The decision to build a museum about human dignity on a Muslim graveyard undermines the entire project.

After five years developing a design for the proposed Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem, international starchitect Frank Gehry withdrew from the project in January. Gehry cited reasons of staff commitments and resource issues, dismissing claims that he left because of the growing controversy surrounding the project’s site, the Mamilla cemetery, a Muslim graveyard.

Since its conception, the project has been under fire for the obvious reason: it’s a museum about human dignity being built on an occupied people’s bones. Gehry made the right choice in dropping this powder keg, but he failed to take a stand against the project and stood behind his client, the museum’s founder, Rabbi Marvin Hier, who responded to criticism of the choice of location by saying, “The case is over. Get used to it.” Tolerance indeed.

Jerusalem is a city of layers. Wander up to almost any ancient site and you will see tour guides pointing out the stratification, explaining how the large Herodian stones sit beneath the Crusader at David’s Citadel, or how the multicolored Mameluke stones are embedded within the Ottoman walls. The history of architecture in Jerusalem is inextricably tied to the history of war and conquest that saw control of the city shift between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The Dome of the Rock sits on the Temple Mount and the plaza in front of the Western Wall was home to a vibrant Arab neighborhood. Each wave of conquest built atop the old, and in the building, there was more than a little destroying.

The destruction of buildings in war is more than physical dismemberment of another culture’s property. It is, as Robert Bevan states in The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War, “the destruction of cultural artifacts of an enemy people or nation as a means of dominating, terrorizing, dividing or eradicating it altogether.” In other words, cities weren’t sacked because the conquerors didn’t like the floor plans. Culture needed to be sacked in order to start a new page of history.

But those were simpler times, when conquerors were free to gloat over their triumphs and didn’t require handlers or spokesmen to spin their victories into acts of justice. Then again, neither the Tartars nor the Turks proposed a museum of tolerance as “a symbol of society’s quest to live together” on the graves of their conquered.

Of course, the museum won’t be the first building in Jerusalem to hit bones if the shovel meets the ground. And while the choice for a location is hardly inconsequential, a museum of tolerance in Jerusalem doesn’t need to be built on a Muslim graveyard to scream of irony.

As settlement building continues in the West Bank, the “Separation Barrier” nears completion, the network of segregated roads within Palestine becomes more labyrinthine, and Gaza sinks deeper under siege, Israeli-Palestinian relations are at an all-time low, with condemnation of the Israeli occupation ringing around the world.

Never mind the old bones being disturbed in Mamilla, live bodies are being moved in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood as ongoing home demolitions make a mockery of any pretense to tolerance.

But is tolerance really the answer anyway? The very word seems to evoke a sense of resignation and infinite patience, of putting up with something with a big sigh as opposed to a genuine acceptance of difference through understanding. Perhaps this is the best that can be hoped for in Jerusalem at this moment, but this museum of tolerance in name only has unearthed the layers of intolerance that lie at the very heart of Israel today.