Israel succeeded in preventing a further act of deception by the Palestinian Authority and its allies at UNESO ahead of the vote on the PA's request to have Hevron and the Cave of the Patriarchs recognized as exclusively 'Palestinian heritage sites.'
After reviewing the draft resolution, the Israeli delegation discovered that the UNESCO recommendation included in it contained the "conclusions" of a professional report by an organization examining such requests.
However, the report had actually reached the opposite conclusions from what was written in the draft resolution.
The report had stated that the PA's request to register Hevron and the Cave of the Patriarchs as 'Palestinian heritage sites' did not fulfill any of the three criteria for which registration is given, and that the request ignores the Jewish and Christian history of the site.
However, the original draft resolution did not include all the conclusions that supported most of the Israeli position, but rather only included a sentence that says that it was not possible to examine the matter in depth because of Israel's refusal to allow the UNESCO delegation to enter the area.
For a whole day, the Israeli delegation struggled to correct the distortion in a series of very difficult meetings with the organization's management, who attempted to make light of the report.
The matter was eventually brought to the attention of UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova, who understood that the injustice done to Israel might drag the organization into legal problems - and ordered the re-submission and redistribution of the proposal with the relevant information included.
Israel's ambassador to UNESCO, Carmel Shama Hacohen, told Arutz Sheva, "We are struggling under conditions that are slanted against us - and therefore we reacted sharply and non-diplomatically to the attempt to make it even harder for us, while [the PA and its allies] distorted and manipulated the facts."
Shama Hacohen did not mince words when describing the attempt to undermine the Jewish connection to one of Judaism's holiest sites. "Someone in the organization here really has no shame - and tried to turn a report which was deadly to the Palestinians into [a report which would be] deadly to Israel and to justify all of the failures of the Palestinians' request. I am glad that there were those who knew how to pull themselves together in UNESCO and to correct the distortion - for the most part, not even all of it [has been corrected."