In the wake of the failed military coup in Turkey, UNESCO, the Paris-based UN body for education, science and culture, cut short its session of the World Heritage Committee in Istanbul which was due to vote on a resolution, submitted by the Palestinians and Jordan, that ignores the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount.

The European Union has proposed another text as an alternative to a draft resolution proposed by the Palestinians and Jordan which referred ten times to Al-Haram Al-Sharif, the Islamic term for Temple Mount, without mentioning that it has been the holiest site in Judaism for thousands of years. In this draft, the Western Wall, the world’s most significant Jewish prayer site, is also referred to by the Arabic term Buraq Plaza, while quotation marks pointedly accompany the words “Western Wall plaza.”

The 21-members of the World Heritage Committee had been scheduled to vote on the matter in the coming days as it wrapped up its 40th session in Istanbul which had been scheduled to run from July 10 to July 20.

According to Israel, the new EU text was not any better than the original one. “The EU proposal still denies the connection of the Jewish people to the Temple Mount,” said the foreign ministry.

The Palestinian delegation along wit Lebanon and Peru pushed for the resolution to be heard on Sunday in spite of the condensed agenda.

But the European Union, which has four member states on the World Heritage Committee backed Israel’s request for a delay.

“It is rare, that our opinion, wins out against the Palestinians and the Arab states,” Israel’s Ambassador to UNESCO said.

On Friday, UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova stood with Israel against the drive to rewrite Jewish history in Jerusalem’s Old City, although she did not specifically mentioned the Temple Mount in her text.

In a message posted on the UNESCO website, she said that Jerusalem’s Old City, “is the sacred city of the three monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam.”

Bokova further charged that actions to deny the Jewish and Christian connection to the site, undermined its status as a Word Heritage site. “To deny or conceal any of the Jewish, Christian or Muslim traditions undermines the integrity of the site, and runs counter to the reasons that justified its inscription in 1981,” Bokova wrote.