More than two and a half millennia ago, a famous Jerusalemite, the prophet Jeremiah, said, “At that time, saith the Lord, they shall bring out the bones of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, out of their graves.”
Recent news out of Jerusalem is that a number of graves in the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion have been desecrated, apparently on New Year’s Day. In total, some thirty graves were damaged, with crosses overthrown and marble slabs used to shatter tombstones. Security cameras — an unusual appurtenance in a home for the dead, but no longer so strange anywhere in the Holy Land — caught footage of those responsible at work: two young men, apparently ultra-orthodox Jews as they wore skullcaps and had tsitsit, long fringes, on their garments. Both have now been arrested.
Once a peaceful oasis in a city that knows too much violence, the graveyard was created in the middle of the nineteenth century following the birth of a small community of Christians belonging to western European Protestant churches. The first bishop, Michael Alexander, appointed jointly by Prussia and England in 1841, was a converted Jew and, though the graveyard was formally opened only some years after his death, his body was brought there from Bilbeis, in Egypt, where he died in 1845 to lie in the soil of the city he had served. Since that time, many others have been buried there, including Bishop Gobat, Alexander’s successor, whose grave, with a fine bust of the bishop, was among those damaged.
Some of the Christians buried there are local, but many, probably most, are foreigners, called to Jerusalem by their faith to serve as doctors, scholars, teachers, and missionaries. Most recently, it received the remains of Shireen Abu Akleh, the journalist killed, as now seems certain, by Israeli soldiers, last May.
Condemnation of the desecration has come from all quarters. Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said the damage was “a blasphemous act”. Other religious and political leaders, as well as the Israeli government, have been forthright in their condemnation as well.
This is not the first time such damage has occurred. The cemetery lies on the seam between Jewish and Islamic Jerusalem — it lay just on the Israeli side of the border before the Six Day War of 1967 (though most of those who needed it lived on the Jordanian side, with enormous complications for visits). This ground is also of historic importance to Jews. Some years ago, a neighbouring yeshiva, or Jewish religious academy, that was established in 1967 laid water pipes and electricity lines over the cemetery without permission and the authorities did little to prevent them or to remove the irreligious intrusion.
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Important as it is to catch and punish the perpetrators, it is also important to ask why this attack has occurred, and why now. Vandalism of graves, especially of the dead of other peoples or faiths, is an ancient practice, of course. It is a particularly ugly crime — the dead cannot fight back. It is also a crime that does less to damage the victims than to benefit the perpetrators, whether just by satisfying some cowardly (because safe) ersatz bloodlust or to free up land for development or simple seizure.
Jews — like their Muslim neighbours but unlike Christians — believe in a need to let the dead lie in peace, forever. Graves may not be dug up, or moved, and dead bodies of Jews, even from two thousand years ago found in archaeological excavations in Israel, are required under Israeli law to be covered over and left in peace, not taken for scientific examination, even temporarily.
All over Europe, Jewish graves — as the perpetrators here probably know — were desecrated countless times over the past millennium, and the vandalism is rightly seen by Jews as sacrilege. Jews in Israel, or some Jews, have not taken the lesson of history to heart. It is an ugly irony that descendants of those who were the victims of this kind of intolerance should, now that they are in a position to demonstrate the kind of tolerance for which they pleaded through centuries of exile, be inflicting precisely the same kind of barbarity on others.
While we do not know the motives of these particular criminals, the context is helpful here. Mount Zion, where the cemetery is located, is seen traditionally as the burial place of King David, and the entire hill holds special significance for religious Jews. The yeshiva has taken over several buildings on the mountain, and the status of the cemetery, like that of many non-Jewish institutions in the city, is less than secure.
Ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel, now masters in their home, as they loudly proclaim, make little secret of their desire not only to impose their narrow vision of Jewish identity, Jewish tradition, and Jewish law on their less orthodox and even on their wholly secular Jewish brethren. They also want to do what they can to dominate or to exclude whatever is non-Jewish, if not from their state, at least from any meaningful role in their society.
Crosses are an especially visible and hated symbol of the traditional enemy. The video of the vandals in action showed them making directly for a large stone cross as soon as they entered the cemetery and investing considerable effort in pushing it over and then smashing it with heavy rocks.
The swearing-in of a new government in Jerusalem two weeks ago undoubtedly plays a role here, too. That government includes parties of the extreme right. One of these is Otzma Yehudit, “Jewish Power”, whose name says much about its aims and its program. Its leader, Itamar Ben Gvir, holds the post of national security minister, with responsibility for the police. He is famous for visiting Sheikh Jarrah, not far away on the other side of the Old City of Jerusalem, during the clashes that preceded the recent election, and shouting at the Palestinians demonstrating there: “We’re the landlords here, remember that, I am your landlord.” Just days after the desecration of the Christian graves, Ben Gvir paid a visit, heavily escorted by bodyguards and police, to the Temple Mount, a visit that could not but recall the visit there by Ariel Sharon in September 2000 that set off the second Intifada. That cost several thousand lives.
Will the outrage of the desecration of graves be dismissed by the Israeli authorities as little more than a teenage prank — those arrested are said to be aged 14 and 18 — or will they give it, and the larger setting of extremist Jewish unfriendliness toward things non-Jewish, the attention it demands? The special position that Israel and the sacred places of Christendom hold within the Christian world calls for more than hand-wringing and conventional pieties about law and order. The deep and complex web of historic ties and the political, social, and religious mistrust between the communities in the region — both Israel and the territories it controls — give the problem added urgency.
Israeli’s new government, which including a police force now under far closer direct control by a minister representing Jewish Power, appears less than wedded to resolving such issues. Jeremiah’s prophecy has taken on strange resonances in 2023.
David J. Wasserstein is Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, specialising in the history of Jews and Muslims. Among his many books are The Caliphate in the West: An Islamic Political Institution in the Iberian Peninsula and Black Banners of ISIS: The Roots of the New Caliphate.