U.S. defunds UNESCO after vote to admit Palestine

After the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization overwhelmingly voted on October 31 to admit Palestine as a full member, the Obama administration immediately defunded UNESCO by withholding its $60 million dues payment, thereby depriving the organization of 22 percent of its budget. Because of the big hole in its 2011 budget created by the loss of U.S. funding, UNESCO suspended new programs.

The Obama administration based its decision on a 1994 U.S. law that requires financial ties to be cut with any U.N. agency that grants the Palestinians full membership. That law is a double-edged sword for the United States. It would apply equally to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which plays a key role in monitoring nuclear proliferation in states like Iran, and the World Health Organization, where the U.S. and other countries intensively coordinate international efforts to deal with public health threats.

And under U.N. rules, membership into the World Intellectual Property Organization would now be more or less automatic, if the Palestinians pursue it. The WIPO has been strongly supported by the United States, seeking to curb piracy of U..S movies and software.

Palestinian leaders said they would slowly and methodically seek to enter other U.N. agencies. And the U.S. State Department said it wants to continue to work with UNESCO, even as it cuts funding — all of which puts the United States in a bind. The Obama administration is expected to reach out to Congress to find a way both to continue to funding UNESCO and give the U.S. government flexibility if Palestine is recognized as a member by other, more important U.N. organizations.

The success of such an appeal is doubtful. A number of pro-Israel congressmen and congresswomen have publicly backed the cut-off of aid and called for further steps to punish the U.N. for the voting patterns of its members and the Palestinians for seeking membership. Kay Granger (R) of Texas, who chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations, said in a letter that she will seek to cut off aid to the Palestinians if they seek to join more U.N. bodies and implied that more U.N. funding could be cut as well. And Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R) of Florida, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, issued a scathing statement calling UNESCO’s action “anti-Israel and anti-peace.”

Israel’s retaliation against Palestine was even more draconian. It suspended the monthly transfer of roughly $100 million in customs, border and some income taxes that it collects on behalf of the Palestinians and relays to their government in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority depends critically on the revenue to pay the tens of thousands of people it employs.

After four weeks and strong American and international pressure, Israel agreed to release the money due the Palestinian Authority. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated, “If the Palestinians return to taking unilateral steps, we will weigh again the transfer of funds.” Transfer of the funds is required under the 1994 portion of the Oslo agreement that formalized relations between Israel and the Palestinians.

The United States has had an on again-off again relationship with UNESCO. Ronald Reagan pulled the U.S. out of UNESCO in 1984, and the country only rejoined in the fall of 2002 under George W. Bush, as his administration was courting U.N. support for the invasion of Iraq.

– edited from The Christian Science Monitor, Huffington Post and The New York Times
PeaceMeal Nov/December 2011

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Israeli troops involved in anti-Palestinian attacks

JERUSALEM – Three Israeli soldiers were arrested on December 6 for suspected involvement in a series of vandalism and arson attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank. Mosques have been torched, graffiti daubed and Palestinian trees chopped down in “Price Tag” attacks, so-called because they seek to make Palestinians pay for violence against Israelis and the Jewish state pay for its occasional curbs on illegal Israeli settlement activity.

In September the Israeli army demolished three dwellings and a bathroom in the Palestinian village of Umm al Kheer in the South Hebron Hills. According to U.N. field workers at the site, the demolitions left eight adults and sixteen children homeless.

“This [has been] done many times here, and it’s catastrophic,” said a resident of the village who, due to fear of retribution from the Israeli government, wished to be referred to only as Suleiman. “The toilet doesn’t make problems for Israeli security; the tent does not make problems for Israeli security; neither does this house in which live twelve kids. How will these kids live? How will these kids sleep tonight? How can we explain the truth to these kids? Maybe these kids will grow up with fear. They must think about that.”

Umm Al Kheer is a Palestinian village built in the 1950s in an area now under Israeli occupation. It borders the Israeli settlement of Karmel established in the 1980s and considered illegal under international law. The village routinely experiences harassment from Israeli soldiers and settlers.

The demolition is part of a clear strategy to push the Palestinians away from the area around the settlement. In October 2008, the Israeli army demolished ten house-tents, leaving 60 people homeless, in order to clear the area for expansion of the Karmel settlement.

Fearing a flare-up in violence, Israel has ordered a police crackdown on the suspected far-right Jewish groups behind the attacks, which have also targeted some of Israel’s West Bank military garrisons, slashing vehicle tires and defacing property. The three soldiers were suspected of damaging both Palestinian and Israeli military property.

The arrests are a rare example of conscript troops’ involvement in the Price Tag campaign. A military spokeswoman declined to detail allegations against them because an investigation was under way. But she said they were taken into custody following the arrest by civilian police two days earlier of a woman and six girls, some of them settlers, for incidents including vandalism of Palestinian trees and army property. One of the three soldiers lived in an unauthorized settler outpost.

– edited from Reuters and Christian Peacemaker Teams
PeaceMeal Nov/December 2011

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

United States opposes Palestine’s bid for statehood

When Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas submitted his request to the United Nations for recognition of a Palestinian state on September 23, the General Assembly responded with a standing ovation. Absent from the cheering section were the United States and its Middle East ally, Israel.

Palestinians want to create an independent state in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The bid to win recognition of statehood by the U.N. laid bare the deep sense of Palestinian exasperation after 44 years of Israeli occupation of their territory and 20 years of nonproductive peace talks. “The time is now for the Palestinian Spring, the time for independence,” President Abbas declared.

The Obama administration has vowed to use its veto as a permanent member of the Security Council to block the Palestinian initiative, should the required 9 of the 15 Council members approve the application when it comes to a vote.

The U.S. and its allies on the Security Council plan to refer the application to a panel for further study, a process that could take months. The delay is intended to allow time to revive direct peace talks between the Palestinians and Israelis.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said only direct negotiations could deliver peace. But such words are cheap and shallow without actions to back them. While Israel talks about peace, its actions toward Palestine have been aimed at only one thing: domination. Israel’s illegal settlements in the Palestinian territory are one evidence of that. Netanyahu’s government has just approved the construction of 1,100 more new homes in settlements on occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank, thereby revealing Israeli peace talk as a charade. And the United States enables the Israeli domination.

In 2009, the White House broadcast a demand that Israel halt the building of new housing units in the West Bank, a demand ignored by Israel. But when it came to action this February, the Obama administration’s representative on the Security Council, Ambassador Susan Rice, vetoed a U.N. resolution that would have condemned Israeli settlements, which are in violation of international law, and demanded an immediate halt to all settlement building. The 14 other Security Council members voted in favor of the resolution.

Israel’s punitive military actions against Palestine are a more egregious form of domination. In it’s December 2008 invasion of the Gaza Strip, for example, Israel unleashed U.S. funded tanks, bulldozers, helicopter gunships, jet fighters — everything but it’s nuclear weapons — against a people with small arms and crude, homemade rockets. The Israeli rampage resulted in 1,400 Palestinian deaths and 13 Israeli deaths. According to the U.N., the Israeli military campaign also left more than 50,000 homes, 800 industrial properties and 200 schools destroyed or damaged.

A U.N. panel and three other groups that separately investigated Israel’s 22-day war in Gaza charged both Israel and Hamas, the Islamist movement that governs Gaza, with committing war crimes during the armed conflict. All investigations were more harshly critical of Israel, with a finding that Israeli soldiers deliberately targeted civilians in some cases. The report of a U.N. human rights panel called Israel’s military assault on Gaza “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”

Israeli soldiers who fought in the Gaza war testified that their military used Palestinians as human shields, unlawfully fired incendiary white phosphorous shells over civilian areas, and used overwhelming firepower that caused needless deaths and destruction. One said, “Fire power was insane.”

Critics of the Palestinian Authority say its strategy of negotiating peace with Israel has been a complete failure. If that failure to win statehood persists in the next few years, it will cause further damage to the credibility of the PA and possibly even cause its collapse.

Another serious problem has been the longstanding failure of the PA and Hamas to bring Gaza and the West Bank under a unified leadership. The rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas did sign a landmark reconciliation pact in May, ending a four-year rift that had divided the territory envisioned for a future Palestinian state. A previous unity arrangement collapsed into civil war in June 2007, when Hamas overran the Gaza Strip in five days of fighting, leaving the Palestinian Authority of Abbas in charge only of the West Bank.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the new Palestinian alliance as “a mortal blow to peace and a big prize for terrorism,” plunging peace efforts deeper into uncertainty. “Israel continues to want peace and seek peace, but we can only achieve that with our neighbors that want peace,” Netanyahu said. “Those of our neighbors that seek the destruction of Israel and use terrorism are not partners to peace.”

Netanyahu was referring to the status of Hamas in Israel, the U.S. and European Union as a terrorist group. Hamas does not accept a Jewish state in an Islamic Middle East. It has sent dozens of suicide bombers into Israel, killing hundreds of people, and fired thousands of unguided rockets at Israel from Gaza. Israel has retaliated with ground and air strikes into Gaza.

Even if the request for full U.N. membership were to pass, Palestinian leaders acknowledge it would have little impact on the ground. Israel is in full control of 60 percent of the West Bank territory, dominating land seen as crucial to the establishment of a viable independent state of Palestine. Israel has created walls, fences, earth barriers, checkpoints, military firing zones, and army bases, all necessary, it says, for the security of their state. Meanwhile, some 300,000 of its citizens have moved into settlements in the West Bank territory of Palestine and another 200,000 also now live in and around East Jerusalem on land formally annexed by Israel.

Palestine has already been recognized by 131 countries, including Russia. But even if its request for full U.N. membership fails, President Abbas’ forceful move in the U.N. for statehood shows that U.S. influence is declining in the region, now shaken by Arab Spring revolts and shifting alliances.

In that changed political environment, a serious change in United States policy is called for. Heretofore, President Obama has talked the talk, but he has not walked the walk. He has publicly called for peace negotiations starting with the borders prevailing before the 1967 Israeli-Arab war, the first time a United States president has explicitly taken that position. But he has taken no action to pressure Israel to accede to that position. So far, Obama has remained firmly in Netanyahu’s pocket.

Without a serious change in policy, the United States will never broker peace between the two conflicted parties. As Israel’s main ally, we are a big part of the problem. With our billions of dollars a year in military aid, we have armed Israel to the teeth and made it the strongest military power in the Middle East — so strong that the Israeli tail now wags the American dog.

As long as the United States continues to play a lopsided game of favorites, the status quo between Israel and Palestine will remain — or deteriorate.

– information from The Associated Press and Reuters, with editing and added commentary
PeaceMeal Sept/October 2011

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)