The Israeli usurping state and Muslim holy sites

"THE tomb of David, a king for Christians and Jews and a prophet for Muslims, on Mount Zion, is one of Jerusalem’s architectural gems. But the site has become an example of how some believers in the disputed Holy Land hope that their faith can dominate. In 2012 the turquoise tiles designed by Muslims in the Ottoman era were removed. “We cleaned it,” says the curator at the National Centre for the Development of Holy Places, a body under Israel’s ministry of tourism...First some ultra-Orthodox enthusiasts used hammers to scrape away what they considered to be the shrine’s 17th-century muck. Then some archaeologists from Israel’s antiquities authority used a grant from a Jewish-Mexican benefactor to erect pews and shelves of prayer books to turn it into a synagogue. The police have abandoned their investigation into the desecration...But Jerusalem’s municipal authority is overseeing the construction of a “museum for tolerance” in the grounds of an old Muslim cemetery. The southern city of Beersheba in recent years has staged a wine festival at the gates of the Ottoman mosque, which Israel confiscated in 1948 and has subsequently used as a jail, courthouse and currently as a history museum filled with statues. When Muslims began to pray on the grass next to the mosque, the city’s mayor, Ruvik Danilovich, put up a fence. If the mosque were restored, many Jews fear it would become a magnet for thousands of Bedouin nearby, jeopardising the city’s Jewish status...The Crusaders first established the myth that David’s remains lie there, installing a sarcophagus to attract pilgrims from Europe, say Jewish experts. Ignoring the Bible, which says that David was buried elsewhere “with his forefathers”, Jews and Muslims later embraced the Crusaders’ tale to press their own claims to the hill. Ottoman Turks wrested the shrine from the Franciscans in the 16th century and gave it to Sufi mystics. Israel, which conquered it 65 years ago, handed it to a yeshiva, a Jewish religious seminary....“How can we demand the world respect our synagogues and cemeteries, if we don’t do the same to their holy sites?” asks Yitzhak Reiter, a former Arab-affairs adviser to the prime minister and the author of a book about Beersheba’s mosque. “Preserving the heritage of other faiths is a Zionist mission.” He suggests that 20 mosques, like Beersheba’s, which fell into Israeli hands in the 1948 war, should be restored to their communities and plaques put up in honour of 33 more that lie in ruins. Officials say they have quietly begun to do so. But only two—one in Acre and another in Lod—have gone up."