Israel Matzav: UNESCO accepts Arab League request to 'postpone' exhibit on Jewish people's connection to the Land of Israel

Friday, January 17, 2014

UNESCO accepts Arab League request to 'postpone' exhibit on Jewish people's connection to the Land of Israel

UNESCO has accepted an Arab League request to 'postpone' (indefinitely) an exhibit on the Jewish people's 3,500-year connection to the land of Israel. The exhibit was to take place in UNESCO's Paris headquarters, and was to be co-sponsored by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. The exhibit was designed by Hebrew University Professor Robert Wistrich, the author of a seminal book on anti-Semitism. The 'reason' for the 'postponement' is that it could 'harm the peace process.'

The center sent out invitations earlier this month using the phrase “Land of Israel.” By Monday, both sides had agreed to the term Holy Land, and UNESCO sent out its invitations.

A day later, UNESCO received a letter from the 22 countries in its Arab Group. They were concerned that while the exhibit’s title was innocuous, the subject itself was political, and warned that hosting such an exhibit in the midst of efforts by US Secretary of State John Kerry to reach a final-status agreement for a two-state solution undermined his work, as well as UNESCO’s objectivity.

The same day, UNESCO decided to postpone the exhibit even though it had met earlier with the Wiesenthal staff in Paris to go over the final details. The exhibit was already being set up in its halls, and it already had received a congratulatory opening letter from President Shimon Peres.

In a letter, Hier immediately called on Bokova to reconsider and not cave in to the “bullying” of the Arab Group, particularly given that UNESCO experts had already vetted and approved the exhibit. He recalled how he had obtained her verbal approval in October 2011, on the same day that UNESCO member states voted to recognize “Palestine” as a state and accord it full membership rights.

That approval, he wrote, was followed by a public signing ceremony in 2012 at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. Hier provided The Jerusalem Post with a photograph from that event, which showed Bokova standing by a panel for the exhibit.

“Let’s be clear,” Hier wrote in his letter to Bokova, “the Arab Group’s protest is not over any particular content in the exhibition, but rather the very idea of it – that the Jewish people did not come to the Holy Land only after the Nazi Holocaust, but trace their historical and cultural roots in that land for three-anda- half millennia. If anything will derail hopes for peace and reconciliation among the people of the Middle East, it will be by surrendering to the forces of extremism and torpedoing the opening of this exhibition – jointly vetted and co-organized by UNESCO and the Simon Wiesenthal Center.”

Bokova, in turn, said UNESCO successfully works with many Jewish groups, and just this November held an event with B’nai B’rith about the Yiddish language. But, she said, consensus was important to the organization.

“Having in mind the delicate phase that the peace negotiations are entering, I have no choice but to take seriously the concerns raised in the letter of the chairperson of the Arab Group,” she wrote.

Israel, which is sponsoring the exhibit along with Canada and Montenegro, expressed dissatisfaction.

“We regret that such an important exhibition has been undermined by inappropriate considerations,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor, “and we hope a solution can be found to enable UNESCO to hold the exhibit as originally planned.”