TEL AVIV – Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein (Likud) has urged the Vatican to assist in preventing future anti-Israel UNESCO resolutions following Wednesday’s vote denying Jewish and Christian ties to Jerusalem.
Edelstein wrote the Secretary of State for the Vatican, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, requesting the help of the pontiff “to prevent the recurrence of developments of this sort … in the name of the Land and the People of the Bible.”
He added that the UNESCO vote was “an assault on history and deeply offensive to both Christianity and Judaism.”
“The denial of the historicity of the two Jerusalem Temples and the Temple Mount as recounted in both the Old and New Testaments is a terrible indictment of the international community when repeatedly adopted by a UN body,” he said.
He continued, “It is now high time to ensure that that the international community adopts another resolution that reaffirms Jerusalem as a holy city for all monotheistic religions, a city where the two Temples stood and from which the Word of G-d was first promulgated to humanity by our prophets.”
On Wednesday, the Pope said in an address at the Vatican that God promised the land of Israel to the people of Israel.
“The people of Israel, who from Egypt, where they were enslaved, walked through the desert for forty years until they reached the land promised by God,” he said in his address about refuge and migration.
The Holy See quoted the migration story from the Old Testament involving Abraham “who heed[ed] God’s call to leave his country for another: ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.’ ”
He added another example from the New Testament: “Even the Holy Family – Mary, Joseph and the child Jesus – was forced to emigrate to flee the threat of Herod, and remained in Egypt until the monarch’s death,” he said.
“The story of humanity is the story of migrations,” said the pope.
His address came before giving an audience to Arab-Israeli Deputy Minister for Regional Cooperation Ayoub Kara in which he thanked him for his efforts on behalf of Christians in Israel.
Kara in return thanked the pontiff for his “decision that Israel is a promising [sic] from God to the Jewish nation.”
Kara added, “It is impossible to ignore the clear affinity and connection between Christianity and Judaism” and that the “UNESCO decision [earlier Wednesday] constitutes an attack upon them.”
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