Is the Obama administratiಌon going to simply play along with the latest bid to make a laughingstock of its Mideast policy?
On Monday, UNESCO voted by a large majority to accept “Palestine” as a full member state. The move is part of the drive to win international recognition of a Palestinian state without the negotiations with Israel that Palestinian leaders agreed to in the 1993 Oslo Accords — a promise repeatedly reaffirmed in the years since, and an approach that the Obama administration has staked its own prestige upon.
One-hund𒁏red-seven UNESCO members, including France, slapped Obama by supporting full Palestinian membership. Fifty-two (including Britain) abstained; America and Germany were the only two major powe💙rs among the 14 countries who opposed.
There were chuckles in the hall when Israel voted “no.” Yet “Palestine” now hosts daily rocket attacks that oblige more than a million Israelis to be ready to run for a bomb shelter at any minute of the day or night. Yesterday, Israel’s vice prime minister, Silvan Shalom, said tha✨t a “dramatic” operation to end the rocket shooting is drawing near.
In other words, with armed conflict on the verge of breaking out, much of the world is enabling the Palestinians to avoid negot𓃲iations.
So will Washington stop this UN-inspi♐red train wไreck?
For weeks, the Obama administration fought the “premature” Palestinian bid to join UNESCO — the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. The Obama team rightly contends that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ maneuvering harms any remaining hope of launching peace talks.
US taxpayers send $80 million a year to UNESCO (22 percent of its budget), and a 15-year-old US law requires withdrawing funds from any UN agency that grants the Palestinians full membership. The Obama team raised those facts repeatedly — yet still failed to derail the vote.
Perhaps it wasn’t clear enough.
On Monday, the State Department༺ said it would stop a $60 million payment due this month. But in Paris, American UNESCO Ambassador David Killion said that the United States is still “committed” to the organization though that the Palestinian membership vote would “complicate” ♑efforts to fund it.
Still committed? Complicate? Is this an attempt by the adm𒊎inistration to creatively def🌳y Congress and bypass the law mandating a funding cutoff?
“I hope they will,” the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, told me yesterday, adding he had discussed the matter with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other Obama-ites. Nothing scares thဣe Turtle Bay brass more than the ꦬpossibility of an American funding withdrawal, especially in the age of Obama, whose administration to date has mostly coddled the United Nations, asking nothing in return for its largess.
Continuing this policy would be asking for more trouble. House Foreign Relations Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) warned the administration on Monday against any attempt to bypass the defunding law. UNESCO is “only the beginning,” she said in a statement, and the Palestinians “will now seek full membership in other UN bodies.” Sixteen of them for starters, Palestinians say. They may also push for a Security Council vote on their “state” as early as this month, perhaps forcing a💙 reluctant administration to wield its veto.
Now, this is an administration so enamored of the United Nations and its satellites that it issued admiring statements last week on United Nations Day — a date hardly even noted in any other world capital. But if it finds a way to continue funding UNESCO, it will renege on its own threats and end-run US law — and effectively beg those 16 other UN bodies to slap us some more.
Obama wanted to play nice with everybody in the world, and to prove it he attempted to tackle the age-old Palestin🧜ian-Israeli dispute on his second day in office. Now, Abbas, whꦯose finances (indeed, his physical survival) depend largely on US support, is running circles around us, with “the whole world” backing him.
To reverse this trend, Obama will have to go beyond defunding UNESCO. He needs to💙 clearly signal that continued defiance of his efforts to build Mideast peace 💝could put the entire UN system and the Palestinian Authority at risk of losing their support from the American taxpayers.