The B’nai B’rith International condemned resolutions passed last week in Mexico City at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conference on cultural policies which attempt to “rewrite the history” of Israel and foster totalitarian control over culture.
Philip Lax, chairman of the International Council of B’nai B’rith, who headed the organization’s delegation to the conference, said at a press conference here yesterday that the resolutions “encourage states to sanction a single culture, denying all others any right to exist, much less thrive.”
He noted that two of the resolutions adopted were inspired by the Palestine Liberation Organization. One of the resolutions, Lax said, equates Zionism with racism and the other calls on UNESCO to assist the PLO, “an organization committed to the destruction of a member of the United Nations (Israel), in inventing a cultural history of the Palestinian people.”
That history, Lax added, would transfer part of the heritage of the Jewish people to the Palestinian Arabs, thus ignoring the Bible and a 4,000 year historical record which indicates that the Arabs came to the area in the seventh century.
“It is quite clear that a Palestinian consciousness has emerged in recent years,” Lax said. “But the PLO seeks to give that consciousness an exclusive pedigree by ignoring Jewish roots.”
“It attempts to give Palestinians the cultural achievements of practically every other people who have inhabited the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, including prehistoric, Amorite, Canaanite, Phoenician, Egyptian, Philistine, Hebrew, Aramean, Greek, Roman and Christian.” The B’nai B’rith leader said that “nowhere does the PLO mention that the only national culture in Palestine over the last 4,000 years has been Jewish.”
CITES CYNICAL DISRESPECT
The B’nai B’rith delegation warned at the beginning of the conference that the PLO might attempt to deny or falsify Jewish history. It cited a statement by PLO chief Yasir Arafat in 1980, at the last UNESCO general conference, in which he transformed St. Paul from a Jew from Tarsus into a Palestinian Arab.
“In cynical disrespect of the intellectual integrity of the delegation assembled, the PLO is now seeking to expand this fraud to cover all of recorded history,” Lax said. “This cultural scavengry is particularly distressing because it will become a reference in the future.”
In equating Zionism with colonialism and racial discrimination, Lax said, a UNESCO conference has “for the first time sanctioned the promulgation of a lie.” The PLO-inspired resolutions and other resolutions which called on UNESCO to “propagate” culture and for states to control “cultural activities” were opposed by the United States and other democratic countries. They were approved, however, by the majority of Soviet, Arab and Third World countries.
WJC LAUDS ONE RESOLUTION
But the UNESCO conference did produce a resolution which the World Jewish Congress, which was also represented at the parley, viewed as beneficial to Soviet Jewry and Jews in Arab lands. The resolution, submitted by the U.S., calls for “freedom of religion.” The measure had its basis in a draft formulated by the WJC delegate, Dr. Leon Kronitz, and supported by numerous other delegates, including several Moslem states, the WJC reported.
According to the text, the resolution declares that restrictions on the free exercise of religious activity are “against the interest of the individual, the member states, and the international community.” Kronitz, who is the executive vice president of the Canadian Zionist Federation and chairman of the WJC Cultural Commission explained that the aim of his draft was to reinforce existing measures in support of minority cultural rights which would include those of Jews in the USSR and other countries.,
In negotiating the text with various delegations, agreement was reached that the U.S. representative would submit the resolution and that its co-sponsors be of a broad-based character. Among those co-sponsoring the resolution were Nigeria, Sudan, Britain, Egypt and Australia.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
