Political heritage of holy sites


October 19, 2016
Sarah Benton

Two articles here – from Al Jazeera and JPost – plus a note.


A Palestinian woman takes a picture of Israeli police in front of the Dome of the Rock during clashes with stone-throwing protesters. Photo by Reuters

UNESCO adopts anti-Israel resolution on al-Aqsa Mosque

UN agency passes resolution that criticises Israeli policies around al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem.

By Al Jazeera
October 18, 2016

Palestinian leaders have welcomed a decision by the United Nations cultural agency to adopt a resolution on occupied East Jerusalem that sharply criticises Israeli policies around the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, while Israel says it ignores Jewish ties to the key holy site.

A spokesman for Paris-based UNESCO said on Tuesday that the resolution, which caused Israel to suspend its co-operation with the agency, was adopted without a new vote after being approved at the committee stage last week.

Israeli troops clash with Palestinians at al-Aqsa

The text, which touches on Israel’s management of Palestinian religious sites, refers throughout to the al-Aqsa mosque compound site in occupied East Jerusalem’s Old City only by its Muslim names: al-Aqsa and al-Haram al-Sharif.

Al-Aqsa Mosque compound is the third-holiest site in Islam. Jews refer to the site as the Temple Mount.

Palestine’s deputy ambassador to UNESCO, Mounir Anastas, told reporters the resolution “reminds Israel that they are the occupying power in East Jerusalem and it asks them to stop all their violations”, including archaeological excavations around religious sites.

The UNESCO resolution also condemned Israel for restricting Muslim access to the site, and for aggression by Israeli police and soldiers, while also recognising Israel as the occupying power.


“By criticising the report for the omission of the words Temple Mount, [Israel] glosses over more than two dozen detailed criticisms of Israeli actions in and around the Old City, which is after all occupied territory,” Al Jazeera’s Paul Brennan, reporting from West Jerusalem, said.

The resolution was submitted by Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and Sudan – and was originally passed with 24 votes in favour, six against, and 26 abstentions.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said in a statement on Thursday that UNESCO had lost its legitimacy by adopting this resolution.

“The theatre of the absurd at UNESCO continues, and today the organisation adopted another delusional decision which says that the people of Israel have no connection to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall,” Netanyahu said.

In April, UNESCO also passed a resolution condemning “Israeli aggressions and illegal measures against the freedom of worship and Muslims’ access to the al-Aqsa Mosque”, also failing to mention the site’s Jewish name.

In 2011, the Palestinians were admitted as a member state of the organisation, which led the United States to suspend its payments to UNESCO.

The latest resolutions created unease at the top of the organisation, with Michael Worbs, who chairs UNESCO’s executive board, saying he would have liked more time to work out a compromise.

“We need more time and dialogue between the members of the board to reach a consensus,” he told AFP news agency.

UNESCO chief Irina Bokova had distanced herself from Thursday’s vote, saying in a statement: “Nowhere more than in Jerusalem do Jewish, Christian and Muslim heritage and traditions share space.”

But Riyad al-Maliki, the Palestinian foreign minister, responded to Bokova by describing her comments as “completely unacceptable”.

“The Palestinian government expects Ms Bokova to focus her efforts on implementing the will of member states and preserving Jerusalem from the Israeli systematic colonisation and assault on its Palestinian character,” said Maliki.

Al-Aqsa Mosque is located in East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed following its invasion in 1967 – in a move never recognised by the international community – as part of its subsequent military occupation of the West Bank.

Jewish settlers and Zionist organisations have called for complete Jewish control over the mosque compound.

Jewish groups’ incursions into the mosque compound have continuously led to Palestinian protests across the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli military and armed settler incursions have resulted in Palestinian deaths and injuries in recent years in particular. Muslim access to the religious site has also been tremendously limited by the army.


Israel faces stiff fight next week over newest UNESCO vote on Jerusalem

Mexico reverses support for Jerusalem resolution

By Tovah Lazaroff, JPost
October 19, 2016

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to contact many of the leaders of 21 member nations of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee Executive Board in hopes of swaying them not to support next week’s vote on a resolution that ignores Jewish ties to the Temple Mount.

Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Carmel Shama-Hacohen said that Israel faced a stiff battle before that committee because it’s composed of countries with a history of voting against Israel.

“There is a will to stop this chaos [of such resolutions] which harms everyone,” Shama-Hacohen said. But he acknowledged that the World Heritage Committee which meets in Paris from October 24 to 26 “will be a tough playing field.”

The vote is part of the bureaucratic process by which the World Heritage Committee reaffirmed the placement of Jerusalem and its Old City Walls on its list of endangered sites called “World Heritage in Danger.”

It had been set to do this in Istanbul in July, but Turkey’s failed coup forced the committee to cut its session short and to reconvene in October to finish its agenda.

At that time the text in question, referred to the Temple Mount solely by its Muslim name of Al-Haram Al-Sharif. The Western Wall plaza was placed twice in quotations marks but otherwise was spoken of as the Buraq plaza.

Since 2015, the Palestinians, have pushed to change the linguistic references to the Temple Mount to largely ignore the Judeo-Christian* ties to the site and turning every resolution on Jerusalem in UNESCO into a cultural and historic battle between Judaism and Islam.

On Tuesday UNESCO’s 58-member Executive Board wrapped up its 200th session in Paris by ratifying such a text, which had been given preliminary approval the prior week in a 24-6 vote. Twenty-six countries abstained and two were absent.

Mexico, which was one of the 24 countries in favour of the resolution has since announced that it has withdrawn its support for the text and would like to be considered as one of the abstaining countries.

Brazil also spoke at the final board session and indicated that it was unlikely to support such resolutions in the future.

After the ratification Shama-Hacohen said, “We have moved forward a step-and-a-half toward dismantling the automatic majority that the Palestinians and the Arab states have against Israel.”

“Mexico has taken a full step toward abandoning support of the Palestinians, after years of voting without hesitation against Israel.”

“The best surprise of the morning,” he said, “is Brazil’s notification that while it did not change its vote this time, it will find it difficult not to do [in the future], if there is a resolution with another text that disregards the Jewish people’s connection to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall,” Shama-Hacohen said.

The Palestinian Authority welcomed the result of Tuesday’s Executive Board ratification and dismissed Israel’s arguments that the language of the text was historically problematic.

“What we are talking about is the ownership and the sovereignty on the site which is East Jerusalem,” the PA’s deputy ambassador to UNESCO Mounir Anastas said.

“We are recalling Israel that they are the occupying power there and as an occupying power they have obligations to respect and they have more than obligations even; they are tied by the international law that requests them first, not to conduct any work and second not to change the names in this site.

“Israel is trying to change, to focus the attention on a secondary problem which is the appellation and things like that, forgetting the essence of the problem, which is the occupation by Israel,” Anastas said.

UNESCO has accepted “Palestine” as a member state since 2011, although the United Nations has not done so.

Next week, the World Heritage Committee will likely accept a similar text. The nations that sit on that committee are: Angola, Azerbaijan, Burkina Faso, Croatia, Cuba, Finland, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korean, Tunisia, Turkey, Tanzania, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.

Reuters contributed to this report.

NOTE

*Judeo-Christian tradition

This term first came into use in the late 1930s, invented by ‘philo-Semites’ in the US to protect Jews. See Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory.

“As of 1952 good Americans were supposed to be, in some sense, committed Judeo-Christians.”

from Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America by Mark Silk, American Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Spring, 1984)

The phrase is also explored by Jonathan Sarna in American Judaism, A History (Yale University Press, 2004. p. 266)

Although Byzantine (Christian) artefacts have been found on the site, there is no evidence that the site has living ties with, or a tradition of reverential meaning for, Christians.


See also: UNESCO unites Israelis in fury

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