I’ve written in the past about the poor choice of the Simon Wiesenthal Center – known globally for promoting racial, religious and ethnic harmony – in wanting to build a new museum on disputed Jerusalem land. But I just can’t get over how they are continuing this fight.

To quickly recap, the Center purchased some land in the center of the city that is part of an old parking lot adjacent to a Muslim cemetery, part of whose graves were long ago moved and reburied elsewhere. Muslim challenges to the construction of the new building eventually went to the Israeli Supreme Court, which just ruled in the Wiesenthal Center’s favor. But this can only be seen this as a pyrrhic victory. That’s because the way the Center has gone about this has only given more ammunition to the haters of Israel – whose bitter cup seems overflowing these days.

Now the Wiesenthal Center has released information about how the original Arab owners of the Mamilla Muslim Cemetery wanted to sell the property to make room for a business center 65 years ago, according to a July 22, 1945 article from the Palestine Post. As Wiesenthal Center founder and director Rabbi Marvin Heir wrote this week in the New York Post, “While we would never build on the cemetery… the Supreme Muslim Council, before there was a State of Israel, did, in fact, have such plans.”

He goes on to explain that his organization’s museum will be built in part on a three-acre site that for half a century has seen “hundreds of people of all faiths have parked in a three-level underground structure without any protest.” So now we’re checking the religion of people who use a parking lot?

What a different story this would have been had the Wiesenthal Center worked with opponents instead of continually fighting them. What a difference it might have been had Rabbi Heir at least informed us that he offered a few compromises to his opponents. Were such efforts even made? More to the point, is the construction of a “tolerance center” on contested land worthy of the fight? We all know that everything in Israel is political, but isn’t the art of politics compromise? How suicidal for the Jewish people would it be for Israel and the Wiesenthal to at least attempt to gain a sense of cooperation here? Yes, prime land in the center of Jerusalem is rare indeed, but this just seems to be a fight in which there will be no winners. 

There are times when might does not make right – even when the law is on your side.