The real reasons Trump is quitting UNESCO

Quixotic US president, Donald Trump, earlier this month announced withdrawal of his country from UNESCO or the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organisation, citing what he alleged bias against Israel.

The next day the illegal Zionist entity also withdrew its membership from UNESCO because of the declaration of the city of al-Khalil as Palestine’s Heritage of Humanity. Jonathan Cook, author of the book “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair”, has written an article on the US withdrawal titled “The Real Reasons Trump is Quitting UNESCO.”

At first glance, the decision 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 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 West Bank of River Jordan, supposedly the locus of a future Palestinian state, is 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 al-Khalil, which the Zionists call Hebron and 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 al-Khalil 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 the Zionist entity understands. Names influence the collective memory, giving meaning and significance to places.

The Israeli historian IlanPappe 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 the Zionist entity calls “Judaisation” is under way in the occupied territories. The settlers of BeitarIlit 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 the occupied Islamic city of Bayt al-Moqaddas which the western press calls 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.

The illegal Jewish settlers, aided by the Zionist entity, 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 Bayt al-Moqaddas’sOld City, including the Zionist entity’s denial for most Palestinians of the right to worship at al-Aqsa.

The Zionist entity has lobbied to have Bayt al-Moqaddas 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 the Zionist entity.

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.

In related news, Iran’s English language daily Kayhan International recently pointed out that since 2011 the US had stopped paying its yearly fee following UNESCO’s vote to grant full membership to Palestine as its 195th member. Since then, the US arrears have totaled around six hundred million dollars.

It said: This means, whether Washington stays or leaves, the move will not hamper the smooth functioning of UNESCO, whose list of World Heritage Sites includes only one from the US, the place in Philadelphia where the Founding Fathers signed the declaration of independence from Britain of the 13 rebel New England colonies that banded together as the United States of America.

It further pointed out that compared to the poor cultural record of the US, Italy tops the list of World Heritage Sites, followed by China which has 52, while Iran has so far 22 registered World Heritage Sites with another 41 on the tentative list of UNESCO.

To quote Kayhan International: “This is not the first time, the uncultured and historically rootless US has left UNESCO. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan had withdrawn from UNESCO during the Cold War with the USSR.

“The US sheepishly rejoined UNESCO in 2002, but had always worked in tandem with its powerful tail, Israel, against the cultural and scientific interests of not just the Muslim countries, but the whole free world. 

“Indeed, UNESCO does commendable work on environmental conservation as well, in addition to culture and history, and recently, it has taken the lead in spurring international awareness and action to combat the destruction of cultural sites and illegal trade in antiquities but the Takfiri terrorists, who are backed by the unholy triangle of the US, the Zionist entity, and Saudi Arabia.

Observers point out that Trump who recently decided to withdraw the US from the international Paris Climatic Accord, and whose terrorist agents face defeat after defeat in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere, is trying to vent his anger at UNESCO, whose World Heritage Designation is no small honor, since it signifies that sites selected are “of outstanding importance, either cultural or natural, to the common heritage of humankind.”

In view of these facts, it will be better for the UNESCO to be free of not just the US tentacles but the mischief of Israel, which has unleashed organized destruction of the heritage of mankind in the usurped land of Palestine, destroying the cultural, religious and historical sites of Muslims, Christians, and the nations of the past with whom the Zionist have no connection.

AS/SS