What is UNESCO and why is the U.S. again withdrawing from it?

“Mounting arrears” was also cited by the state department as one other reason why the USA withdrew from UNESCO. It was a decision the administration was required to make, based on a law, passed in the 1990s, that bars the USA from funding any United Nations group that allows for Palestinian membership.

Israel will follow the United States, which notified about its decision yesterday, in abandoning the UNESCO.

US President Donald Trump’s administration is reviewing many of its multilateral commitments. UNESCO’s decision in July to extend heritage status to a plateau in a heavily Tibetan area was criticized for reinforcing Chinese control over the region by allowing authorities to remove Tibetan residents from it.

As early as 1984, the Ronald Reagan administration pulled the United States out of the agency, citing what it called the U.N. body’s ideological tilt toward the former Soviet Union against the West, and the USA stayed away till 2003.

“So I think that this is an emotional step connected with the unipolar world syndrome that this great country, the United States, is going through. The US deliberately confuses criticism of Israel, the occupying Power, for its documented violations of the regulations and principles of global law with hostility and prejudice, which is not true in the case of Israel”.

But the United States has and it continues to be charged tens of millions in dues each year and has lost its voting rights in UNESCO’s principal decision-making body, which is known as the General Conference.

“The question is, do we want to pay that money, and do we want to pay more money going forward when there’s actually a law that says that any United Nations entity that accepts Palestinians as a member state can not get USA funding?” It also quoted a said a former European UNESCO ambassador saying, “It’s an organisation that has been swept away from its mandate to become a sounding board for clashes that happen elsewhere, and that translates into political and financial hijacking”. The United States stands by Israel and is a true leader for change at the UN.

“I’m here to underscore the ironclad support of the United States for Israel”, Haley said in February. Earlier this year, UNESCO designated the core area of the West Bank city of Hebron – home to the Cave of the Patriarchs, an important religious site for Jews and Muslims – as a Palestinian World Heritage Site, a symbolic slight of both the USA and Israel.

The decision of the United States to leave UNESCO due to their pro-Israel commitment is expected to drastically hurt the financial strength of the world organization.

The US was angered in 2011 when UNESCO members granted Palestine full membership of the body, despite opposition from its ally Israel.

Charges that UNESCO has become too politicized and strayed from its primary mission are fair, but that has less to do with the organization itself than its members. Then in 2013, after the U.S. had missed several payments to UNESCO, its voting rights were suspended.

Israel has been complaining in the past few years about the agency’s impartiality regarding discussions about cultural heritage sites in Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories.

Israel’s United Nations ambassador on Thursday said Washington’s decision to pull out of the world body’s culture and education agency showed there was a “price to pay for discrimination against Israel”.