By Raphael Ahren, Times of Israel—
Was Israel’s failure to recruit the Christian world against the controversial UNESCO resolution on Jerusalem a crushing, unforgivable diplomatic defeat, or does the Western world care so little about its religious and cultural heritage that there’s nothing even the savviest officials could have done to prevent it?
By referring to the Temple Mount compound merely as “Al-Aqsa Mosque/Al-Haram Al-Sharif,” the resolution willfully ignores Jewish ties to the Old City and its holy sites. This blatant distortion of history has caused tremendous outrage among the Israeli public and has been highlighted in the government’s angry responses to it.
But the resolution, which was overwhelmingly approved in the committee stage on Thursday and, ratified by UNESCO’s executive board Tuesday, also turned a blind eye to Christianity’s relationship with the city in which Jesus was crucified and buried some 2,000 years ago and which has since been revered by Christians all across the globe. Not one of the nearly 2,000 words of the resolution specifically mentions the world’s largest religion (nearly one-third of the world’s population is Christian), and there is just a vague nod to the importance Jerusalem has “for the three monotheistic religions.”
And yet, Christian-majority countries at UNESCO largely supported the resolution, which was sponsored by Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and Sudan. Read on…