Mistakes to go around

Editorial

Last Monday, Palestine became a full member of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. For the Palestinians, it is considered by many as a symbolic step toward statehood, implying some type of progress towards this goal. The Palestinians’ September request for full UN membership is still under consideration and the UNESCO vote seems to be a backdoor attempt to gain entry (although Riyad al-Malki, the Palestinian foreign minister, contends the two are in no way related).

UNESCO’s laudable mission is “to contribute to the building of peace, the eradication of poverty, sustainable development and intercultural dialogue through education, the sciences, culture, communication and information.” As a result of this recent vote, the agency will likely lose a quarter of its budget, forcing office closures and staff layoffs, since, under legislation passed in the 1990s, the United States will not fund any UN body that accepts Palestine as a full member. This means that UNESCO will no longer receive the American contribution representing about 22 percent of the agency’s annual budget. Another sum, representing about three percent, will likely not be forthcoming from Israel. (The American ambassador to UNESCO seemed to imply Monday that the United States might somehow circumvent its own legislation by seeking other ways to support the agency. For now, however, the Americans are withdrawing their tens of millions of dollars of funding completely.)

Joining the Americans and Israelis in voting against Palestinian membership in UNESCO were 14 countries, including Canada, Germany, Australia, Sweden and the Netherlands; 107 voted for its membership, while 52 countries, including Britain, abstained.

The real meaning of UNESCO membership, practically, symbolically and propaganda-wise, remains anyone’s guess. In the New York Times, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor is quoted as saying that the vote would not give the Palestinians “any advantage on the ground” and called it “a big diplomatic car crash.”

A “crash” is what seems to be coming. While most UNESCO members were cheering the next step toward Palestinian statehood, the reality is that this path is not linear, and the direction in which it’s headed is not at all clear.

Contributing to the chaos is the internal politicking between Hamas – still riding high on its successful prisoner swap that saw Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit return home after five years of captivity – and the PA for control over the Palestinian people’s future.

While the UNESCO vote might seem to be a victory for Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas – who is reportedly already planning on trying to get state membership in other international agencies – it likely matters more to the international community than it does to Palestinians, whose competing leaderships show no signs of uniting.

Just three days before the UNESCO vote, Abbas appeared on Israel’s Channel 2, calling the Arab world’s rejection of Resolution 181, the partition plan, a “mistake.” It was 64 years ago this month that the United Nations voted to partition British-controlled Palestine into a country for the Jews and a country for the Arabs of the area.

“At that time, 1947, there was Resolution 181, the partition plan, Palestine and Israel. Israel existed. Palestine diminished. Why?” Abbas asked the interviewer, in English.

As reported in Reuters, “When the interviewer suggested the reason was Jewish leaders’ acceptance of the plan and its rejection by the Arabs, Abbas said: ‘I know, I know. It was our mistake. It was our mistake. It was an Arab mistake as a whole. But do they punish us for this mistake [for] 64 years?’”

In response to Abbas’ comments, a Hamas spokesman said, “No one is authorized to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people and no one is authorized to wipe out any of the historical rights of our people.”

As troubling is Abbas’ deflection of the problem of bringing Hamas to the diplomatic table, or any table for that matter. When asked on Channel 2 how he could involve Hamas in peacemaking, Abbas, said, according to Reuters: “Leave it to us, and we will solve it.”

The conflict has not raged for 64 years because of a single mistake the Arab world made in 1947. It has raged because of a million small and large mistakes, misjudgments and refusals to cooperate – with Israel, the United States and, most importantly, with each other – throughout those 64 years. While it is gratifying to witness a Palestinian leader second-guessing the rejectionism of 1947, it will still lead to very little progress if he and his peers do not recognize the decades of rejection that have followed.

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