House Moving Closer To a Serious Showdown Over Funding for the United Nations, As Palestinians Press a ‘Dangerous’ Scheme

The next event to watch in respect of the Palestinian Arabs will come on Thursday at Washington, where what the Financial Times calls “lawmakers from across the political spectrum” will make what the London daily deems  “a new push to cut off American aid to the Palestinians as punishment for their efforts to become a separate state.” But when one gets into the particulars, it turns out there are two streams of money that are under attack. One goes to the Palestinian Arabs and the other to the United Nations.

Ourselves, we wouldn’t give the Palestinian Arabs aid, particularly not funds belonging to the American taxpayer. But let us leave the question of the Palestinian Arabs aside. There are serious people on both sides of the issue. No less a figure than Elliott Abrams, whom the Financial Times characterizes as “a leading conservative voice against the Palestinians,” is quoted as saying: “If they were to cut off the Palestinian Authority, Israel would have to pick up a lot of its responsibilities, so who would they be helping and who would they be hurting?”

By our lights the more important fight is not defunding the Palestinian Arabs but defunding the United Nations. This seems to be the strategy of the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. The gentlewoman from Florida is fresh from calling a halt to the Obama administration’s détente with the dying regime of Fidel Castro and his brother, Raul. Now she is honing her plans to deal with a United Nations whose General Assembly is prepared to admit the Palestinian Authority as a state.

Her hearing on Thursday will follow a statement she issued last week after learning that the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, known as UNESCO, may grant full membership to a Palestinian Arab mission. Her statement said it “is deeply disappointing to see UNESCO, which has reformed itself in recent years, poised to support this dangerous Palestinian scheme. The U.S. must strongly oppose this move and make clear that any decision to upgrade the Palestinian mission’s status by UNESCO or any other UN entity will lead to a cutoff of U.S. funds to that entity.” 

Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen is nothing if not savvy. No doubt she’s well aware that the Palestinians are plotting to use any membership they win in UNESCO to ask the organization to declare Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, revered by Christians as the birthplace of Jesus, a Palestinian World Heritage site. In an even more explosive demarche they are likely to call for a similar designation for Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs, which is the burial site of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and Leah and is the second holiest site in Judaism.

In any event, the Foreign Affairs Committee chairman also asserted that the Palestinian Arab leadership, “[f]eeling that their efforts at the UN Security Council will fail,” has been “shopping around the UN system for recognition.” She called it an “attempt to rig the process” — meaning the negotiations that previous United Nations resolutions require the Palestinians to participate in — and said the attempt “needs to be stopped dead in its tracks.” She called the American taxpayers’ contributions “our strongest leverage at the UN” and said they “should be used to stand up for our interests and allies and stop this dangerous Palestinian scheme.”

We can’t recall language so pointed and on point, even back in the days when Senator Helms was leading the effort to reform the United Nations. Mrs. Ros-Lehtinen’s bill is called the United Nations Transparency, Accountability, and Reform Act. The Foreign Affairs Committee describes as placing “conditions on U.S. funding to the UN in order to achieve long awaited reform at that body.” The measure would prohibit “contributions to any UN entity which upgrades the status of the Palestinian mission to the UN,” according to the committee, and has more than 100 co-sponsors. It would be a giant step in the right direction, and once it is passed, America would be in a better position to deal with the demands of the Palestinian Arabs themselves.