For Unesco and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Israel’s capital is anything but Jewish.
This week in Paris, the executive board of Unesco, the United Nations entity charged with looking after matters related to education, science and culture, will vote on a resolution called “Occupied Palestine,” which attempts to redefine the capital of Israel as a supranational city to which Muslims, Christians and Jews have equal claim.
Perhaps not coincidentally, an exhibition currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City makes the same case. For the sake of Jerusalem, both need to be exposed as the attempts at historical revisionism that they are.
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Ultimately, “Every People Under Heaven” functions as a highbrow gloss on the movement to define Jerusalem as anything but Jewish, and so to undermine Israel’s sovereignty. A more aggressive approach will be on display at Unesco on Thursday during the vote on the resolution defining Jerusalem as a global city with a universal rather than a national identity.
But both efforts are equally deluded. Imagining the past as we want the present to be is not a practical solution to Jerusalem—or anything else. It would be more productive to try to learn from the painful realities of medieval Jerusalem, not to revise its history. True progress for the city will come only when we confront our own reality, the good as well as the bad, in which Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.
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UNESCO & the Met want to define Jerusalem as anything but Jewish—but it is the capital of Israel, the Jewish state: https://t.co/bD9GEFHMq2
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) October 10, 2016
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