Art Historian: UN Resolution, Met Exhibit Aim to 'Delegitimize Israel'

A U.N. resolution, along with an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, attempt to redefine the identity of Jerusalem, according to an art historian.

Victoria C. Gardner Coates made that claim in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, headlined, "Rewriting the History of Jerusalem, For UNESCO and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Israel's capital is anything but Jewish."

The executive board of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, will vote on a resolution called "Occupied Palestine" this week in Paris.

According to Coates, the measure "attempts to redefine the capital of Israel as a supranational city to which Muslims, Christians and Jews have equal claim."

Coates believes the resolution and the exhibition at The Met, entitled, "Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven," are efforts amounting to "historical revisionism."

Coates believes the exhibition's theme is "all claims to the city were equal" during the medieval period.

"The visitor is encouraged to conclude that if only adherents of the three major religions -- Christianity, Judaism and Islam -- would understand themselves as citizens of Jerusalem, a city transcending national boundaries, this utopia could be recaptured," she said.

Coates refutes the idea that a utopia existed in medieval Jerusalem. She wrote that during 1000-1400, Christians and Muslims successively dominated Jerusalem, and that during this time period, one of the smallest Jewish populations in the history of the city lived there.

Coates wrote that the exhibition is part of a "contemporary political agenda to delegitimize Israel."

"Ultimately, 'Every People Under Heaven' functions as a highbrow gloss on the movement to define Jerusalem as anything but Jewish, and so to undermine Israel's sovereignty," she said.

"A more aggressive approach will be on display at UNESCO on Thursday during the vote on the resolution defining Jerusalem as a global city with a universal rather than a national identity," she continued.

Coates says the exhibition and the vote are "equally deluded."

"It would be more productive to try to learn from the painful realities of medieval Jerusalem, not to revise its history," she wrote. "True progress for the city will come only when we confront our own reality, the good as well as the bad, in which Jerusalem is the capital of Israel."