Epic Conflict

Coincidentally, I spent about an hour or so with a doctoral candidate doing his thesis yesterday on this very theme of the importance of place to Jewish and Muslim identity intensifies Israeli-Palestinian conflicts over land as illustrated in this report:

Why Israeli-Palestinian conflicts over land turn epic

But the illogic appears immediately in addition to a few wrong facts:

Standing outside a mausoleum in Jerusalem's Mamilla cemetery, Rawan Dajani bows her head and cups her hands upward in prayer for her ancestor Sheikh Ahmed Dajani. He was buried in Mamilla, the oldest Muslim burial ground in Jerusalem, nearly half a millennium ago. [that's all? 500 years? on Mt. of Olives there are Jewish graves from 2000+ years ago]

...[these] controversies are more than debates over landownership; they are debates over the ownership of memories, a place in human history.

In Israel especially, place is connected to identity, making it a priority to protect the places that offer a sense of belonging. Any effort to remove evidence of historical ties is seen as an attack on identity. Just last week, Israeli authorities destroyed at least 15 tombstones in the Mamilla cemetery which it said were illegally built.

"There is a tendency in both communities to deny the spirituality or the sanctity or the history of the other on a certain spot," says Marc Gopin, a rabbi and the director of George Mason University's Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution.

Why place plays such a key role in identity

Such tactics are common. This past March, a right-wing Israeli group sponsored ads on 200 buses that displayed fictitious posters of the Temple Mount, in which a Third Temple replaced the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

In 2000 Israeli leader Ariel Sharon set off the second intifada [no, he didn't] by visiting the Temple Mount and asserting permanent Israeli sovereignty over the compound. The violence lasted four years and claimed the lives of more than 5,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis.

But even lesser-known holy sites become part of the conflict if a community feels its presence being threatened.

Recently, the Israeli government named as heritage sites Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, which both Judaism and Islam claim as Abraham's birthplace. By claiming sites in the Palestinian-controlled West Bank, Israel further blurred the lines of the ownership of land – and history...

..."It's not that I'm concerned about the graves as much as I'm concerned about the fact that we don't exist to the Israelis," Ms. Husseini Dajani said.

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