IN its wisdom, Israel has ‘suspended’ ties with Unesco. Would the world have screamed if the Zionist state had decided to end the relationship for good? With the US presidential election due next month, the hardline Likud government chose just the right moment to sever relations with Unesco for a resolution that refers twice to Israel as “the occupying power” and unequivocally condemns its policy on Al Aqsa, Islam’s third holiest site.

A reading of the Unesco resolution, not fully reported in Pakistani media, shows there is nothing new in it, for it recalls its previous motions on the Old City of Jerusalem and asks Tel Aviv to prohibit all “such works in conformity with its obligations” under the provisions of Unesco’s previous resolutions. However, what must have hurt Israeli hawks, especially Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu most, was Unesco’s reiteration of the “continuous storming of Al Aqsa Mosque/Al Haram Al Sharif by Israeli right-wing extremists and uniformed forces”. It also did not speak of “Temple Mount” and instead referred to “Al Haram Al Sharif” that made Mr Netanyahu apoplectic.

He called Unesco “the theatre of the absurd” and said the world’s heritage watchdog had lost its legitimacy. Imagine the word ‘legitimacy’ coming from the prime minister of a state whose very presence in the West Bank (and Gaza) lacks moral and legal legitimacy! The resolution – 24 for; six against, with 24 abstentions – also refers to “arrests and injuries among Muslim worshippers and Jordanian Auqaf guards” and appropriately calls the relevant Israeli department “so-called” Israeli Antiquities’ officials.

Unesco poses no threat to Israel’s security; all it does is what Tel Aviv considers piffle — issue statements critical of the Jewish state’s decades-old policy that aims at eroding the West Bank’s Arab-Islamic character as part of its ultimate aim of making the area west of the Jordan part of Eretz Yisrael, Greater Israel. Obviously, Israel cannot pursue the Zionist version of Nazi lebensraum without first changing the occupied territory’s demographic character to turn the Palestinian majority into a minority. The logical requirement of this land-grab policy is that the establishment of Jewish settlements and the war on the Palestinian people’s cultural heritage must go together.

On both these counts entities infinitely more powerful than Unesco have denounced Israel repeatedly in strong terms — only to evoke Israel’s defiance.

President Barack Obama, in his address to the Muslim world from Cairo on June 5, 2009, made clear Israel had to stop work on Jewish settlements — a plea he made repeatedly whenever he met Mr Netanyahu without evoking the faintest of nods from the Likud leader, who standing on American soil and addressing the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee had the audacity to ridicule decades of American policy by saying “Jerusalem is not a settlement”.

1993 AGREEMENT FLOUTED

Astonishing is the stark contrast between theory and practice of America’s policy on Palestine. In principle, Washington remains committed to a two-state solution, which envisages a sovereign Palestinian state. Its categorical enunciation is to be found in the Camp David accord, brokered by Jimmy Carter and signed by President Anwar Sadat and Prime Minister Menachem Begin on Sept 17, 1978. It was reaffirmed subsequently and categorically in the Declaration of Principles (DoP) signed by Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin on Sept 13, 1993, on the White House lawns.

The contents of the DoP were never to be implemented. Rabin was murdered by a Jewish fanatic and subsequent Israeli prime ministers renegotiated it with full American help only to finally wreck it. Whatever was left of the DoP was destroyed by Ariel Sharon, who reoccupied territories partly vacated under the DoP and destroyed Yasser Arafat’s headquarters brick by brick. Since then, the world has accepted the status quo, with Mr Netanyahu feeling no qualms of conscience by declaring a sovereign Palestinian state was out of the question.

Next year will mark the centenary of the Balfour Declaration that viewed “with favour” the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and pledged to use Britain’s “best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine …”

What is amazing about this document is that it speaks of “the civil and religious rights of [the] existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” — as if Jews were already a majority and they should take care of the minorities.

The fact was when the foreign secretary of “His Majesty’s government” sent the letter to Lord Rothschild, the Jews constituted only 11 per cent of the Ottoman sanjak of Palestine.

There is no other document in modern history which has caused so much strife and bloodshed. As Edward Said wrote in an article in Dawn (Feb 8, 2001) “Israeli Jews resemble members of a cult rather than citizens of a modern secular state. And, in some ways, it is true that Israel’s early history as a pioneering new state is that of a utopian cult sustained by people much of whose energy was in shutting out their surroundings while they lived the fantasy of a heroic and pure enterprise.”

The writer is Dawn’s Readers’ Editor

Published in Dawn October 18th, 2016