The Ma’man Allah (Mamilla) Cemetery: Greenwashing and Erasing of Heritage in the Name of Modern Colonization and Infrastructure

The graveyard is a historical Muslim cemetery in West Jerusalem, just to the west of the northwest corner of the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, near  Jaffa Gate and the New Gate. The cemetery grounds also contain the bodies of thousands of Christians killed in the pre-Islamic era, as well as several tombs from the time of the Crusades. It was used as a burial site for over  1,000 years until 1927 when the Supreme Muslim Council preserved it as a  historic site.

In 1948, the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs stated that the cemetery is:  “one of the most prominent Muslim cemeteries, where seventy thousand  Muslim warriors of [Saladin’s] armies are interred along with many Muslim scholars […] Israel will always know to protect and respect this site”.  

Unfortunately, the authorities did not live up to those words. Today, it seems like they actively want to erase it. Recently, Municipal Israeli authorities authorized the building of a museum on the grounds of the Ma’man Allah cemetery. Ironically, the museum is called “the Museum of Tolerance”. Beyond the lofty words, the museum aims to rewrite the history of the cemetery – taking more of its land and erasing indigenous Palestinian Arab heritage.

During the Heriland course on Cultural Heritage and Spatial Planning, in 2022 in Amsterdam, I was introduced to two approaches for understanding and managing cultural landscapes: Historic Urban  Landscape (HUL), and Historic landscape characterization (HLC). In the HUL training session, we were introduced to strategies that allow the preservation of heritage in the network of nowadays growing cities; the HLC workshop gave us tools which focused on enriching our maps by enabling us to characterize elements and categorize them to better understand the area. Furthermore, I participated in seminars on spatial change and changing demographics. 

During the course, we also got the opportunity to do a fieldwork assignment; my group and I chose to go to the recently opened National Holocaust Memorial, “Namen Monument”, in the former Jewish neighbourhood of Amsterdam. The monument was designed by the internationally renowned architect, Libeskind. Ironically, the same architect also designed the Museum of Tolerance on the Ma’mn Allah Cemetery in Jerusalem, (even though other architects, such as Frank Gehry, the Pritzker prize winner, refused to design the museum for ethical reasons).

My group and I asked the visitors about their opinions and feelings while entering the site. Everyone praised the idea of the monument and said it was vital to keep alive the memory of the victims and deaths. An old lady who lives nearby remarked that she volunteered to help build the monument brick by brick.

During their occupation of the Netherlands, the Nazis killed over 100 thousand Dutch Jews; more than two-thirds of the Jewish population in The Netherlands. 

I do believe that graveyards like monuments can withstand the passage of time – unless they are actively erased. In an interview with the Centre for Constitutional Rights, Dyala Husseini Dajani, a Jerusalemite whose ancestors are buried in the cemetery and who had joined a petition to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to halt the desecration, said:

“The systematic desecration of our ancestors’ resting place and destruction of our cultural heritage by Israeli authorities confirms our feelings that Israel has no regard for the human rights of living Palestinians, or the peace of the dead. We are under no illusions that we are anything but third-class citizens in the eyes of the Israeli state, which treats us and our history with utter contempt, while the international community stands silently by […]”.