The Real Reasons Trump Is Quitting Unesco
28 October 2017By Jonathan Cook in
Nazareth
At first glance, the decision last week by the Trump administration, followed
immediately by Israel, to quit the United Nation's cultural agency seems
strange. Why penalise a body that promotes clean water, literacy, heritage
preservation and women's rights?
Washington's claim that the UN's Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organisation (Unesco) is biased against Israel obscures the real crimes the
agency has committed in US eyes.
The first is that in 2011 Unesco became the first UN agency to accept
Palestine as a member. That set the Palestinians on the path to upgrading
their status at the General Assembly a year later.
It should be recalled that in 1993, as Israel and the Palestinians signed the
Oslo accords on the White House lawn, the watching world assumed the aim was
to create a Palestinian state.
But it seems most US politicians never received that memo. Under pressure from
Israel's powerful lobbyists, the US Congress hurriedly passed legislation to
pre-empt the peace process. One such law compels the United States to cancel
funding to any UN body that admits the Palestinians.
Six years on, the US is $550 million in arrears and without voting rights at
Unesco. Its departure is little more than a formality.
The agency's second crime relates to its role selecting world heritage sites.
That power has proved more than an irritant to Israel and the US.
The occupied territories, supposedly the locus of a future Palestinian state,
are packed with such sites. Hellenistic, Roman, Jewish, Christian and Muslim
relics promise not only the economic rewards of tourism but also the chance to
control the historic narrative.
Israeli archaeologists, effectively the occupation's scientific wing, are
chiefly interested in excavating, preserving and highlighting Jewish layers of
the Holy Land's past. Those ties have then been used to justify driving out
Palestinians and building Jewish settlements.
Unesco, by contrast, values all of the region's heritage, and aims to protect
the rights of living Palestinians, not just the ruins of long-dead
civilisations.
Nowhere has the difference in agendas proved starker than in occupied Hebron,
where tens of thousands of Palestinians live under the boot of a few hundred
Jewish settlers and the soldiers who watch over them. In July, Unesco enraged
Israel and the US by listing Hebron as one of a handful of world heritage
sites "in danger". Israel called the resolution "fake history".
The third crime is the priority Unesco gives to the Palestinian names of
heritage sites under belligerent occupation.
Much hangs on how sites are identified, as Israel understands. Names influence
the collective memory, giving meaning and significance to places.
The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has coined the term "memoricide" for Israel's
erasure of most traces of the Palestinians' past after it dispossessed them of
four-fifths of their homeland in 1948 - what Palestinians term their Nakba, or
Catastrophe.
Israel did more than just raze 500 Palestinian towns and villages. In their
place it planted new Jewish communities with Hebracaised names intended to
usurp the former Arabic names. Saffuriya became Tzipori; Hittin was supplanted
by Hittim; Muyjadil was transformed into Migdal.
A similar process of what Israel calls "Judaisation" is under way in the
occupied territories. The settlers of Beitar Ilit threaten the Palestinians of
Battir. Nearby, the Palestinians of Sussiya have been dislodged by a Jewish
settlement of exactly the same name.
The stakes are highest in Jerusalem. The vast Western Wall plaza below Al Aqsa
mosque was created in 1967 after more than 1,000 Palestinians were evicted and
their quarter demolished. Millions of visitors each year amble across the
plaza, oblivious to this act of ethnic cleansing.
Settlers, aided by the Israeli state, continue to encircle Christian and
Muslim sites in the hope of taking them over.
That is the context for recent Unesco reports highlighting the threats to
Jerusalem's Old City, including Israel's denial for most Palestinians of the
right to worship at Al Aqsa.
Israel has lobbied to have Jerusalem removed from the list of endangered
heritage sites. Alongside the US, it has whipped up a frenzy of moral outrage,
berating Unesco for failing to prioritise the Hebrew names used by the
occupation authorities.
Unesco's responsibility, however, is not to safeguard the occupation or
bolster Israel's efforts at Judaisation. It is there to uphold international
law and prevent Palestinians from being disappeared by Israel.
Trump's decision to quit Unesco is far from his alone. His predecessors have
been scuffling with the agency since the 1970s, often over its refusal to cave
in to Israeli pressure.
Now, Washington has a pressing additional reason to punish Unesco for allowing
Palestine to become a member. It needs to make an example of the cultural body
to dissuade other agencies from following suit.
Trump's confected indignation at Unesco, and his shrugging off of its vital
global programmes, serve as a reminder that the US is not an "honest broker"
of a Middle East peace. Rather it is the biggest obstacle to its realisation.
A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His
books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan
to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's
Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). His website is
www.jonathan-cook.net.
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