A convenient heritage

Editorial

The Palestinian Authority on Monday asked that the Bethlehem site where Christian tradition says Jesus was born be named a United Nations World Heritage Site. On its face, the idea sounds fair. The birthplace of the figure that more than a billion people view as the Messiah and the son of God should have as good a shot as any at such a title. The leadership of the PA seeking to add prominence and international respect to a foremost Christian site sounds downright pluralistic and multicultural.

In fact, it is a cynical back-door attempt to exploit this Christian heritage place to gain legitimacy for a Palestinian state without taking the steps necessary to coexist with Israel. It has nothing at all to do with the sanctity of the Church of the Nativity and everything to do with gaining international recognition for a proto-state that Palestinians hope to make de facto even while they refuse the compromises and commitment to peace required to make it de jure.

This campaign is all because UNESCO, the UN branch that decides these things, recognizes World Heritage Sites only in independent states. While more than half of UN member-states recognize Palestine in one form or another, the imprimatur of UNESCO would be a coup – and the PA knows it.

“[I]t is part and parcel of our plan to end the occupation and build the institutions of the state of Palestine,” said Khulud Daibes, the PA’s tourism minister.

At least in the case of the Bethlehem church, the PA acknowledges its sanctity to Christians, an honor not granted to the holiest site of the Jewish people. Jewish connections to the Western Wall – and, by extension, the Jewish people’s history in that land – are comprehensively erased by the PA.

“The claims being made by the rulers of Israel and its rabbis about the alleged Temple are pure fabrications without any base or foundation,” declared the Higher Islamic Authority of Palestine in 2001.

In 2002, Yasser Arafat claimed that decades of Israeli archeology had “found not a single stone proving that the Temple of Solomon was there, because historically the Temple was not in Palestine [at all].... They are now trying to put in place a number of stones so that they can say, ‘We were here.’ This is nonsense. I challenge them to bring a single stone from the Temple of Solomon.”

Fatah’s current “moderate” leader, Mahmoud Abbas, said, in 2000: “[The Israelis] claim that 2,000 years ago they had a Temple. I challenge the claim that this is so. But even if it is so, we do not accept [current Israeli claims on the Temple Mount].”

So thorough is the Palestinian leadership’s historical revisionism that many, perhaps most, Palestinians actually believe that Jews have no historical connection to Jerusalem. So it is telling that the PA is positioning itself as the protector of a Christian holy site.

During Jordanian control of the West Bank and under the PA, Christian and Jewish holy sites have been mistreated, desecrated and destroyed, and access to the sites has been denied. The fate of Jewish and Christian cemeteries, synagogues, churches and sacred sites in the past 60 years should provide UNESCO with enough plausible doubt to deny this request.

However, it was just a few months ago that UNESCO recognized Rachel’s Tomb, Judaism’s third holiest site, as a mosque, and affirmed it and Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs (Judaism’s second holiest site) as “integral part[s] of the occupied Palestinian territories.” In a statement, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu asked rhetorically, “If the nearly 4,000-year-old burial sites of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs of the Jewish nation – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah – are not part of its culture and tradition, then what is a national cultural site?”

It is too much to hope that UNESCO will take such considerations into account, given its history. Nor will they likely contemplate the possible reasons why, in 50 years of Jordanian and Palestinian domination, the Christian population of Bethlehem has fallen from 70 percent to 15 percent, and the Jews who live nearby can do so only behind guard stations and barbed wire.

Sadly, the world at large seems more interested in protecting things than people – the Taliban was notorious for repression and murder, for example, but only when they blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001 did much of the world decide these were really bad guys. Then again, a cynic might take heart in the possibility that this World Heritage Site church will draw global attention to how the PA cares for the antiquities under its jurisdiction – which just might lead some observers to take a closer look at how they treat the human beings under their control, too.

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