Responding to UNESCO Resolution, Netanyahu Announces Building of Settlement Museum

July 10, 2017 Blog, News
The Ibrahimi Mosque in occupied Hebron (Al-Khalil). (Photo: MEMO)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently announced his decision to withhold a further $1 million in Israel’s membership dues to the United Nations and invest this money in a settlement museum, in protest of a recent UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) vote to inscribe Hebron’s Old City and Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque in the occupied West Bank on the World Heritage in Danger list.

Friday’s resolution, filed by the Palestinian Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Tourism, the Hebron municipality, and the Hebron rehabilitation committee, argued that Hebron’s Old City urgently needed protection from Israeli violations in the area that harmed the exceptional international value of the site.

Friday’s vote asserted that Hebron’s Old City and the mosque would be registered in UNESCO’s World Heritage List, and also stated that the two sites are to be recognized as being in danger, meaning that each year UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee will convene to discuss their case.

However, authors of the submission have insisted there was no attempt to deny Jewish links, emphasizing that the move aimed rather to demonstrate the impact of the Israeli occupation on a site of international significance.

 

Reading a passage from the Torah referring to the Ibrahimi Mosque – also known as the Cave of Patriarchs, where prominent Jewish religious figures are believed to be buried – Netanyahu argued on Sunday that “the connection between the Jewish people and Hebron and the Tomb of the Patriarchs is one of purchase and of history which may be without parallel in the history of peoples.”

Netanyahu went on to slam UNESCO for “yet another delusional resolution,” equating the international body’s recognition of Israeli violations in the West Bank city to a “denial” of historical Jewish presence in Hebron.

Netanyahu said that the $1 million cut from Israel’s contributions to the UN would be transferred to fund the creation of “the Museum of the Heritage of the Jewish People in Kiryat Arba and Hebron” – referring to the illegal Hebron-area settlement housing notoriously aggressive settlers – in order, the Israeli leader said, to “present to the world the historical truth and the Jewish People’s deep connection of thousands of years to Hebron.”

 

Netanyahu added that he had also called for plans to move forward in the “City of David” archaeological site in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, which has been used by Israeli authorities to prove the existence Jewish presence in Jerusalem during Biblical times – to the detriment of other cultures present in the area before or after, and displacing scores of Palestinian residents of Silwan in the process.

Hebron’s Old City, which is under full Israeli military control, is home to some 30,000 Palestinians and around 800 Israeli settlers who live under the protection of Israeli forces.

(Maan, PC, Social Media)

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