, but also the history of Jerusalem”.
The
Israeli Museum of Tolerance is set to open in 2017 and will be build on
top of the age-old Mamilla cemetery in Jerusalem’s Old City. According
to the Islamic community, some of the Prophet Muhammad’s companions were
buried there. (Photo: Pablo Castellani)
Of the 200 dunams
(one dunam is 1000 meters square), only 20 still serve as a graveyard.
Not for long. Dajani continues, “In July the municipality gave the final
green light to a new residential project. The few tombs that survived
the destruction, will be removed to give space for a massive complex
including 200 apartments, a commercial mall and a 480-room hotel”. The
construction of the Museum of Tolerance is still ongoing meanwhile a new
pub and nightclub opened one month ago where there had previously been
gravestones.
The Israeli project
to destroy Mamilla cemetery has deep roots. In 1933 the British Mandate
planned the first transformation of the graveyard. Under that project
the cemetery was supposed to be divided into four parts: a residential
area, a public garden, a commercial area and the remains of the
graveyard. This European colonialism laid the foundations for the future
Israeli policies: the same project is exactly the one implemented after
’48, when all the public properties owned by the State under the
Islamic al-Waqf
contracts passed into the hands of the new Israeli Custodian of
Absentee Property through the Absentee Law (the Israeli law used to
confiscate all the properties owned by Palestinian refugees).
The cemetery was used since the Roman times, until the 7th
century when the Persians conquered Jerusalem. In 636 AD it became an
Islamic cemetery and it witnessed a bloody massacre during Crusaders
time when 17,000 people were brutally killed in the occupation of
Jerusalem and laid to rest there. People still say that the prophet
Mohammed is buried there; for sure Mamilla is the place of rest for the sahaba,
disciples of Mohammed, and later for famous scholars, intellectuals,
former governors of Jerusalem. In that way it is a symbolic threat to
the biggest Israeli goal of the Judaization of historical Palestine.
Tombs
in the historic cemetery of Mamilla in West Jerusalem, in the
background the construction site of the Israeli Museum of Tolerance to
set to open in 2017. (Photo: Pablo Castellani)
“The current
municipality has the aim to transform Jerusalem into an open air
gallery, on behalf of international tourism,” says Sergio Yahni, an
Israeli journalist and coordinator of the Palestinian-Israeli
organization the Alternative Information Center. Yahni continues, “To
reach this goal, it’s erasing the Islamic history and tradition of the
city. Jerusalem is built on multiple layers, a unique stage of history,
but the municipality is working hard to simplify it. How? Erasing the
Islamic layer in order to replace it with the Roman and the Jewish
ones”.
“The huge project
that is going on in Mamilla is business: they are commercializing the
city, selling it as a modern Jewish city, but at the same time as an
ancient one. The mayor, Nir Barkat, wants to sell Jerusalem to the world
as an opulent tourist attraction, because of this, he is transforming
its character and the nature. Who is the victim? The Arab history of the
city”.
One of the tools
Israel is using to do this is archeology. For decades Israel has used it
to justify its policies on the ground. “The scientific archeology was
replaced by the ideological archeology: all the Israeli work in this
field is based on the Bible and the Old Testament, trying to demonstrate
their narrative,” Yahni explains. “And obviously, in this context,
there is no space for the Islamic and Arab tradition. Let’s take the
example of the Moroccan Quarter, in the Old City, just beside the
Wailing Wall: it was built in the 12th
century and it was destroyed after 1967 because it was contradicting
the Zionist narrative. The same thing is happening in Silwan with the
City of David and in Mamilla: the archeology is a tool to justify a
personal and self-interested narrative, erasing the real one”.
But the Palestinian
residents of Jerusalem aren’t giving up. They have been fighting for 30
years through petitions, legal action and support from outside but with
little results. In 1986 the first appeal to the UN agency Unesco to save
the site failed. In 2006 the Israeli Supreme Court received and then
rejected the first complaint by families and human rights organizations
to stop the work in the graveyard. This has been followed by several
other petitions to UN and UNESCO. But today the disappearance of Mamilla
is still ongoing.
A boy running in the garden next to the cemetery. (Photo: Pablo Castellani)
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