The United Nations is at it again, finding any means within its power to hurt Israel. For example, the UN is planning to allocate many millions of dollars of UN funding, meant to assist the Palestinian Authority in development work, to be used instead to help the Palestinians pursue legal action against Israel in international forums. A document entitled the “United Nations Development Framework State of Palestine 2018-2022” states that such assistance is to include training and technical advice to enable the Palestinians to “effectively access international accountability mechanisms” and “hold Israel accountable for its violations under international law.” The UN document was signed by more than a dozen UN agencies, including UNESCO, UNICEF, the UN human rights office and the UN Development Programme (UNDP). It committed the UN itself to “strengthen its own advocacy on the impact of Israeli violations on Palestine’s development prospects, including through joint activities that clearly communicate the effect that the occupation and breaches of international law have on the ability of Palestine to develop economically, socially, environmentally and politically.”
This so-called “development framework” is a sham. It represents an outrageous abuse of the UN development assistance budget, estimated to be approximately $250 million annually. The Trump administration cannot allow this misuse of U.S. taxpayer funded contributions to the UN to go unchallenged. Senator Ted Cruz (R.-Texas) has already pounced on what he called “yet another example of the UN’s shameful hostility towards Israel, which encourages more false attacks, accusations, and criticism of our close ally.” He added, “I will continue to press all legislative options to ensure U.S. taxpayer dollars are not used to implement, facilitate, or carry out this discriminatory plan undermining Israel.”
Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based monitoring group that helped expose the UN’s plan to fund a lawfare campaign against Israel, said, “There is no other example or precedent of the UN funding, training, and advising one side of a conflict to pursue legal advocacy against another side within UN bodies and other international mechanisms.”
The UN Development Framework document’s key premise is that Israel alone bears the “ultimate accountability for Palestine’s ability or failure to reach the global goals articulated in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” In the UN’s alternate reality, Palestinian leaders bear no responsibility for their government’s enormous waste, corruption or regular violations of the human rights of the Palestinian people, much less the financial rewarding and incitement of acts of Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians. Instead, the UN document reinforces the Palestinians’ victimhood narrative. It places the UN squarely on the side of supporting the fiction that there is some sort of unique “Palestinian character and identity of East Jerusalem,” without acknowledging the reality of the central importance of Jerusalem’s Old City in Jewish history, religion and culture.
UNESCO is already on record with a series of one-sided resolutions focusing on the purported "cultural heritage of Palestine" as it relates to the Palestinians' self-proclaimed capital of East Jerusalem, which includes the Old City, while denying the deep historical Jewish ties to Jerusalem including to Judaism's holiest sites within the Old City. UNESCO has denied the Jewish state of Israel's right to explore its own history in the city and to protect Jews' freedom of worship, as well as that of members of other religious faiths. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, mocked one such resolution as “absurd,” tweeting: “What’s next? A Unesco decision denying the connection between peanut butter and jelly? Batman and Robin? Rock and roll?”
The United Nations is complicit in the Palestinians’ campaign to demonize, delegitimize and discriminate against Israel. The Trump administration has indicated its intention to withdraw from UNESCO altogether and has warned that it may also withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council if it does not mend its ways. That's a good start, but it must do more to use the financial leverage of the United States as the UN’s largest funder to put a stop to practices throughout the UN system that operationalize the UN's anti-Israel bias once and for all.
The United Nations is at it again, finding any means within its power to hurt Israel. For example, the UN is planning to allocate many millions of dollars of UN funding, meant to assist the Palestinian Authority in development work, to be used instead to help the Palestinians pursue legal action against Israel in international forums. A document entitled the “United Nations Development Framework State of Palestine 2018-2022” states that such assistance is to include training and technical advice to enable the Palestinians to “effectively access international accountability mechanisms” and “hold Israel accountable for its violations under international law.” The UN document was signed by more than a dozen UN agencies, including UNESCO, UNICEF, the UN human rights office and the UN Development Programme (UNDP). It committed the UN itself to “strengthen its own advocacy on the impact of Israeli violations on Palestine’s development prospects, including through joint activities that clearly communicate the effect that the occupation and breaches of international law have on the ability of Palestine to develop economically, socially, environmentally and politically.”
