Religion and politics: New religious sites and spatial transgression in Israel

In order to view the establishment of new religious centers and how they are received by local populations, I analyze such basic geographical concepts as scale, space, location, and image. I see how these can alter the perception and further refine the concept of spatial transgression in three case studies in Israel: the building of the Mormon Center in Jerusalem, the establishment of the Bahá' ín Gardens in Haifa, and the struggle to build a mosque in Nazareth. In this article I seek to identify the factors influencing the presence or absence of conflict to help explain the different "stories" revealed. The article also constitutes an addition to the literature on Israeli (and Palestinian) religiogeographical controversies by focusing on nonmainstream or nondominant cases and by comparing the relative roles of different factors that shape the success or failure of spatial transgressions in religious geography.