Israel Matzav

300 fake graves destroyed

When last we left the fake Muslim graves in the Mamilla cemetery in downtown Jerusalem, an Israeli court had turned down a request by the Waqf to prevent their destruction. Since that ruling at the beginning of this week, the Jerusalem municipality has destroyed some 300 fake graves.

The tombs were built by Muslim elements who took advantage of the fact that the Jerusalem Municipality's Health Department granted them a permit to clean up and fix existing tombstones. Instead of just cleaning graves, however, the Muslims hired workers to try and grab land from the adjoining Independence Park (Gan HaAtzmaut).

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Each new tombstone is dismantled only after an expert from the Antiquities Authority inspects it and confirms that it is indeed a new tombstone.

The new tombstones had no graves or human remains beneath them. Plastic bottles, cigarette packs and irrigation pipes were found beneath some of them. Others were built atop a sewage pipe.

Someone please tell me that the Municipality has at least documented this on video for the inevitable backlash.

In 1962, the Mamilla cemetery was declared mundras (dormant) in accordance with Islamic law by the highest Shari'a court in the country. By that time, no one had been buried there for 40 years. In the 1930's, Yasser Arafat's uncle, Haj Amin al-Husseini built a hotel on the cemetery's grounds (the Palace Hotel - now Israel's ministry of industry and trade) and attempted to build an Islamic university on this 'holy' cemetery.

The cemetery was declared mundras in 1962 to permit the city of Jerusalem to build a parking lot over part of it.

After a court battle lasting several years, the Simon Wiesenthal Center was given permission to build its Museum of Tolerance on the parking lot's grounds. The Supreme Court did all it could to avoid deciding the case, but the Waqf refused all offers of compromise. The Wiesenthal Center spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in court fees, and by the time the case ended, the world-class architect who was supposed to design the site (Frank Gehry) was no longer available and much of the donation money had dried up, leading to the museum being downsized.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:46 PM