"Six months ago, when UNESCO canceled an exhibition about the Jewish people's connection to the Land of Israel just before its scheduled opening, Professor Robert Wistrich, its author, was livid. The cancellation, which followed Arab pressure, was disgraceful, he fumed, an appalling "betrayal" that proved that the organization is "subjected, entirely, to political considerations," because "there's one standard for Jews, and there's another standard for non-Jews, especially if they're Arabs." The situation has much improved since then, Wistrich and others involved in the project assert, as the exhibition opened on Wednesday afternoon at UNESCO headquarters in Paris...
And yet changes have been made to the exhibition since it was nixed in January. Most strikingly, the word "Israel" has been deleted from the exhibition's title and replaced by "Holy Land." An exhibit that was initially called "The 3,500 year relationship of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel" is now entitled "The 3,500 year relationship of the Jewish People with the Holy Land.""..."Simon Wiesenthal Center's Rabbi Marvin Hier...told The Times of Israel...the replacement of the "Land of Israel" wording with the "Holy Land,"... it perceived as an unimportant nuance...We never objected to it."
In addition, "six months ago, the invitation prominently featured an image of the Dead Sea scrolls. On the invitation to Wednesday's event, the picture is conspicuously absent. ...Wistrich confirmed that UNESCO asked for the picture to be removed, though he said he didn't know what could be objectionable about old scrolls from Qumran. "Perhaps it too obviously recalls, as it were, the longevity of the Jewish people's association with the Land of Israel," he said. "It's a very concrete display of the fact that 2,000 years these were our whereabouts." The same Hebrew found in these scrolls, some of which date back to 400 BCE, is spoken today in the State of Israel, he said, "and this is a very striking manifestation of the intimacy of the connection. That would be my speculation, but they may have other considerations.""