UNESCO

UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, is a Paris-based UN specialized agency that runs real, valuable programs in education, science, culture and heritage preservation, and that has also built a documented, decades-long record of singling out Israel for censure and erasing Jewish historical ties to Jerusalem, a record so severe it has twice driven the United States, and once Israel, to withdraw entirely.

What it is

UNESCO was created at a conference of 44 governments in London, 1 to 16 November 1945, in the wreckage of the Second World War; its constitution, drafted with heavy input from British education minister Rab Butler, was signed by 41 countries at that founding conference and came into legal force on 4 November 1946 with the deposit of the twentieth national ratification. Its stated purpose is to “contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among nations through education, science and culture.” Today it counts close to 194 member states, governed by a General Conference that meets every two years, an Executive Board that runs day-to-day oversight, and a Director-General, a post held by Frenchwoman Audrey Azoulay since 2017. Funding comes from assessed member-state dues plus voluntary contributions; the United States was historically UNESCO’s largest single funder, providing roughly 22 percent of its budget before Washington’s contributions lapsed, a share UNESCO says has been offset since 2018 by diversified funding and doubled private contributions, with the US share falling toward 8 percent of the total by 2025.

Real preservation work, everywhere except Jerusalem’s holiest site

UNESCO’s World Heritage program is its best-known and most defensible work: it has inscribed sites across Israel itself, including the Old City of Acre, the White City of Tel Aviv, Masada and the biblical tels of Megiddo, Hazor and Beer Sheba, alongside thousands of sites worldwide. It runs large literacy and girls’-education initiatives, coordinates global press-freedom monitoring, led the reconstruction of Mosul’s Old City after ISIS’s destruction of it (the largest single operation in UNESCO’s history, launched in 2018), and produced the first global standard-setting instrument on artificial intelligence ethics. UNESCO also runs Holocaust remembrance and education programming, having supported antisemitism-prevention teacher training in roughly 85 countries, a genuine and creditable use of its convening power that an honest article records alongside its failures elsewhere.

The record on Israel

UNESCO’s Israel record turns on Jerusalem. In 2011, UNESCO’s General Conference voted to admit “Palestine” as a full member state, a vote that under standing US law (legislation dating to the 1990s barring funding to any UN body that admits Palestine ahead of a negotiated settlement) automatically triggered a mandatory cutoff of US dues, an act of Congress rather than executive discretion. On 15 April 2016, UNESCO’s Executive Board adopted a resolution, by a vote of 33 in favor to 6 against with 17 abstentions, that referred to the Temple Mount and Western Wall complex solely by their Islamic names, “Al-Aqsa Mosque/Al-Haram Al-Sharif,” and recognized the site’s significance to Islam alone, erasing Jewish and Christian historical connection to Judaism’s holiest site. The resolution passed with the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands voting against; UNESCO’s own Director-General at the time, Irina Bokova, publicly repudiated it, stating “the Al-Aqsa Mosque/Haram al-Sharif…is also the Har HaBayit, or Temple Mount, whose Western Wall is the holiest place in Judaism” and warning that denying any faith’s ties to the Old City “undermines the integrity of the site.” UNESCO’s Executive Board readopted substantially similar language in October 2016 and again in 2017, and in July 2017 declared Hebron’s Old City and the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the burial site of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs, an endangered Palestinian World Heritage site.

Why the US and Israel walked out, twice

Citing “mounting arrears,” the need for institutional reform, and “continuing anti-Israel bias,” the United States filed formal notice of withdrawal on 12 October 2017; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling the body “a theater of the absurd,” announced Israel would follow. Both withdrawals took legal effect at midnight, 31 December 2018, ending 69 years of Israeli membership. The US Congress authorized a financing plan in December 2022, and Washington formally rejoined as a full member on 11 July 2023, partly out of concern that China had filled the leadership vacuum the US exit created; Israel has not rejoined. The reprieve was short. On 22 July 2025, the State Department, under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, again notified UNESCO of US withdrawal, effective 31 December 2026 under the UNESCO Constitution’s own notice provision, again citing UNESCO’s 2011 admission of “the State of Palestine” as contributing to “anti-Israel rhetoric” within the organization, alongside objections to UNESCO’s promotion of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Director-General Azoulay called the decision regrettable and contrary to “the fundamental principles of multilateralism” while stating the organization had prepared for it and was not planning layoffs.

The pattern

UNESCO is not Hamas or an armed group; it produces no charter of war and claims no attacks. Its bias is procedural and cartographic: a heritage body that inscribed Israel’s own ancient tels using the language of shared human patrimony has, on the specific subject of Jerusalem, repeatedly voted to write Jewish and Christian history out of the holiest site in Judaism, in resolutions passed by governments, not by UNESCO’s technical staff or its own Director-General, who twice publicly dissented from her own organization’s vote. That distinction, an agency capable of real heritage and literacy work whose political organs vote in blocs that reliably exclude Jewish history from Jerusalem, is the fact a reader needs to walk away with.