Ambassador to UNESCO says Israel may reconsider exit

Israel’s ambassador to UNESCO says he is urging his government to reconsider its decision to quit the UN cultural body, saying it has halted its “anti-Israeli resolutions” over the past year.

Israel and the United States both announced on October 12 that they would leave the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization over resolutions critical of the Jewish state.

But ambassador Carmel Shama-Hacohen says there has been a change of tone under the Paris-based agency’s new chief, Audrey Azoulay, a former French culture minister who was elected last year.

“What I’m going to recommend to my ministry and my government is at least to reconsider our decision,” Shama-Hacohen tells journalists by telephone.

“It could be postponing the date of leaving for one year or something like that,” he suggests, which would delay the scheduled departure until at least December 2019.

He speaks as Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian officials adopt amended versions of last year’s decisions by UNESCO’s world heritage committee to list the Old City of Jerusalem and its walls, as well as Hebron in the West Bank, as endangered sites.

The new resolutions — adopted through a rare consensus — keep the two sites on the list, but remove phrasing that Israel had considered aggressive.

Shama-Hacohen says that under Azoulay’s leadership there had been a “new spirit and new energy,” noting: “We haven’t had any anti-Israeli resolutions at UNESCO for one year.”

Staying put would be “a miracle”, he adds, “but there is an option for it.”

Azoulay welcomes today’s consensus between the usually feuding parties, calling it “a win-win situation.”

She says she hopes it will “allow a period with less tension that should open the way for more UNESCO work on the ground.”

— AFP