Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could not have asked for more. Even as the eyes of the world are turned to the prime minister in anticipation of his order to evacuate the controversial land robbers (settlers) from the West Bank’s Amona outpost, UNESCO turns the spotlight onto the Jewish people’s holiest and most consensual site.

The organization’s Oct. 13 draft resolution regarding the holy sites in Jerusalem ignores the age-old Jewish affinity for the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. The venue and timing of the decision couldn’t have been better for Netanyahu. For many Jews, the Arab states and the Palestinians who proposed the UNESCO resolution may as well have denied the Holocaust. The Temple Mount and the Western Wall of the Jewish Temple are not simply venerated by God-fearing Jews, they are milestones in the history of every Jew, serving as the grounding of the Jewish collective.

Sworn leftists and secular Jews are hard-pressed to justify the resolution (severely contested by Israel), which was reaffirmed Oct. 18 following a request by Mexico to change its vote. Even if we accept the absurd claim that there’s no link between the Temple Mount compound and the Jerusalem Temple itself, no organization or state has the right to dispossess any nation of its central narrative. Several years ago, during a debate about the status of Jerusalem, I witnessed an altercation between Israeli peace activists and a Palestinian participant who expressed doubt about the affinity of the Jewish people with the Western Wall. Several minutes later the Israelis were wolfing down copious amounts of non-kosher seafood. Indeed, this bond between a Jew and the Jerusalem Temple or Western Wall goes well beyond keeping the halacha, the ancestral law.

From a symbolic-national point of view, the prime minister was completely right when he compared denying Jewish people’s links to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall to denying China’s link to the Great Wall and the Egyptians’ connection to the pyramids. But that’s as far as the similarity goes between the Great Wall and the pyramids and the Temple Mount and Western Wall. Whereas there’s no controversy about China’s sovereignty over all parts of Beijing, and there’s no doubting Egypt’s sole sovereignty over Giza, Israel is the only state in the world that recognizes its sovereignty over East Jerusalem, in general, and the Temple Mount, in particular.