A week ago the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) voted to adopt a resolution that in the words of Haaretz;
Disregards Judaism’s historic connection to the Temple Mount and casts doubt on the link between Judaism and the Western Wall. Twenty-four countries voted in favor of the decision while six voted against and 26 abstained while just two were missing from the vote.
The controversy was less over what the resolution said so much as the way they said it, an analysis by Nir Hasson (also in Haaretz) says the following;
The term Western Wall appears in quotes throughout the document, while the Arabic term for the site, Al-Burak, does not. The document refers to the Temple Mount by its Arabic names, Haram Al-Sharif and Al-Aqsa, while making no mention of its Jewish names.
The BBC provided an excellent all around analysis also though it strikes me that not much of an analysis is needed. The bottom line is that a UN body just crapped all over Jewish history.
This is why I take more pleasure than usual at the announcement that Israeli archaeologists located the site where the Romans breached the wall to Jerusalem sometime around AD 70.According to the Times of Israel;
The discovery, made last winter during an excavation of a construction site for the new campus of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design outside the Old City, also finally confirmed the description of the wall that was breached provided by the historian Josephus Flavius.
I guess no one at UNESCO has bothered to read The Jewish War. It doesn’t matter so much now anyway as Israeli archaeologists (nor the country as a whole) are no longer cooperating with UNESCO.
If anyone ever wondered why an American veto was so necessary in the UN Security Council this kind of nonsense is the demonstrable reason.
