Israel and USA walk out of UNESCO – but not hand-in-hand


1) A measured account by Foreign Policy; 2) An explainer from VOX says it’s all to do with Palestine/Israel; 3) Barak Ravid reveals the 2 quitters did not tell each other of thier decision to leave UNESCO. Plus Notes and Links on UNESCO.


Audrey Azoulay, new director-general of UNESCO, delivers a speech at UNESCO headquarters in Paris on Oct. 13. Photo by Chen Yichen/Xinhua via Getty Images.

UNESCO Gets First Jewish Director, Day After U.S. Leaves Over ‘Anti-Israel’ Bias

Outgoing head defends organization after U.S., Israeli departure.

By Robbie Gramer, Colum Lynch, Foreign Policy
October 13, 2017

A day after the United States and Israel pulled out of the U.N. culture and education body citing anti-Israel bias, UNESCO elected its first ever Jewish director general.

Audrey Azoulay, France’s former culture minister, eked out a win over Qatar’s candidate and frontrunner Hamad bin Abdoulaziz Al-Kawari. UNESCO’s executive body voted on Friday.

Azouley will take the helm of UNESCO as it battles cash shortages, geopolitical rivalries, and the loss of two member states. This week, as first reported by Foreign Policy, the United States said it would pull out of the organization, which it said has an “anti-Israel” bias. Israel soon followed.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley didn’t mince words when she outlined the U.S. withdrawal in a statement released on Thursday: “Its extreme politicization has become a chronic embarrassment,” she said, citing a “long line of foolish actions” including designating the Israeli-occupied ancient city of Hebron as a Palestinian world heritage site, and keeping Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad on a UNESCO human rights committee.

“U.S. taxpayers should no longer be on the hook to pay for policies that are hostile to our values and make a mockery of justice and common sense,” Haley said.

UNESCO’s outgoing director general, Irina Bokova, pushed back against charges the U.N. body had an anti-Israel bias and said her successor has their work cut out, in a telephone interview with FP just before Azoulay’s win.

“While I’m not entirely surprised by this move, I always thought something more was at stake,” Bokova said about the U.S. departure. She acknowledged that the U.S. departure, coupled with that of Israel, is “a blow to the organization. It will certainly take its toll.”

But she sharply disputed the charge UNESCO was anti-Israel.

“My responsibility as [director general] has always been to look at the very balanced and very fair approach toward our mandate,” she told. “I would not say that UNESCO is an embarrassment,” she added.

One of UNESCO’s chief tasks, she noted, dovetails with a top Trump administration foreign policy priority: Countering violent extremism. UNESCO runs programmes to fight the illegal antiquities trade that helped bankroll the Islamic State, and also conducts literacy and education programmes in Afghanistan and Iraq meant to wither potential roots of radicalization. The organization has also restored cultural sites in the conflict-ridden Sahel.

 

 

Last July UNESCO declared the Ibrahimi mosque/Tomb of the Patriarchs, revered by both Muslims and Jews, a Palestinian world heritage site as it is in Hebron, Palestine. Photo by Jim Hollander/EPA

“This work is so profoundly important…Protection of heritage is not just a cultural concern, nowadays it is a security imperative,” she said.

Azoulay’s election was a victory for the French, and will allay fears about UNESCO being led by candidates from authoritarian governments. Other frontrunners were Qatari, Egyptian, and Chinese candidates.

Her unexpected victory was also proof positive of the lingering diplomatic fissure in the Persian Gulf. The Qatari candidate could not round up support from fellow Gulf Arabs, a sharp blow to Doha’s efforts to emerge from diplomatic isolation since Saudi Arabia and its neighbours cut off ties in June.

While Haley and other U.S. officials made much of UNESCO’s alleged anti-Israel bias, diplomats familiar with the U.S. deliberations said the decision to leave was prompted by penny-pinching concerns. U.S. payments to UNESCO are now in arrears to the tune of about $550 million — and diplomats were worried that total would continue to grow.



UNESCO’s decision, October 2016,  to criticise Israel for the  “continuous storming of al-Aqsa mosque and al-Haram al-Sharif by the Israeli rightwing extremists and uniformed forces” without mentioning the site’s religious significance for Jews  was strongly attacked by the Israeli government. Photo by Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images

Here’s what UNESCO is — and why the Trump administration just quit it

“It’s as if a couple who had been living apart for years finally agreed to a divorce.”

By Zack Beauchamp, Vox
October 12, 2017

Thursday morning, Americans woke up to some news that felt like it was out of left field: The Trump administration was withdrawing the United States from membership in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

This seemed strange because UNESCO is such an inoffensive-seeming organization: Its most prominent function is designating and protecting official international landmarks, called World Heritage Sites — places like The Alamo and the Great Barrier Reef. What possible reason could the US have for quitting an organization devoted to culture and science?

The reality, though, is bit a more complex, as the US and UNESCO have actually been at loggerheads since 2011.

The key issue, as with many US-UN disputes, is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In October 2011, UNESCO admitted the Palestinian territories to the organization as an independent member-state called Palestine. This triggered a US law which cut off American funding for any organization that recognized an independent Palestine. The US had previously paid for 22 percent ($80 million) of UNESCO’s annual budget.

Finally, in 2013, after the US missed several rounds of payments to UNESCO, the organization suspended US voting rights in its core decision-making bodies. So the US hasn’t been a real UNESCO member for a while. Trump is just making that status official — and scoring a domestic public relations coup with pro-Israel, anti-UN conservatives in the process.

“It’s as if a couple who had been living apart for years finally agreed to a divorce,” says Richard Gowan, a scholar at the European Council on Foreign Relations who studies the UN.

While most famous for designating various places World Heritage Sites, UNESCO also sponsors a range of international cultural and intellectual activities.

“A lot of UNESCO’s work is quite pointless,” Gowan tells me. “But it also runs an odd array of worthwhile programmes on issues ranging from education to tsunami warning.”

Some of these things, like supporting international Holocaust education, are really important. But the organization isn’t nearly as prominent or geopolitically significant as the UN Security Council, which sets binding international law, or UN Peacekeeping, a body literally tasked with helping war-torn countries transition to peace. That makes UNESCO a natural venue for countries that want to engage in ideological grandstanding and symbolic protest votes without actually causing too much chaos in the international system.

For instance, in 1984, the Reagan administration took out its frustration with the UN on UNESCO over accusations of anti-US, pro-Soviet bias at the UN (it took until 2002 for the US to rejoin). It’s also why the Palestinians, frustrated with the failure of US-sponsored negotiations to produce a peace agreement, pushed to be recognized as a UNESCO member-state: It was a venue in which they stood a real chance at gaining symbolic statehood status, and thus in theory putting more diplomatic pressure on Israel to sit down and negotiate.

The Palestinians won their 2011 UNESCO membership by a thundering 107-14 margin (though 52 states abstained). However, this has produced little in the way of progress on an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement — and the consequences of the subsequent aid cutoff for UNESCO have been severe. Klaus Hüfner, an expert on UNESCO at the Global Policy Forum, termed it a “financial crisis.”

This funding cutoff is severe enough that UNESCO has been forced to cut back both on irrelevant bloat and the extremely valuable environmental and educational activities.

Trump’s decision, at the very least, won’t make things better.

In formal terms, though, it won’t really change much. The US will become what the UN calls a “non-member observer state” in UNESCO: allowed to send representatives to UNESCO meetings but not vote in them. Since that’s basically what the US is now, that has little impact beyond the US’s formal title.

“The organization has already adapted to losing funds from a key member, so I think the practical consequences will be small, says David Bosco, a political scientist at Indiana University.

It’s possible, though, that the symbolism of formal US withdrawal could actually makes things even worse. As the US moves further away from UNESCO, other countries that fund it might follow their lead.

“One concern for the organization might be whether the US move prompts a few others to leave or to be slow on their payments,” Bosco worries. “Organizations like UNESCO are always struggling to get members to pay their dues on time in any case.”

It might also encourage UNESCO members to punish the US by antagonizing it further on Israel-Palestine issues. Earlier this year, UNESCO designated the core area of the West Bank city of Hebron — home to the Cave of the Patriarchs, an important religious site for Jews and Muslims — as a Palestinian World Heritage Site, a symbolic slight of both the US and Israel. It’s easy to imagine UNESCO voting to take more actions like this in the future.

“Non-Western countries are already a powerful bloc in UNESCO, and their influence will increase further [after US withdrawal],” says Gowan. “Expect lots and lots more UNESCO resolutions bashing Israel, for a start.”

Ultimately, though, it seems unlikely that the Trump administration cares all that much about this. The UN is exceptionally unpopular among many conservatives, elite and grassroots alike, who view it as deeply hostile to Israel. Earlier this year, the Trump administration floated massive cuts to US funding for the UN, which were popular with some pro-Israel conservatives but ultimately impractical.

Withdrawing from UNESCO over Israel-related issues scores points with these supporters without having immediately tangible consequences for US security interests. “It’s a relatively low-cost way for the Trump administration to strike a blow against the perceived flaws of the UN system,” Bosco says.

The fact that withdrawing from an international cultural organization makes the US look bad, at a time when the world’s opinion of the US is already free-fall, doesn’t appear to be a major concern.

“Trump will be able to sell the narrative that he is tough on the UN, despite actually walking back from some of his harshest demands for financial cuts. Non-Western countries like China will trumpet that this is a sign of US disengagement from the world,” Gowan tells me. “In a funny way, it’s a win-win!”


U.S. Exit From UNESCO Took Israel by Surprise, Was Uncoordinated

Despite close relations between Israel and Trump administration, incident exposes a grave lack of coordination between the two countries

Barak Ravid, Haaretz news
October 16, 2017

Israel was surprised by the U.S. decision on Thursday to quit UNESCO. Four senior Israeli and American officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there was no coordination with Israel in the days before the decision was announced and that the Trump administration did not tell Israel beforehand.

The senior Israeli officials said that in recent months the possibility of the United States leaving the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization had come up in talks between Israeli and U.S. diplomats in New York and Paris. They said the issue was also brought up during the June visit to Israel of U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley. But the Israeli sources said that at no point did the Americans tell Israel a decision had been made to withdraw.

Despite the generally close relations between Israel and the administration of President Donald Trump, the affair exposed a grave lack of coordination between the two countries.

Senior officials in Jerusalem confirmed that Israel learned of U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s decision to quit UNESCO from a report posted on the website of Foreign Policy very late Wednesday night. In its wake, Israeli diplomats at the embassy in Washington, the UN and at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters asked their American counterparts for clarification. Only late Thursday morning was Israel told that in a few hours the State Department would announce the U.S. departure from UNESCO.

Senior U.S. officials confirmed that Washington was not proactive about informing Israel of its decision. “The deliberative process that led to the decision to withdraw was an internal U.S. government process and was not discussed with any non-USG entities prior to the secretary’s decision,” a senior official said, using an abbreviation for the U.S. government.

In fact, the State Department did not inform Israel even after Tillerson made the decision. The only official to whom Tillerson reported the decision was UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova. Only after the announcement was published in the media did the United States inform its allies, including Israel.

The surprise in Jerusalem, in addition to the fact that the decision was made during the Simhat Torah holiday, was the main reason for Israel’s rather odd announcement on Thursday night that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had directed the Foreign Ministry “to begin to prepare” for the possibility that Israel would leave UNESCO together with the United Sates. Since Israel had no information about the timing of the U.S. decision, there had been no real discussion with the prime minister on the subject. Netanyahu’s “directive” was the result of a conference call of a few minutes that Netanyahu held on Thursday night with a few of his advisers and senior Foreign Ministry officials.


NOTES AND LINKS

See also  UNESCO unites Israelis in fury, UNESCO criticises Israel, as the occupying power, for failuree to maintain the Haraaam al-Sharif/ Temple Mount complex,October 2016;

UNESCO vote for Hebron decried as antisemitic, July 2017

Introducing UNESCO: what we are

UNESCO ‘Symbolic Globe’

UNESCO works to create the conditions for dialogue among civilizations, cultures and peoples, based upon respect for commonly shared values. It is through this dialogue that the world can achieve global visions of sustainable development encompassing observance of human rights, mutual respect and the alleviation of poverty, all of which are at the heart of UNESCO’S mission and activities.

The broad goals and concrete objectives of the international community – as set out in the internationally agreed development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – underpin all UNESCO’s strategies and activities. Thus UNESCO’s unique competencies in education, the sciences, culture and communication and information contribute towards the realization of those goals.

UNESCO’s mission is to contribute to the building of peace, the eradication of poverty, sustainable development and intercultural dialogue through education, the sciences, culture, communication and information. The Organization focuses, in particular, on two global priorities:

And on a number of overarching objectives:

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [French: Organisation des Nations unies pour l’éducation, la science et la culture] is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) based in Paris. Its declared purpose is to contribute to peace and security by promoting international collaboration through educational, scientific, and cultural reforms in order to increase universal respect for justice, the rule of law, and human rights along with fundamental freedom proclaimed in the United Nations Charter. It is the successor of the League of Nations’ International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation.

UNESCO has 195 member states and ten associate members. Most of its field offices are “cluster” offices covering three or more countries; national and regional offices also exist.

UNESCO pursues its objectives through five major programmes: education, natural sciences, social/human sciences, culture and communication/information. Projects sponsored by UNESCO include literacy, technical, and teacher-training programs, international science programs, the promotion of independent media and freedom of the press, regional and cultural history projects, the promotion of cultural diversity, translations of world literature, international cooperation agreements to secure the world’s cultural and natural heritage (World Heritage Sites) and to preserve human rights, and attempts to bridge the worldwide digital divide. It is also a member of the United Nations Development Group.

UNESCO’s aim is “to contribute to the building of peace, the eradication of povertysustainable development and intercultural dialogue through education, the sciences, culture, communication and information”. Other priorities of the organization include attaining quality Education For All and lifelong learning, addressing emerging social and ethical challenges, fostering cultural diversity, a culture of peace and building inclusive knowledge societies through information and communication.

The broad goals and objectives of the international community – as set out in the internationally agreed development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – underpin all UNESCO strategies and activities.

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