Sweden Votes in Favour of UN Resolution Ignoring Jewish Connection to Jerusalem

The Times of Israel reports:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu harshly criticised a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) resolution from last week in which Jewish ties to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall area in Jerusalem’s Old City are wholly ignored.

The resolution refers to Israel as the “occupying power” at every mention and uses the Arabic al-Aqsa Mosque/Al-Haram al-Sharif without ever calling it the Temple Mount, as it is known to Jews. The text does refer to the Western Wall Plaza but places it in quotation marks, after using the Arabic Al-Buraq Plaza.

“This is yet another absurd UN decision,” Netanyahu said Saturday. “UNESCO ignores the unique historic connection of Judaism to the Temple Mount, where the two temples stood for a thousand years and to which every Jew in the world has prayed for thousands of years. The UN is rewriting a basic part of human history and has again proven that there is no low to which it will not stoop.”

It bothers me that Sweden officially subscribes to this type of historical revisionism. You don’t have to love Israel and its government’s policy towards the Palestinians to acknowledge that Judaism has historic links to Jerusalem. To rewrite history to fit contemporary political convictions is simply wrong.

Image: The siege and destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans under the command of Titus in 70 BCE (1850) by Scottish painter David Roberts (1796–1864), via Wikimedia Commons.