Here is a lesson on how greed creates the component parts
that come together and become the monster whose destructive power damages the
greedy that started this whole cycle.
The credit for the lesson goes to Victoria C. Gardner Coates
who wrote: “Rewriting the History of Jerusalem” an article that also came under
the subtitle: “For Unesco and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Israel's capital
is anything but Jewish.” It was published on October 10, 2016 in the Wall Street
Journal.
Victoria Coates gets the credit because she is the historian
that did more than mutilate history by creating the monster that slays her
credibility as an impartial historian. Aside from her contempt for Unesco, she
has a beef against the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York City which is currently exhibiting a show called “Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every
People Under Heaven.” To put it simply, Coates would have preferred to see that
appellation read as: Only Jews Under Heaven.
She complains that the exhibition perpetuates the myth that
“during the medieval period, all claims to the city were equal and inhabitants
were uniformly defined by their participation in this unique community.” Worse,
she goes on to say, “this interpretation is projected onto the modern Jerusalem . The visitor is
encouraged to conclude that if adherents to Christianity, Judaism and Islam
would see themselves as citizens of Jerusalem ,
this utopia could be recaptured”.
She calls that sort of encouragement a disservice done by
the exhibition, and refutes it by constructing an argument that carries within
it the poison pill that kills her argument. She begins that process by saying
this: “during the exhibition's time frame Jerusalem
was dominated by Christians and Muslims. These four centuries spanned the
sparsest Jewish presences in Jerusalem ,
beginning with the slaughter of Jews by the Crusaders whose population dwindled
to 200. The Mamluk conquest of 1260 improved conditions.” She then concludes
that “Medieval Jerusalem
was not a harmonious multicultural melting pot [but a place] where endemic
violence and religious bigotry characterized the period”.
But what's the significance of all that? The significance,
in her view, is that when you paint Jerusalem
as a “global city with a universal rather than a national identity” hosting the
three religions, you turn it into a cosmopolitan city. This diminishes “the
enduring spiritual connection of Jews to Jerusalem ”
and serves the “contemporary political agenda to delegitimize Israel , [also]
undermines its sovereignty.” And this is the nonsense that acts like a poison
pill and kills Victoria Coates's thesis.
Clearly, her ultimate aim is to establish – now and
eternally – that Jerusalem
must be recognized by the whole world to belong to the Jews, always the Jews
and no one but the Jews. Her problem is that she started an argument she
thought would lead to that conclusion, except that the evidence she possessed
was saying something different. It was saying that Jews had the least claim on
that city. And so, Victoria Coates went into the attack mode accusing both
Unesco and the Metropolitan Museum of conspiring to delegitimize Israel .
And that's the closest thing she could have said to accuse them of
anti-Semitism.
The unfortunate part is that despite the fact she had all
that was necessary to make an important contribution to the accuracy of the historical
record, she failed to do so. To begin with, she should have told the readers
that the Mamluks (sometimes referred to as Mamaleek) were Muslim Arabs. The Crusaders,
who correctly identified them as Semitic, tried to exterminate them. Because
the Jews happened to be there, the Crusaders considered them Semitic as well
and roughed them up too. But the Arabs prevailed in the final battle and pushed
back the Crusaders. They viewed the Jews as their cousins, and protected them.
Had Victoria Coates been truthful about that history, she
would have highlighted the noble character of the Arabs and paved the way for
true progress to happen in a place that needs it badly. But having truncated
half of the historical record, and having distorted the other half, she ends
her presentation with this: “Progress will come when we confront our reality in
which Jerusalem is the capital of Israel .”