Dispute Over a Holy Site Somehow Gets More Religious

The Israeli press and government are in an uproar about a resolution submitted to UNESCO, the United Nations’s cultural agency, by seven Arab states that, they say, denies the connection between the Jewish people and the Temple Mount. The resolution, ratified Tuesday, is hopelessly one-sided, which is not a shock for a UN entity that operates on a majority vote and without a Security Council veto. But what’s fascinating is that the Israelis are treating the resolution as an assault on their religious-historical claims to the site, which the report addresses only obliquely. This is a deepening problem on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the slow transformation from a national struggle into a religious one. And the religious struggle never seems more intractable than when the topic is the Temple Mount.

The UNESCO resolution is problematic, even by UN standards. One sign of its striking bias can be seen in the voting. The U.S., U.K., Germany and the Netherlands, as well as Estonia and Lithuania, voted against, none of which is all that unusual. But 26 countries abstained, including Sweden, whose Social Democratic government has recognized Palestine, as well as France, Italy and Spain. Most of the 24 countries that voted in favor are majority-Muslim.