In the Middle East, a building is never just a building, just as a national boundary is never just a boundary and a religious shrine is never just a tourist attraction. Frank Gehry is finding this out the hard way, as his design for the new Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance draws withering fire from both Israelis – who have called the design “so hallucinatory, so irrelevant, so foreign, so megalomaniac” – and Palestinians, who accuse Gehry of designing a building that calls to mind the Israeli destruction of Yasir Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah. What everyone seems to be saying underneath the rhetoric, however, is that the museum is just too American.