The world’s democracies must reassess their ties with UNESCO, the United Nation’s cultural organization, if it does not revisit the resolution it passed last week denying the Jewish and Christian historical connections to Jerusalem, Josh Block, President and CEO of The Israel Project (which publishes The Tower), wrote in an op-ed Wednesday in The Hill.

The resolution “inflicted a wound upon millions of Jews, and many more millions of Christians” and “makes a mockery of the historical record and flies in the face of religious tolerance,” Block wrote. He noted that strong condemnations of the resolution have come from the White House, Congress, UNESCO director-general Irina Bokova, and outgoing United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.

UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee is scheduled to meet in Paris next week, and will have an opportunity to revisit the decision. Some countries have already done so: Mexico changed its vote from supporting the resolution to an abstention, and Brazil may soon do the same. Poland and South Korea, countries with large Christian populations, sit on the committee and may reconsider the consequences of the resolution to their citizens.

At stake, Block wrote, “is more than the reputation of the UN” and its agencies, but whether the world permits “an unaccountable international bureaucracy to attack Israel by fabricating history, replacing fact with falsehood, and denying the legitimacy of the foundations of Judaism and Christianity.”

The historical record is clear, he wrote:

In the holy scriptures of the Jews and Christians, the Jewish Temple, which twice stood and was twice destroyed on this very same site, is the ultimate expression of Israel’s faith in God. It is the place where the glories of King Solomon and the defiance of the Maccabees came to life, among whose columns Jesus walked and preached, a site housing spectacles of great joy but also, on the occasions of its destruction, inconsolable lamentation. …

So thoroughly did the Romans ransack the ancient Jewish Temple — the results of which are etched upon that other fabricated global heritage site, the Arch of Titus in Rome — that only its outer, western wall, known to Jews as the Kotel, remained.

If UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee doesn’t take action, Block argued, then the United States should follow Israel’s lead and “and reevaluate their ties with the agency.”

In an op-ed published earlier this week in The Tower, Petra Marquardt-Bigman recalled the history of the Arab denial of the Jewish connection to the Temple and characterized the resolution as “fanning the flames of religious passions that could set all of the Middle East ablaze.”

[Photo: Yonatan Sindel / Flash90 ]