Mr. Netanyahu, Let's Boycott UNESCO
Mr. Netanyahu, Let's Boycott UNESCO
After halting its annual fees to the UN's cultural agency, the State of Israel should suspend any cooperation with UNESCO.

The United Nations’ body just simply decided to give the Palestinians full membership and that's quite enough.

Jerusalem will not risk any isolation, since it’s already a pariah in the UN and the word “Jew” has become, once again, an accepted insult in the global square. 

UNESCO’s next steps are under Israel’s nose: very soon the Temple Mount, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Joseph’s Tomb, Rachel’s Tomb, the Shalom al Israel synagogue and the Cave of the Patriarchs will be designated as “mosques” by the UN’s agency.

Israel's passive policy helped the Palestinians win the UNESCO race and allowed the “rewriting the history of Palestine”, as Hamdan Taha, director of the Palestinian Antiquities Department, explained last summer.

If Israel will continue to ignore this horrible blood libel, there are no chances to stop the Islamic revisionism supported by the West (France just voted for the Palestinians at UNESCO). All Islamic nations will soon band together again to work against the Jewish people at the UN.

After leaving UNESCO, the State of Israel should also set up a campaign of public diplomacy to explain how the United Nations became a corrupted and anti-Semitic forum and a tool of the Islamic bloc against the Jewish people.

The precedent of a similar boycott of Israel is the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

The very idea of Israeli hopes of UNESCO’s good faith was inane, especially given the organization’s long record of anti-Jewish hatred. UNESCO’s intifada goes back to November 20, 1974, when under Arab pressure, UNESCO voted to exclude Israel from any regional group.

During the 90’s, then-UNESCO director-general Frederico Mayor boycotted all the international conferences in Jerusalem and UNESCO’s officials always refused to meet with Israeli officials.

In 2005, when the United Nations celebrated its 50th anniversary, UNESCO refused to include the Holocaust in its World War II resolution, intentionally ignoring Israel’s request to include a reference to the destruction of European Jewry.

In July 2000, Yasser Arafat insisted to Bill Clinton at Camp David that “no Jewish temple ever existed”. This blood libel will become UNESCO’s next mantra. Just think about what PA cleric Sheikh Taissir Tamimi said about the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron: “It’s a pure mosque, which Jewish presence defiles”.

Slapping history squarely in the face, last year UNESCO adopted Tamimi’s propaganda and declared that Rachel’s Tomb and Hebron’s Cave are “Muslim mosques”.

In 2009 UNESCO designated Jerusalem as the “capital of Arab culture”, a false claim now finding fertile ground even outside the Islamic world. The Dutch government, through UNESCO, just donated 300,000 euros to the Palestinian Authority, meant to finance excavations near Joseph’s Tomb, fourth on thelist of Judaism’s holiest sites.

Last year, the UNESCO report on science forcibly converted to Islam the Jewish physician Maimonides, calling him “Moussa ben Maimoun”.

Through the UNESCO membership, the Palestinians are trying to put together a case to take Israel to the International Court of Justice to condemn the Israeli excavations in Jerusalem as “war crimes and crimes against humanity”. This is the most severe calumny that was directly connected to the deaths of dozens of Israelis and Palestinians during the so-called “Western Wall Tunnel riots” of 1995.

In recent years, UNESCO increased its collaboration with ISESCO, the cultural body of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Ever since the Wakf accelerated its wholesale destruction of artifacts on the Temple Mount back in 1996, when it surreptitiously built a new mosque in Solomon’s Stables, UNESCO has remained remarkably silent, not once condemning the Palestinian Authority for its desecration of the site.

Indeed, UNESCO does not even recognize Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem. The organization has called for financial sanctions against Israel, passed hundreds of resolutions demonizing Israel’s activities in Judea and Samaria and denounced Israel’s efforts to restore holy sites in Jerusalem. By gratifying UNESCO, Israel will only boost the Palestinian cultural Intifada.



Last year, the UNESCO report on science forcibly converted to Islam the Jewish physician Maimonides, calling him “Moussa ben Maimoun”.

This is an historical battle that Israel can win with the support of Westerners who still care about the fate of their civilization.

But the Jews have to stop playing according their enemies’ guillotine.