Palestinian flag raised over UNESCO headquarters

13/12 14:03 CET

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In an historic, symbolic and controversial act the Palestinian flag has been raised over a UN building for the first time.

UNESCO, the world body’s Paris-based culture, education and science agency, angered Israel and the US when it effectively recognised ‘Palestine’ as a state, by allowing it to become a member.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas spoke at the flag-raising ceremony. He told the audience it was an historic moment which, he said, augured well for the future entry of the Palestinian state to other international organisations.

Membership of UNESCO is not expected to have any significant impact on the Palestinians’ campaign for full UN membership, which would require approval by the Security Council. The US has restated its opposition and said it would use its veto to block that move.

http://www.euronews.net/2011/12/13/palestinian-flag-raised-over-unesco-headquarters/

Palestinian flag to be raised at UNESCO headquarters

By AFP 

Published: December 8, 2011

 

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki (L) and Palestinian ambassador to UNESCO Elias Sanbar will be present during the flag raising ceremony on December 13, 2011. PHOTO: REUTERS 

PARIS: United Nations cultural agency UNESCO said Wednesday the Palestinian flag would be raised at its Paris headquarters on December 13 after Palestine won full membership despite Israeli and US objections.

The flag will be raised “to mark Palestine’s admission to the organisation” in the presence of UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova and the President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas, as well as Foreign Minister Riad Maliki. The President of the UNESCO’s General Conference Katalin Bogyay and the Chairperson of the Organisation’s Executive Board Alissandra Cummins, will also be present.

UNESCO’s General Conference admitted Palestine as the Organization’s 195^th Member on 31 October. Membership became official on 23 November, when Palestine signed and accepted UNESCO’s Constitution at the National Archives in London — a move seen as a step towards its eventual recognition as a UN member state.

The move prompted Israel and the United States to pull the plug on their UNESCO funding.
Legislation dating from the 1990s requires the US administration, Israel’s staunchest ally, to withdraw funding from any UN agency that admits Palestine as a full member before a final peace deal is reached with Israel.

http://tribune.com.pk/story/303449/palestinian-flag-to-be-raised-at-unesco-headquarters/

Israel’s mania: Zionism, Racism and Culture

Last Modified: 17 Nov 2011 10:41:53 AM IST

		Sukumar Murlidharan        senior journalist

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Binyamin Netanyahu

After blustery threats failed to banish the item from the agenda, the U.S. and Israel retaliated in their own ways when the U.N. cultural body UNESCO, voted overwhelmingly to admit Palestine as a full member.

 

The U.S. cut off all financial support and Israel announced plans to build a few thousand more dwelling units in occupied Palestinian land.

 

As the public discourse plays out about a world body that does not repay U.S. generosity with any manner of gratitude, a more realistic assessment, which nobody yet dares speak out loud, is gaining traction in the higher levels of the U.S. administration. Robert Gates, a legacy of the Bush administration and till recently U.S. Defence Secretary, in one of his final internal meetings before leaving office, reportedly said that the U.S. had done much and taken great risks for Israel, though Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was proving an “ungrateful ally”.

 

A few days after the UNESCO vote, U.S. President Barack Obama met his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy at the G20 summit and spoke informally about his disappointment at the French support for Palestinian membership. Unaware that their conversation, conducted through interpreters, was being heard by media personnel assembled in anticipation of a joint press conference, Sarkozy said quite simply that he found Netanyahu an impossible liar. Obama did not demur, only suggesting that Sarkozy’s frustration was nothing near the aggravations he faced in his daily dealings with the cocky and obstreperous Israeli.

 

Netanyahu’s disdain for all who would stand in the way of Israel’s infinite aggrandisement was evident in his address to the U.N. General Assembly in September, not long after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had submitted a claim on behalf of his people for full membership of the world body. The General Assembly he said, was “the theatre of the absurd”, which a religious mentor had, as he began his political career as envoy to the U.N., described as a “house of many lies”.

 

The Israeli Prime Minister spoke with unconcealed racist contempt, as when describing Israel’s challenge of security in terms of its proximity to hostile territory, comparable to the distance between certain boroughs of New York city. And the people within these boroughs he reminded his audience, “are considerably nicer than some of Israel's neighbours”.

 

Netanyahu accused the U.N. of having sanctified the “lie” that “the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism's holiest place” was “occupied Palestinian territory”. And with this airy denial of centuries of Palestinian settlement in the area, he quickly moved onto another tall tale to establish the antiquity of the Jewish claim to the land. Archaeologists, he said, had found in close proximity to the Western Wall, an ancient seal, close to 3,000 years old, imprinted with his surname. And his first name dated even further back. People who bore that name wandered in the area since distant millennia and there had been “a continuous Jewish presence in the land ever since”.

 

Current scholarship, as exemplified in the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand’s acclaimed book The Invention of the Jewish People – now into a second edition -- has exploded this mythology in large part. But the facts of Netanyahu’s own life, which he has managed to artfully embellish, speak for themselves. Netanyahu’s father Ben-Zion Milikovski was a Polish settler in Palestine who adopted a surname of Hebraic provenance as a gesture of commitment to the Zionist myth. It was effrontery of a high order for the Israeli Prime Minister to strut his name before the General Assembly as an identity dating back millennia. But then, perhaps he was true to his ancestry in one respect: his espousal of a particularly rabid form of colonial ideology was much in the mould of his father, regarded as an incendiary element by even that most extreme Zionist, Menachem Begin.

 

The denial of the Palestinians’ right to exist acquires several forms: most of them overt, physical and brutal. Palestine has been a battle about culture and antiquity since the first expropriations of the native population by Zionist settlers in the 1920s. And it is no coincidence that among the first major projects that Israel undertook in East Jerusalem after it was seized in 1967, was an archaeological excavation to establish the area’s unbroken Jewish heritage.

 

These excavations have been controversial, their most observable feature being the use of bulldozers to cut through layers of antiquity to arrive at a distant Judaic past. Archaeology has been a profoundly political discipline everywhere, but nowhere more explosively so than in Palestine. In 2010, Israel entered into a public spat with UNESCO when the historic site in Hebron – scene of a grisly 1994 massacre of Palestinian worshippers by the extremist Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein – was designated as a mosque on the basis of its dominant features. In 1996, riots broke out all over the occupied territories when Netanyahu, in an earlier tenure as Prime Minister, ordered the opening of an archaeological tunnel that Palestinians believe, was deliberately laid under the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem to weaken its foundations. And in 1992, Albert Glock, an American archaeologist who had documented the principal features of Palestinian villages and heritage sites effaced in the creation of Israel, was shot dead in Birzeit on the West Bank, in a crime that was never solved.

 

Netanyahu’s locutions are increasingly an insult to basic rationality. His government is almost certainly going to disregard the consequences of Palestine’s newly acquired membership of UNESCO, much as it has every inconvenient U.N. resolution in the past. The Palestinian people though have gained a toehold within the institutional framework of multilateralism. They could use this limited opening to work towards salvaging their culture and heritage – as embodied in numerous sites of historic importance in the entire territory of historical Palestine – from the devouring myths of Zionism.

 

It is a largely symbolic victory, but significant nonetheless and one that needs to be consolidated.

 

(This article was first published on http://sukumar-md.blogspot.com)

 
http://www.pratirodh.com/international-news/104-17-Nov-2011/israel-rsquo-s-mania-zionism-racism-and-culture.html

Clinton warns UNESCO of loss of US funds

US secretary of state says UN cultural agency could lose tens of millions of dollars if it agrees to admit Palestine before Israeli-Palestinian peace deal is concluded

News Agencies

10.06.11, 00:26 / Israel News

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday that the UN cultural agency UNESCO should "think again" on plans to vote on Palestinian membership, noting that such a move could cause the United States to cut funds for the organization.

Clinton, speaking to reporters in the Dominican Republic where she was on an official visit, said she found it "inexplicable" that UNESCO would consider moving ahead on a Palestinian vote while the issue was still before the United Nations Security Council.

"I ... would urge the governing body of UNESCO to think again before proceeding with that vote because the decision about status must be made in the United Nations and not in auxiliary groups that are subsidiary to the United Nations," Clinton said.

Other US lawmakers also warned the UN cultural agency that it stands to lose tens of millions of dollars in funding if it agrees to admit Palestine as a member before an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal is concluded.

Two top members of the House panel that oversees such funding say the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization could lose roughly $80 million in annual US contributions if it follows the recommendation of its board and admits Palestine.

Over US objections, the UNESCO board voted earlier Wednesday in Paris to recommend Palestine's membership. A vote from the full body is expected later this month.

The US provides 22% of UNESCO's budget but was in the clear minority on the 58-member UNESCO executive board, which voted 40-4 with 14 abstentions in favor of the recommending the Palestinian bid. Apart from the US, only Latvia, Germany and Romania voted against, according to US officials.

While lawmakers have proposed suspending US assistance to the Palestinians if they proceed with a bid for UN membership, current US law prohibits giving funds to the United Nations or any UN agency that grants the Palestine Liberation Organization the same standing as member states.

In addition, existing US law can bar Washington from funding any UN body that accepts members that do not have the "internationally recognized attributes of statehood." That requirement is generally, but not exclusively, interpreted to mean UN membership.

The State Department said it was studying the implications of Palestinian membership on UNESCO funding but repeated the US position that such a move would complicate the Mideast peace process by raising tensions with Israel, which is fiercely opposed to the step.

'Jeopardize relationship with Palestinians'

The Palestinians are seeking recognition and full membership in the United Nations at the UN Security Council but the US has said it will veto the bid unless there is a peace deal with Israel. Faced with that obstacle, the Palestinians are seeking membership in other UN bodies including UNESCO.

Reps. Kay Granger, a Republican, and Nita Lowey, the chairwoman and top Democrat, respectively, of the House panel that controls US foreign aid, both urged UNESCO not to admit the Palestinians, noting the aid restrictions.

Granger said in a statement that she would advocate cutting the UNESCO contribution if the Palestinians succeed.

"Making a move in another UN agency will not only jeopardize our relationship with the Palestinians, it will jeopardize our contributions to the United Nations," she said. "There are consequences for short-cutting the process, not only for the Palestinians, but for our longstanding relationship with the United Nations."

Lowey said in a statement the UNESCO board's action was "premature and counter-productive" to efforts to bring Israel and the Palestinians back to long-stalled peace talks.

"It is incumbent on every agency affiliated with the United Nations to do its utmost to foster not thwart conditions for peace," she said. "Toward that end, I urge the full membership of UNESCO to reject this destructive gambit and urge the Palestinian Authority to return to direct negotiations with Israel."


http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4131967,00.html

UNESCO clears way for Palestine seat vote

US secretary of state urges UN body to "think again" after its executive committee backs the Palestinian membership bid.

Last Modified: 05 Oct 2011 23:49

Palestinians held a rally outside UNESCO in Gaza City in support of Palestine's UN bid last month [Reuters] Palestine has won a first diplomatic victory in its quest for statehood when the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation [UNESCO] executive committee backed its bid to become a member of the cultural body with the rights of a state. Palestine's Arab allies braved intense US and French diplomatic pressure to bring the motion before the committee's member states, which passed it by 40 votes in favour to four - the US, Germany, Romania and Latvia – against it, with 14 abstentions. The Palestinian bid will now be submitted to the UNESCO general assembly at the end of the month for final approval involving all 193 members based in Paris. The move was swiftly criticised by the US and Israel. Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, said UNESCO should "think again" about voting on Palestinian admission. 'Inexplicable move' Clinton, speaking to reporters during a trip to the Dominican Republic, also called the move "confusing," as the UN Security Council weighs a request from the Palestinians for full UN membership, which the US opposes. "I found quite confusing and somehow inexplicable that you would have organs of the United Nations making decisions about statehood or statehood status while the issue has been presented to the United Nations," Clinton said. "I think this is a very odd procedure indeed," she said. "The decision about status must be made in the United Nations and not in auxiliary groups that are subsidiary to the United Nations." David Killion, the US ambassador to UNESCO, issued a statement urging all delegations to join the United States in voting "no" while in Washington, US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland sharply criticised the Palestinian effort. "This is not going to create a state for them," she said at her daily briefing. "It is going to make things harder ... It further exacerbates the environment of tension." Nimrod Barkan, Israel's ambassador to UNESCO, said the move would harm the agency and would not advance Palestinian aspirations. "The problem is that the politicisation of UNESCO is detrimental to the ability of the organisation to carry out its mandate," he told Reuters. France, which has advocated observer status of the UN, said that UNESCO was not the place to further the Palestinian case for recognition. "The priority is to revive negotiations," foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said. "We consider that UNESCO is not the appropriate place and the General Conference is not the right moment." Both US and Israel argue that the way to create Palestine is through negotiations. UN bid Last month, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas formally applied to the UN Security Council for full membership of the UN, ignoring a US warning that it would veto the move, as well as threats from members of the US Congress to restrict American aid to the Palestinians. Thursday's recognition by the executive committee raised questions about whether Washington might be required by US law to cut off funding for the agency if it were to accept the Palestinians as a member. The US pays 22 per cent of UNESCO's dues, the State Department said. The Palestinians have had observer status at UNESCO since 1974. In order to gain full membership, so-called "states" that are not members of the UN may be admitted to UNESCO with a two-thirds majority of the General Assembly. Apart from diplomatic gains, UNESCO membership would allow Palestinians to apply to classify its monuments as World Heritage Sites at a time when the heritage of much of the region is under dispute. It was not clear whether Palestine would need to be a recognised state for its UNESCO bid to succeed. An official at the Palestinian mission declined to comment. To keep pressure on the UN, Abbas's Palestinian Authority has been looking at institutions that may recognise their sought-after statehood status - a campaign triggered by a breakdown of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks a year ago. On Tuesday, it won partnership status from the Council of Europe, the European Union's main human rights body. The US government has said the Palestinians can gain an independent state on land occupied by Israel in a 1967 war only via negotiations with Israel, Washington's main ally in the Middle East. In a related development, envoys from the Middle East "Quartet" - the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States – will meet in Brussels on Sunday to try to revive peace efforts.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/10/201110523540744569.html