After last year's abstention at UN Human Rights Council, India is back to voting against Israel.

A [new] resolution adopted by the Executive Board of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s Programme and External Relations Commission at its 199th session last Friday, April 15. The resolution was moved by Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and Sudan, all members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which fashions itself as a sharia’h-compliant parallel United Nations.

Temple Mount activists: Prayer ban for Jews is discrimination - Border Police officers patrol Temple Mount.
Temple Mount activists: Prayer ban for Jews is discrimination - Border Police officers patrol Temple Mount. - Temple Mount activists denounced on Sunday the recent diplomatic efforts of US Secretary of State John Kerry, along with comments by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in support of the longstanding status quo on the Temple Mount in which Jews and other non-Muslims are banned from praying at the holy site.Kerry held meetings on Saturday in Amman with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Jordan’s King Abdullah, and in Germany with Netanyahu on Thursday to discuss the issue.Netanyahu said during a press conference Saturday night that, “Israel will continue to enforce its longstanding policy: Muslims pray on the Temple Mount; non-Muslims visit the Temple Mount.”   Organizations that have strongly advocated for Jewish visitation and prayer rights at the Temple Mount – the holiest site in Judaism and a holy site for Muslims – accused Kerry and Netanyahu of breaching international and Israeli law in preventing Jews from praying there.“John Kerry has positioned himself alongside Islamic fundamentalism in his efforts to prevent Jews praying at the Temple Mount, which is in total opposition to the US being the cradle of modern democracy, which takes pride in being the homeland of human rights,” said the Joint Committee of Temple Organizations on Sunday.The committee comprises approximately 30 different organizations committed to promoting Jewish visitation and prayer rights at the Temple Mount, and the assertion of Israeli sovereignty over it.“This represents a colossal loss of values by the US State Department, which is lending its hand to severe religious and racist discrimination,” the committee stated, saying that the agreement contravened the principles of the American Constitution and Israeli law.The Supreme Court has, in the past, upheld the theoretical right of Jews to pray at the Temple Mount, although it has stated that security forces are permitted to take security considerations into account when deciding whether to allow non-Muslim prayer there.In accordance with the so-called status quo arrangement at the site, non-Muslim prayer is de facto banned, due to the concern that permitting it will lead to Arab rioting and violence and a severe deterioration of the security situation.“The prime minister is not entitled to prevent Jews from praying on the Temple Mount,” the committee continued, adding that such a stance contravened international law on freedom of worship, Israel’s Law of the Holy Places and Israel’s Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel.Yehudah Glick, a longtime Temple Mount activist and a Likud candidate in this year’s election, said that given the spiritual nature of prayer, it cannot be prevented at the site by declarations or by force.He praised Netanyahu, however, for what he claimed was the prime minister’s refusal to agree to further concessions, such as instituting a quota on the number of Jewish visitors to the site or banning Jewish visitation completely for several months.“Prayer is an internal, spiritual act, which an army or police force has no power to prevent,” Glick wrote on his Facebook page. “The reality on the Temple Mount will not be determined by speeches or even international agreements in front of cameras, but rather by facts on the ground.”Glick said he was therefore calling on people to “come to Zion, which is the Temple Mount, to make the world accustomed to the fact that Jews are part of the natural view of the mount.”Speaking to The Jerusalem Post, Glick said, “Three million Muslims visited the Temple Mount in 2014 and only 12,000 Jews did, so naturally the Muslim claims carry more weight until Jewish visitors increase.”Glick advocates a time-sharing or space-sharing arrangement at the holy site, as is implemented at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron.Glick also said he welcomed increased US and Jordanian efforts to maintain order at the Temple Mount, as was evidenced by a tentative agreement to install a 24-hour video monitoring system at the site.“If Jews are allowed to visit the Temple Mount without being harassed that would be wonderful,” said Glick.In September, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon outlawed the Murabitun and Murabatat Islamist activists groups, who for several years were paid by the Islamic Movement’s Northern Branch to verbally abuse and harass Jewish visitors at the Temple Mount.The Temple Institute, an educational and activist group dedicated to preparing vessels for the third Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount and “bring[ing] about the building of the Holy Temple in our time,” denounced the agreements between Israel, the US and Jordan, saying they discriminated against Jews and bolstered Jordan’s “ custodian rights” over the site.“The prime minister has rewarded Islamic terrorism by empowering and institutionalizing the discrimination of Jews on the Temple Mount,” said Rabbi Chaim Richman, international director of the Temple Institute.“Instead of stating unequivocally that the recent violence and murder of innocent Jews has nothing to do with peaceful Jewish prayer, the prime minister has bolstered a false Islamist narrative by agreeing to place cameras monitoring Jewish visitors’ lips on the Temple Mount and reaffirming that Jordan, and not Israel, is the sovereign ruler over the Temple Mount, the heart of our people,” Richman said.According to its website, the Temple Institute’s “long-term goal is to do all in our limited power to bring about the building of the Holy Temple in our time,” while in the short-term seeking to “rekindle the flame of the Holy Temple in the hearts of mankind through education.” © Article by JEREMY SHARON \ 10/25/2015, The Jerusalem Post, photograph by Reuters

....

In what is possibly the swiftest rewriting of history, the resolution strips the Temple Mount and other Biblical sites of their Jewish heritage and declares them as solely Islamic. The Jerusalem Post describes the hideous caricaturing of history by the Unesco worthies pithily: The resolution’s “language ignores Jewish ties to its holy religious site of the Temple Mount and the Western Wall area in Jerusalem’s Old City... It refers to the area solely as Al Aqsa Mosque/al-Haram al Sharif, except for two references to the Western Wall Plaza that were put in parenthesis. The text also referred to the plaza area by the Western Wall as al-Buraq Plaza”.

Strangely, last year in October, Unesco had “backed away from reclassifying the Western Wall as solely a Muslim holy site, but is now using language that refers to it as such”, the Jerusalem Post reports, adding, “April’s resolution reaffirms that the Mughrabi Ascent, which starts at the Western Wall Plaza, is an integral and inseparable part of Al Aqsa Mosque/al-Haram al-Sharif”.

The Unesco resolution calls on Israel to “restore the status of the Temple Mount to what it was prior to September 2000 when the second intifada broke out”. At that time, according to the resolution, “the Jordan Waqf had full control of Al Aqsa Mosque/ al-Haram al Sharif including maintenance and restoration work and regulating access”. At present, the site is “under the full authority, but not full control, of the Islamic Waqf”. Israel controls access to the site.

Commenting on the absurdity of the demand, a top Israeli official told me, “This resolution coincides with Jordan declaring it will not install cameras on Temple Mount to monitor the events there. A few months ago there was a demand to install cameras there, as a move to mediate between the sides and to bring calm to Temple Mount. The Palestinians demanded to monitor the ‘Israeli provocations’ and we happily agreed to install them all over the compound so that every violation or provocation will be documented (including in the mosques).”

Not surprisingly, the Palestinians and their patrons in the OIC realised that installing cameras would result in self-incriminating evidence of their provocations on Temple Mount. “There would be footage every time they prepare themselves for a conflict with the Israeli side, including collecting rocks inside Al Aqsa itself. The cameras would have exposed all of this and due to recent Palestinian pressure, the Jordanians have decided not to install them.”

The 58-member board of Unesco approved this odious resolution with 33 votes in favour, six against and 17 abstentions. Ghana and Turkmenistan chose to be absent. Among those who voted for the resolution were South Africa, Algeria, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, Spain, Russia, France, Guinea, India, Iran, Lebanon, Malaysia, Morocco, Mauritius, Mexico, Mozambique, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, North Korea, Senegal, Slovenia, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Chad, Togo, Vietnam.

Those who voted against the resolution were the US, Germany, Britain, Netherlands, Estonia, Lithuania. Members who abstained from voting were Albania, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, El Salvador, Greece, Haiti, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Nepal, Uganda, Paraguay, South Korea, St. Kitts & Nevis, Serbia, Trinidad & Tobago, Ukraine.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected the resolution with the contempt it deserves: “This is yet another absurd UN decision. Unesco ignores the unique historic connection of Judaism to the Temple Mount, where the two temples stood for a thousand years and to which every Jew in the world has prayed for thousands of years. The UN is rewriting a basic part of human history and has again proven that there is no low to which it will not stop.”

Soon after the resolution was adopted, Irena Bokova, who heads Unesco and is likely to become the next UN Secretary-General, distanced herself from this travesty. That’s understandable, given the absurdly untenable claims made by the resolution, wishing away history with the sole purpose of delegitimising Israel and denuding Jerusalem of its Jewish past.

In a letter to the Director-General of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, Bokova has said that the decision to thus define the Temple Mount was a political decision and that she was opposed to it. “This decision was made by the economic council and the management council of UNESCO which are both management bodies, and was not made by me,” she wrote.

What should bother us in India is that our representative at Unesco has gone and voted against Israel and in support of negating Jewish history. Was the vote a Pavlovian response by a Foreign Office bureaucrat in Paris? Or was it a conscious decision of the BJP Government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to restore status quo ante after the notional departure of an abstention?

Either way, the vote reaffirms the view that much of foreign policy remains hostage to the perversities of the Congress decades when red-ragging Israel was considered the best means of appeasing Arabs abroad and Muslims at home. It was expected that Modi’s hawk eye would spot the clause in the 2014 draft BRICS declaration, no doubt worked in by bureaucrats faithful to the Congress, that controverted India’s traditional position on the Israel-Palestine issue. But those were very early days and the clause went unnoticed.

Next came the vote against Israel at the UNHRC on a resolution on Gaza in July 2015. That too could be explained away as bureaucrats defying the regime change that had happened two months ago, or getting the better of the new Government that was elected to smash the status quo and break with the past. A year later, when India abstained from voting against Israel at the UNHRC, it was seen as course-correction, signalling an end to pandering to Arabs in the hope of pleasing Muslims at home. Less than a year after that historic abstention, it’s back to the past with a bang.

Two points need to be made to drive home the fact about India’s unwholesome vote in Paris which may find favour with Israel-haters but has left Modi’s core support base wondering who’s calling the shots. Clarity is definitely needed on why India voted in support of exterminating the very idea of Jewish identity and faith. Intriguingly, the Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson has not commented on the Unesco vote yet, although it is believed the Government is in receipt of a letter of trenchant protest from the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

The first point refers to India voting for a resolution, moved by OIC member-states, that rewrites history in the most grotesque manner. Did the Government believe this would soften OIC on the Kashmir issue? If it did, it clearly believed wrong. For even as India was voting for the Unesco resolution in Paris, the OIC member-states were voting unanimously for a scathing anti-India resolution on Kashmir at the 13th Islamic Summit in Istanbul. As expected, the Government of India officially denounced it. This has created a peculiar situation: In New Delhi we deplore the OIC and debunk its resolution, in Paris we merrily waltz with the organisation that promotes Islamic supremacy by voting in support of their resolution.

Second, the April 15 Unesco resolution has set a frightening precedent with enormous mischief potential. In theory, this moment onward anything and everything is possible. Imagine a clutch of Islamic countries moving a resolution at Unesco declaring Ayodhya an Islamic heritage city, the Ram Mandir as Babri Masjid, and the Ram Chabutra-Sita ki Rasoi area as Babur Plaza. Let there be no doubt that such a resolution would secure sufficient votes, including those of China, Brazil, France and Spain, possibly also Russia and the US, to pass muster. Which way would India vote?

There is no percentage in believing this won’t happen. There is even lesser percentage in doing what we did in Paris.

(The writer is a current affairs analyst based in NCR)