A short walk down the hill from the westernmost gate of the 16th-century walled city of Jerusalem lies the area known as Mamilla (Maʾman Allah), at the center of which is the eponymous ancient pool surrounded by the remains of a Muslim cemetery. In Jerusalemite folklore, Mamilla was the burial site of several of the ṣaḥāba (companions of the prophet Muhammad) and tens of thousands of warriors in Saladin's army who fell while retaking Jerusalem from the crusaders. Chroniclers and historians have recorded that from at least the 15th century until the late 1920s, numerous Sufi shaykhs, Islamic scholars, and elite notables of the city were buried there, until it filled up and was closed for further burial.

At the end of the 1948 war, Mamilla ended up on the Israeli side of the cease-fire lines in a newly Arab- and Muslim-free West Jerusalem. With the Israeli capture of the Old City and East Jerusalem in the 1967 war, Mamilla was in the new geographic center of an expanding “unified Jerusalem,” making it prime real estate. Starting in the 1960s, the Israeli municipality began to chip away at Mamilla cemetery land for the construction of a park, two streets, and several buildings. In the late 1990s, the municipality supported a proposal by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center to build a Museum of Tolerance (MoT) in Jerusalem and offered it land at Mamilla, which sparked a series of lawsuits and a public and international outcry when ground for the museum was finally broken in 2005. Before the matter came to a legal conclusion, up to 1000 Muslim graves were exhumed and relocated.

Yitzhak Reiter's latest study, Contesting Symbolic Landscape in Jerusalem: Jewish/Islamic Conflict over the Museum of Tolerance at Mamilla Cemetery, examines the legal, public, and symbolic battle that took place over Mamilla primarily after the initial 2005 petition against the MoT, filed by the Al-Aqsa Corporation of the Northern Branch of the Islamic movement in Israel (NIM), until the Supreme Court's ruling in 2008 which sided with the MoT. (A parallel lawsuit brought by a Jerusalem-based nongovernmental organization that sought to place the case under jurisdiction of the shariʿa court rather than the Israeli state court failed early on.) The NIM lawsuit charged that digging up graves was impermissible according to Islamic law, and also violated the democratic values of Israel and the humanistic values of Judaism. Over the course of the lawsuit both sides brought subjective and highly charged evidence about the sacrality of burial land in Islam and Judaism, and made assertions about the relative weight of urban development against historic preservation and property rights as well as the potential impact of the affair on majority-minority relations in Israel and on global Jewish-Muslim relations.

A historian of Islamic institutions in Jerusalem and of Islamic law, Reiter is strongest in Chapters 3–6 when evaluating the legal questions surrounding the status of waqf (religious endowment), fatāwā (Islamic legal interpretations) on grave exhumation, and the Mandate-era history of the cemetery. His chapter on the Mandate, for example, examines important original source material, revealing that while the Supreme Muslim Council developed land belonging to Mamilla and other cemeteries, it was also vigorously criticized for this by other Palestinians. In Chapter 7, Reiter examines invocations of halakha (rabbinical law) and comparative cases from Europe, the United States, and the Islamic world. Throughout, Reiter gives a close reading of the original petitions, supporting documents submitted by various parties including a “friend of the court” petition by seventy leading Jewish Israeli scholars, nongovernmental organizations, and public intellectuals who opposed the location of the MoT, and finally the Supreme Court's decision itself (Chapter 8). In the end, Reiter makes a compelling case that the Supreme Court deliberation and decision was political (he terms it “ideological”), based on the three justices' problematic framing of the legal questions at hand, selective adherence to the evidence offered, hostility to the petitioning party, and overt identification with the “Jewish-Zionist goals” of the MoT and its municipal and state supporters.

In a brief two-page epilogue Reiter adds updates from 2010, when dozens of Palestinian families with ancestors buried in Mamilla, along with Palestinian civil society organizations, petitioned the United Nations and the Swiss government in its capacity as depository of the Fourth Geneva Conventions. They succeeded in gathering thousands of signatures and garnered international media coverage, but their campaign fizzled out quickly and as of this writing, all signs indicate that construction on the MoT is proceeding apace.

Overall, Reiter's study is a solid—at times engaging—study of the legal case and the storm surrounding it, the first level of inquiry he set out for himself, although it would have benefited greatly from supporting maps, tighter editing to streamline the chronology and eliminate redundancies, and a broader base of sources. He relies almost exclusively on court documents, Knesset protocols, the press, and websites, and despite referring to conducting interviews and discussions in the introduction, Reiter does not actually refer to or cite any of them in the text. As a result, he misses the opportunity to flesh out further the motives, opinions, and strategies of the involved parties, leaving some of the actors as one-dimensional legal briefs.

At the same time, Reiter's book suffers from insufficient context for the nonspecialist English-speaking audience, which may be due to its origins as a translation of the Hebrew book for an audience far more familiar with many of the issues at hand. Because of this, Reiter is less successful in his treatment of the two other levels of inquiry he identifies, the political level of majority-minority relations in Israel and the universal level that asks questions about holy sites, secular legitimacy over religious matters, and conflict resolution, both of which are left undercontextualized and underdeveloped to varying degrees. This is somewhat surprising, and disappointing, as Reiter has published extensively on both topics.

For example, in Chapter 2, Reiter frames the Mamilla affair against a broader struggle over the landscape in Israel/Palestine, briefly citing theoretical as well as empirical works on 1948 by Walid Khalidi and Meron Benvenisti. However, the full impact of the 1948 war and the massive land expropriation that came in its wake—and the ongoing relevance of this historical moment for both sides—is not brought out clearly enough for the unfamiliar reader. In fact, the nakba is mentioned solely in the context of the NIM's “anti-nakba” activities—their legal battles over, and de facto restoration of, former mosques and cemeteries throughout the country, from Tiberias to Jaffa. However, this narrow lens is problematic in two respects: first, Reiter fails to convey an understanding that Palestinians' efforts to reclaim their erased landscape through summer camps, “return” marches to their destroyed villages, and the construction of memorials in Arab towns and villages cross the political spectrum and the religious/secular divide. Second, Reiter ignores the elephant in the room underlying the Mamilla case, namely, that neither the Supreme Court nor the Jerusalem municipality had any interest in reopening the nakba files and in establishing a legal precedent questioning the legality of expropriated “absentee” land.

Additionally, Reiter's discussion of majority–minority relations is hampered by the lack of context on the broader political crossroads at which Palestinians in Israel find themselves after October 2000, when thirteen Palestinians (twelve of them citizens of Israel) were killed by the Israeli police in a wave of unrest that accompanied the outbreak of the Second Intifada. While he quotes from the Or Commission report that blames the NIM and its leader, Shaykh Raʾid Salah, for “generat[ing] tension between Muslims and Jews in Israel,” a charge which is repeated in an expert opinion submitted to the court by a former Shabak official on behalf of the MoT, Reiter (like the court) does not recount the punitive measures the Knesset has considered or passed in recent years that limit Palestinian citizens' civil rights, including attempts to punish their commemoration of the nakba, nor does he mention the hostile and tense public atmosphere that has pervaded Jewish–Arab relations in Israel since 2000. Both of these factors have little to do with the NIM or the Mamilla affair alone, but surely shaped the legal and public battle in numerous ways.

Likewise, Reiter's desire to shed light on battles over holy sites and conflict resolution is constricted by his failure to situate the Mamilla case sufficiently against the political landscape of Jerusalem, a deeply divided city whose 300,000 Palestinian residents by and large do not hold Israeli citizenship, have no representation on the city council, and suffer from extensive inequalities in infrastructure, public services, and access to land. Furthermore, longstanding tensions between Palestinian Jerusalemites and the municipality over house demolitions, and the ongoing Jewish settlement campaigns in Shaykh Jarrah (about which Reiter has recently written) and in other parts of Jerusalem are surely relevant for understanding the systemic failure of Israeli municipal and legal institutions to give fair consideration and protection to Palestinian Jerusalemites as well as the much larger battle over the symbolic landscape in Jerusalem. Without this context the uninformed reader cannot fully appreciate the hypocrisy of the court's claims about transparency of the planning and review process or the claims of “public utility” provided by the museum and endorsed by the court, not to mention the spatial and symbolic sensitivities of Mamilla.

One final point that demands comment is the way that the Mamilla case brings to the fore the role of Israeli academia in the political and now legal realm. While Israeli mizrahanut (Oriental studies) has long been intertwined with military and government service (Reiter himself was a former deputy adviser on Arab Affairs to the Prime Minister's office in the late 1970s–1980s), its involvement in the state's defense against Palestinian legal claims appears to be of newer provenance (such as the Naqab Bedouin lands cases in which Israeli academics are found on both sides). Reiter confesses early on that while he “initially supported” the MoT entrepreneurs, in the course of writing his book he “gradually came to understand that the dispute could be viewed differently and in a more complex manner” (p. 3); full transparency, however, would seem to demand more information about the extent of Reiter's role in the trial and the nature of the evidence he submitted, including any potential overlap with the book. For the most part, Reiter's treatment of the case is measured and academic, but there is still some slippage between the voice of the historian/legal scholar and that of the invested expert witness/former political adviser; this comes out most starkly in Reiter's treatment of Salah and the NIM.

In the book Reiter highlights the role of other academics submitting “expert opinions,” some of whom were parties to the amicus brief and others who supported the MoT. Reiter makes clear that the Supreme Court justices sided with the latter group, among whom were Orientalists, for nonevidentiary reasons. These Orientalists presented themselves as more qualified to speak on Islamic law than shariʿa court president and qadi Ahmad Natour, one of the litigants, whose Islamic learning they challenged (ironically because of the fact that he was their former student and not the product of an Islamic institute of law). The Orientalists also presented themselves as more legitimate witnesses because of their implied professional distance in contrast to what they decried as Natour's political motivations. At the same time that it accepted the authority of one group of scholars and for reasons that remain unexplained, the court ignored the academic expertise of the amicus scholars on questions of historical geography, urban planning, and the potential worsening of Palestinian–Israeli and Muslim–Jewish relations as a result of the Mamilla affair.

In spite of these significant omissions, Reiter's book is a thoughtful, richly documented first look at the Mamilla affair. It is a welcome contribution to the literature on contemporary Jerusalem, law and society in Israel, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Nonspecialists and students will likely find it too dense and specialized on its own, but individual chapters could certainly be incorporated into classroom use with appropriate accompanying material. Furthermore, the Hebrew edition of the book supplies ten documents in the appendix in Arabic and Hebrew that could be used for primary source analysis either in original or in translation, depending on the level of the students.