The Munich Agreement: Lessons for the Future - Amb. Dore Gold

80 Years since the Munich Agreement

Joint conference of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Israel

The question is, what are the lessons for the future of our discussion here? So, two things came to mind when I considered speaking a second time. I think, first, we have to avoid false history because part of what the forces that want us to appease them are trying to do is make us feel guilty, whatever the story is. You know, in the case of World War I and the Versailles Treaty, it was clear that, as we said earlier, guilt over the Versailles Treaty led to dangerous flexibility in Munich, and today, as we said before, the Iranians love to remind the Americans of their role in overthrowing Mossadegh. So, even if that is exaggerating, today historically if you try to identify why Mossadegh fell, there are multiple factors and it isn’t Kermit Roosevelt of the CIA that is the principal factor. That has still been useful up until recently. So, they would weave the story of false history and try and gain something in the field of diplomacy. You have to avoid false history.

By the way, in our context with the Palestinians we are getting false history big time. Obviously, we’ve been dealing with this in the Jerusalem Center. I mean, why do they use UNESCO to produce this entirely made-up narrative about the history of Jerusalem? And they take the Temple Mount and they remove all references in UN resolutions to our historical background and make it an exclusively Islamic site. So, this is part of the insertion of false history, which is now part of diplomacy. So, in the past Israeli diplomats might have smiled sheepishly and not taken an assertive position against this, but you have to. You can’t let the international community be told these stories.

I will never forget, I was at a UN conference as director general of Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Istanbul, and I ran into the secretary-general of UNESCO and she was lobbying me to become the next Secretary General of the United Nations, as she lobbied everybody who was taking a coffee break there. So, I said to her, we were starting to think about who we should invite to Jerusalem, like all the UNESCO ambassadors. So, I said, “I have an idea for you. The next time you hear this rubbish that there never was a Temple, why don’t you invite all the ambassadors to UNESCO for a Roman holiday?” She looks at me. Roman holiday? She expected Jerusalem. I said, “You guys can go to the arch of Titus and you can see the kelim, the implements of the Temple itself. They didn’t have Polaroid cameras then, but they did chip away its stone to show you what existed at the time, and we can stop this ridiculous argument.” So, I think she thought it was a cute mention of mine, but it’s part of this whole thing. You just can’t let this stuff continue.

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Ambassador Dore Gold has served as President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs since 2000. From June 2015 until October 2016 he served as Director-General of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Previously he served as Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN (1997-1999), and as an advisor to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.