The Politics of Sacred Places: A View from Israel–Palestine by Nimrod Luz (review)

Reviewed by: The Politics of Sacred Places: A View from Israel–Palestineby Nimrod Luz Ira Robinson The Politics of Sacred Places: A View from Israel–Palestine. By Nimrod Luz. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. 223pages. 115. 00 hardcover; ebook available. Nimrod Luz, the author of this fascinating book, is a Jewish Israeli academic who situates himself at the theoretical crossroads of the disciplines of geography, anthropology, and religious studies in order to End Page 112assess the ways in which sacred space impinges on the perspectives of Muslims, Christians and Jews living in Israel. He attempts, in his own words, to "present balanced, highly informed, and theoretically sound research on the politics of the sacred" (16). A relationship of trust with Muslim and Christian communities in Israel was not easy for him to achieve. In the course of his research, he was referred to as "a Zionist, an orientalist. . . and even a suspected collaborator or informer of Israeli security forces" (17). He shares with us his extensive fieldwork in a number of rural and urban settings in order to present the often-highly-conflictual political and social implications of the attempted (re) establishment of sacred spaces by Israeli non-Jewish communities. In rural Galilee, Luz presents the Maqam Abu al-Hijja, the traditional tomb of a Kurdish Muslim warrior in the army of Saladin (twelfth century). He then analyzes a Galilean Christian shrine at the birthplace of Saint Mariam Bawardy (1846–1878, canonized 2015). In his narrative, he carefully draws our attention to the interconnections between the spatial and the political. He also offers an analysis as to why both these shrines remain local and obscure, in the context of current trends in Islam that discourage pilgrimage to such shrines, and the differing preferences of the Galilee Christian tour establishment. Because he concentrates on the shrines of non-Jewish communities, he does not deal, even for comparison's sake, with the rich Israeli Jewish tradition of establishing holy places in the Galilee in particular. In urban Israel, Luz depicts in detail the controversies surrounding mosques in Beersheba, Jaffa, and Acre. Each of these mosques has its local particularities, but they share in common the struggle of local Muslim communities to re-establish their presence in the public spheres of Israeli cities with large Jewish majorities. In a similar sense, he describes the travails surrounding the reestablishment of an Anglican church in Acre. His final chapter deals with the highly volatile issue of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount in Jerusalem. His analysis, however, is not centered on the holy site in Jerusalem per se. The thrust of his investigation is the perspective of the leadership of the Israeli Islamic movement on this issue. In elucidating this issue, he utilizes the term "glocalization, " signifying the "simultaneous occurrence of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies in contemporary social, political, and economic systems" (157). Luz details how the concept of glocalization helps us to better understand the issue of Jerusalem and its holy places in the Israeli Muslim context. Any contemporary scholar who approaches issues relevant to Israel knows that there is hardly any statement of either fact or theory they could make that is not diametrically opposed by others. Ultimately, scholars like Luz have to make their choices. The choices made by Nimrod Luz in his careful methodological framing of his evidence are of great significance. He is clear in his depiction of Israeli Jewish society End Page 113as a "settler-colonial society" (124). He is equally clear that the efforts of Muslim and Christian communities in Israel to reclaim mosques and churches in their communities are "struggles of indigenous people to claim their past places" (125). Jewish Israeli claims to indigeneity are somewhat casually dismissed by reference to the work of radical non- or anti-Zionist scholars such as Shlomo Sand and Israel Shahak. Luz consistently refers to the government of Israel as an "ethnocracy, " which he defines as "a political regime that facilitates expansion and control by a dominant ethnicity within a modern national state" (37). This is in contrast with both Israel's mainstream self-definition as a democratic and Jewish state, and Sammy Smooha's definition of. . .