UNESCO last year declared ancient Jewish Biblical sites to actually be Muslim holy sites: the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron (left) as the “Ibrahimi Mosque,” and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem (right) as the “Bilal ibn Rabah Mosque.” (Images source: Wikimedia Commons)
A.J. Caschetta – The UN’s Palestine Language
- For decades, UN agencies have slandered the Jewish state, most recently with the April 2016 accusation that it has been “planting Jewish fake graves” in Palestinian territory, and with UNESCO declaring last year that the ancient Jewish Biblical sites Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs are actually Muslim holy sites, and last month that the Temple Mount, where the Jewish Temples were destroyed in 587 BCE and 70 CE, is an Islamic site with no connection to Judaism.
- West Bank: This territory was for millennia called Judea and Samaria. After the 1948 War of Independence, Transjordan annexed it, renamed it the “West Bank,” and occupied it for nearly two decades. In the Six Day War, after Jordan attacked Israel, Israel entered the territory and administered it until the Oslo Accords era, when Israel turned over much of the area to the Palestinian Authority.
- Occupation: When it comes to Israel, the UN is obsessed with the word “occupation.” A recent Wall Street Journal article documents 530 General Assembly references to Israel as an “occupying power” versus zero for Indonesia (East Timor), Turkey (Cyprus), Russia (Georgia, Crimea), Morocco (Western Sahara), Vietnam (Cambodia), Armenia (Azerbaijan), Pakistan (Kashmir), or China (Tibet)….Saying that Jews are “occupying” Judea is as nonsensical as saying Arabs are “occupying” Arabia or Gauls are “occupying” France.
- Settlement: The UN uses the term to insinuate Israeli theft of “Palestine.” The Obama administration eagerly embraced this terminology. If there is an occupying force in Gaza, it is Hamas. The West Bank is “disputed territories” to anyone claiming a modicum of neutrality. As Elliot Abrams put it, “the term ‘settlement’ loses meaning when applied to Jews building homes in their nation’s capital city.”
US President-elect Donald Trump won the White House promising to reform our dysfunctional government. But will he also stand up to the even more dysfunctional United Nations?
As the Trump campaign emphasized in a position paper released November 2, the UN has long displayed “enormous anti-Israel bias.” For decades, UN agencies have slandered the Jewish state, most recently with the April 2016 accusation that it has been “planting Jewish fake graves” in Palestinian territory, and with UNESCO declaring last year that the ancient Jewish Biblical sites Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs are actually Muslim holy sites, and last month that the Temple Mount, where the First and Second Jewish Temples were destroyed in 587 BCE and 70 CE, is an Islamic site with no connection to Judaism. On the day America elected a new president, the UN adopted ten new resolutions against Israel.
A.J. Caschetta
A.J. Caschetta is a senior lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a Shillman-Ginsburg writing fellow at the Middle East Forum. He can be reached at [email protected].
