JERUSALEM POST
by Robert Wistrich
June 20, 2014

Given the UN’s long record of anti-Israel actions, I was initially rather skeptical that such an exhibition on the Jewish people’s connection to the Land of Israel could ever be implemented by a UN organization.

Two years ago, I was approached by Rabbi Marvin Hier, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and Associate Dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper, to write the text for the UNESCO exhibition People, Book, Land – the 3,500-year relationship between the Jewish People and the Holy Land. Given the UN’s long record of anti-Israel actions, I was initially rather skeptical that such a project could ever be implemented by a UN organization.

After all, many at the UN appear to share the negationist Arab view that there is no historic connection between the Jews and the land of the Bible; or believe that Israel is merely a transient colonialist interloper in the Middle East; or assume that Muslim Arabs (who first invaded the land in the 7th century CE, 1600 years after the United Hebrew Monarchy established by King David) are the only indigenous inhabitants of the land. Even those who call themselves “friends of Israel” often prefer to evoke the Holocaust rather than explore the Jewish people’s deep roots in the land.

The exhibition which I put together on behalf of the Wiesenthal Center provides a very different image of this past – tracing the continuities and ruptures from the time of the Biblical Patriarch Abraham to the present-day State of Israel.

It is an epic, moving story which shows the uninterrupted presence of Jews in the land of Israel for over three millennia – not least their tenacity, even after the destruction of the First and Second Temples by Babylon and then Rome. It addresses the literary creativity, the rabbinical scholarship, the messianic hopes, longings, dreams and extraordinary fidelity of Jews to their original homeland through centuries of persecution and discrimination by foreign rulers (from the ancient Assyrians to the British) in the land of Israel and then in exile.

READ MORE

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/An-unshakable-bond-360004