In a rare display of unity, nearly every faction of the Israeli government has condemned UNESCO’s anti-Semitic resolution claiming that the Jewish people have no connection to the holiest site in Jewish history, the Temple Mount. While the United Nations has long been an unapologetic critic of the Jewish State, the latest Palestinian-drafted resolution was unchartered territory. Never before had the UN engaged in such grotesque historical revisionism.
“Usually, this animus is cloaked in the garb of anti-Zionism,” writes Tablet Magazine’s Yair Rosenberg. “This morning, however, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) dispensed with all pretense and passed a blatantly anti-Semitic resolution erasing Jewish ties to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site.” Rosenberg continues:
The Palestinian-drafted resolution, which passed 24-6 with 26 abstentions, claims that the site of the two Jewish Temples is sacred solely to Muslims. It refers to the area only by its Islamic names: Haram al-Sharif and Al-Aqsa Mosque (the shrine situated on the site). This is essentially the equivalent of passing a resolution airbrushing Muslim ties to Mecca, a move which would rightly be deemed Islamophobic.
The absurd resolution was passed by a kangaroo court made up of such venerable human rights defenders as Russia, Qatar, Iran, and Pakistan. In response, Israeli officials condemned the UN’s disgraceful and purely symbolic resolution as an affront against the Jewish people—some responding with indignation, others with mockery:
What’s next? A UNESCO decision denying the connection between peanut butter and jelly? Batman and Robin? Rock and roll?
— Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) October 13, 2016
To say that Israel has no connection to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall is like saying that China has no connection to the Great Wall.
— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) October 13, 2016
By this absurd decision UNESCO has lost what little legitimacy it had left.
But I believe that historical truth is stronger and will prevail— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) October 13, 2016
But one response in particular stood out above all, underscoring the utter farce of going to war with history itself.
Quoting directly from ancient Jewish and Christian biblical texts, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs beautifully illuminated the dark and inescapable rabbit’s hole the UN has dug itself into.
The #Bible according to #UNESCO following today’s resolution pic.twitter.com/LTDnAYBg1I
— Israel Foreign Min. (@IsraelMFA) October 13, 2016
The #Bible according to #UNESCO following today’s resolution pic.twitter.com/ex5CvyTvKF
— Israel Foreign Min. (@IsraelMFA) October 13, 2016
The implication here is clear. By denying the Jewish connection with the Temple Mount, UNESCO must logically (or perhaps illogically) reject not just archeological evidence and third-party historical accounts documented by Josephus and other ancients historians, but biblical writings considered sacred by Jews, Christians, and yes, Muslims, alike.
By privileging Islam, a religion founded nearly 1500 years after the ancient structures in Judea were first erected, the UN has bought into fringe Islamic-Supremacist ideologies. To accept the historiography advanced by the resolution’s drafters, self-righteous Sunni Arab Palestinians obsessed with establishing their “indigenous” status in a land colonized by Islamo-Arab invaders several centuries prior, requires a suspension of disbelief.
Here’s where the Palestinian myth-making falls apart, or at least runs into major contradictions. Sunni Arabs (otherwise known as modern-day Palestinians) venerate and believe wholeheartedly in the tales of Abraham, Moses, Solomon, and David. But doing so requires a belief that the Jews, or “children of Israel,” not only dwelled in the land of Canaan (a biblical term for Israel) but created a Kingdom there as well. At the center of both religious and civic society in the Jewish Kingdom of Israel, by all historic accounts, was the Temple Mount, the Jewish-built structure where Jewish priests conferred blessings upon the Jewish people.
Take this biblical history or leave it, but cherry-picking the elements that advance your politicized narrative is intellectually dishonest at best.