views

essay

Our Jerusalem

To ignore Jewish ties to City of David is nonsensical.

F

or a major United Nations
agency to suggest in a vote that
Israel is an “occupying power” in
Jerusalem, with no legal or historical
ties to it is a blatant act of historical
revisionism. Jerusalem
is Judaism’s holiest city.
UNESCO’s 58-mem-
ber executive board
staked its claim to
delusion in a May 2
resolution dubbed
“Occupied Palestine.”
Robert Sklar
The resolution, which
Contributing Editor
carries no force of law,
passed 22-10.
King David repelled
the Jebusites more than 3,000 years ago
en route to making Jerusalem the capi-
tal of the Israelite nation. Ruling forces
have come and gone — Babylonians,
Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines,
Crusaders, Muslims, Ottoman Turks
and British. But Jerusalem has been the
City of David, the ancestral homeland
of the Jews, from his reign on.
The Jewish people clearly hold an
indubitable claim to the biblical city.
Jews have had a presence in Jerusalem
for nearly 2,000 years. They re-estab-
lished a Jewish majority in 1847. Today,
Jerusalem is a historic hilltop city of
865,000 people, including some 200,000
Arabs.
The UNESCO resolution wasn’t as
extreme toward Israel as past U.N.
resolutions in that it cited Jerusalem’s
importance to the “three monotheistic
religions.” And the vote saw 23 coun-
tries abstain; three countries were
absent. The net effect: growing Israel
support, which could be heralded as a
diplomatic triumph despite the resolu-
tion’s passage.

PEERING BENEATH

The UNESCO resolution calls on Israel
to repeal all governmental “measures
and actions” that have altered the
“character and status” of Jerusalem, the
Israeli capital unified in the Six-Day
War of 1967 after Arab forces amassed
at Israel’s borders. Israel’s 1980
Jerusalem Law upheld the 1967 annex-
ation of Jordanian-controlled areas
— unifying the city. Today, Jerusalem is
more a mix of Jewish and Arab neigh-
borhoods than segregated zones.
The UNESCO resolution rebuffs any
application of Israel’s “basic law” in
Jerusalem; acknowledging such a law
would endorse the notion of a uni-
fied city under Israel governance. It’s
no surprise the resolution condemns
Israel’s continued construction in

8

May 18 • 2017

jn

the Arab-dominated eastern sector
of Jerusalem, the area Palestinian
leaders eye as the capital of a future
Palestinian state.
The resolution also takes a shot on
behalf of Hamas, “deploring” how Israel
has maintained a “continuous” border
closure of the Gaza Strip. Palestinians
imagine their state encompassing
the Fatah-controlled West Bank and
the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip as well
as east Jerusalem. The U.S., Israel and
the European Union have all declared
Hamas a terrorist organization.

JEWISH CORE

Israel holds a “legal, historical and
moral right to its own undivided capi-
tal,” asserts the Zionist Organization
of America (ZOA) in defending Israel’s
sovereignty in Jerusalem.
Neither Israel nor the Jewish people
deny Jerusalem’s ties to Islam and
Christianity. Psalms 122:3, recited on
Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day, this
year on May 24, proclaims: “Jerusalem,
that art builded as a city that is com-
pact together” — a city that unites
all. Under Israeli sovereignty, Jews,
Christians and Muslims alike are free
to worship in Jerusalem.
At Independence Hall in Tel Aviv
on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion
declared Israeli statehood, became
Israel’s first prime minister and pre-
served the Zionist dream.
Jerusalem is now home to the
Knesset, the Supreme Court of Israel,
the Israel Museum, the Jewish National
Library, Hadassah Hospital and Hebrew
University as well as such Jewish holy
places as the Western Wall, the Temple
Mount and the Mount of Olives.
It was no coincidence UNESCO
— the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization
— took its anti-Israel vote on Yom
HaAtzmaut, Israeli Independence Day.
The vote followed a UNESCO resolu-
tion last October that slighted Jewish
ties to the Western Wall and the
Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City.

POLITICAL WRANGLING

Submitting the latest UNESCO resolu-
tion on Israel to a vote were Algeria,
Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar
and Sudan. Egypt, of course, not only
has a longstanding peace treaty with
Israel, but also has a common chal-
lenge in the Sinai Peninsula: Islamic
State.
Unhinged as it was, the resolution
did gather “no” votes from the U.S.,
Germany, the United Kingdom, Greece,
Italy, the Netherlands, Lithuania,

Paraguay, Ukraine and Togo. India,
with strengthening diplomatic and
defense ties to Israel, abstained.
America’s “no” vote under President
Donald Trump comes in sharp relief
to the Obama administration abstain-
ing last December on a U.N. Security
Council resolution condemning Israeli
settlements as hindering a two-state
solution to the Israeli-Palestinian con-
flict.
In a symbolic move to register abhor-
rence with the May 2 resolution, Israel
announced it would withhold $1 mil-
lion of its annual support to the U.N.
— $40 million. The annual U.N. budget:
$5.4 billion.
The JN staunchly supports a united
Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, not the
idea of a split, multinational city. Under
Palestinian statehood, negotiated pro-
visions could create some Arab auton-
omy and oversight in parts of east
Jerusalem. The art of negotiation could
even involve a land swap to redraw city
borders, giving more flexibility toward
competing Israeli and Arab interests
in east Jerusalem and in Jewish settle-
ments nearby in the West Bank.
Jerusalem is part of the territory
cited at the San Remo Conference for
a Jewish homeland. The San Remo
Resolution, approved by the post-
World War I Allied Supreme Council
gathered in 1920 at San Remo, Italy,
recognized that Great Britain received
the British Mandate to establish a
Jewish homeland, “a sacred trust in
civilization,” according to the League
of Nations. The San Remo documents

The JN staunchly
supports a united
Jerusalem as
Israel’s capital, not
the idea of a split,
multinational city.

affirming the Jewish people’s rights
have never been superseded by an
internationally binding agreement,
according to the ZOA.

COMPELLING ACT

The same day as the May 2 vote by
UNESCO, U.S. Vice President Mike
Pence said the White House just might
end the 16-year presidential waiver of
the Jerusalem Embassy Act passed by
Congress in 1995. The act recognized
Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital
and mandated the U.S. Embassy be
moved there from Tel Aviv. Every six
months, presidents have waived the
move, presumably in the interest of
national security out of fear of an Arab
backlash.
Specifically, the Jerusalem Embassy
Act holds that “Jerusalem should
remain an undivided city in which
the rights of every ethnic and reli-
gious group are protected” and that
“Jerusalem should be recognized as the
capital of the State of Israel.”
That’s a strong endorsement for
Jerusalem being the eternal, indivisible,
unequivocal capital of Israel and of am
Yisrael — the Jewish people. •