Israel will ignore Palestine’s membership of UNESCO, but Palestine can use this toehold to salvage its heritage.

After blustery threats failed to banish the item from the agenda, the United States and Israel retaliated in their own ways when the United Nations cultural body, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) voted overwhelmingly to admit Palestine as a full member. The US cut off all financial support and Israel announced plans to build a few thousand more dwelling units in occupied Palestinian land.

As the public discourse plays out about a world body that does not repay US generosity with any manner of gratitude, a more realistic assessment, which nobody yet dares speak out loud, is gaining traction in the higher levels of the US administration. Robert Gates, a legacy of the Bush administration and till recently defence secretary, in one of his final internal meetings before leaving office, reportedly said that the US had done much and taken great risks for Israel, though Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was proving an “ungrateful ally”.

Netanyahu’s disdain for all who would stand in the way of Israel’s infinite aggrandisement was evident in his address to the UN General Assembly in September, not long after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had submitted a claim on behalf of his people for full membership of the world body. The General Assembly, he said, was “the theatre of the absurd”, which a religious mentor had, as he began his political career as envoy to the UN, described as a “house of many lies”. Netanyahu spoke with unconcealed racist contempt, as when describing Israel’s challenge of security in terms of its proximity to hostile territory, comparable to the distance between certain boroughs of New York city.

And the people within these boroughs, he reminded his audience, “are considerably nicer than some of Israel’s neighbours”. Netanyahu accused the UN of having sanctified the “lie” that “the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest place” was “occupied Palestinian territory”. And with this airy denial of centuries of Palestinian settlement in the area, Netanyahu quickly moved onto another tall tale to establish the antiquity of the Jewish claim to the land. Archaeologists, he said, had found in close proximity to the Western Wall, an ancient seal, close to 3,000 years old, imprinted with his surname. And his first name dated even further back. People who bore that name wandered in the area since distant millennia and there had been “a continuous Jewish presence in the land ever since”. Current scholarship, as exemplified in the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand’s acclaimed book The Invention of the Jewish People has exploded this mythology in large part.

The denial of the Palestinians’ right to exist acquires several forms, most of them overt, physical and brutal. Palestine has been a battle about culture and antiquity since the first expropriations of the native population by Zionist settlers in the 1920s. And it is no coincidence that among the first major projects that Israel undertook in East Jerusalem, after it was seized in 1967, was an archaeological excavation to establish the area’s unbroken Jewish heritage.

These excavations have been controversial, their most observable feature being the use of bulldozers to cut through layers of antiquity to arrive at a distant Judaic past. Archaeology has been a profoundly political discipline everywhere, but nowhere more explosively so than in Palestine. In 2010, Israel entered into a public spat with UNESCO when the historic site in Hebron – scene of a grisly 1994 massacre of Palestinian worshippers by the extremist Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein – was designated as a mosque on the basis of its dominant features. In 1996, riots broke out all over the occupied territories when Netanyahu, in an earlier tenure as prime minister, ordered the opening of an archaeological tunnel that, Palestinians believe, was deliberately laid under the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem to weaken its foundations. And in 1992, Albert Glock, an American archaeologist who had documented the principal features of Palestinian villages and heritage sites effaced in the creation of Israel, was shot dead in Birzeit on the West Bank, in a crime that was never solved.

Netanyahu’s locutions are increasingly an insult to basic rationality. His government is almost certainly going to disregard the consequences of Palestine’s newly acquired membership of UNESCO, much as it has every inconvenient UN resolution in the past. The Palestinian people though have gained a toehold within the institutional framework of multilateralism. They could use this limited opening to work towards salvaging their culture and heritage – as embodied in numerous sites of historic importance in the entire territory of historical Palestine – from the devouring myths of Zionism. It is a largely symbolic victory, but significant nonetheless and one that needs to be consolidated.