Analysis from Israel

Pursuant to Max’s post yesterday, I’d like to weigh in on UNESCO’s latest effort to persuade Washington to restore the funding it lost when it recognized “Palestine”: Quite aside from UNESCO’s anti-Israel animus (see, for instance,  its erasure of Jewish history by declaring millennia-old Jewish holy sites to be Islamic), America shouldn’t be financing an “Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization” that thinks education, science and culture are best promoted by suppressing freedom of the press. The following Haaretz report is not a joke:

Israel’s ambassador to UNESCO didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when a senior official at the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization called him in for a tongue-lashing on Wednesday [November 9]. The reason? A cartoon published in Haaretz.

The November 4 cartoon, a riff on the government’s anger at UNESCO’s decision to accept Palestine as a full member, showed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak sending an air force squadron to attack Iran, with Netanyahu ordering, “And on your way back, you’re gonna hit the UNESCO office in Ramallah!”

When he met with Eric Falt, UNESCO’s assistant director general for external relations and public information, Ambassador Nimrod Barkan was stunned to be handed a copy of this cartoon and an official letter of protest from UNESCO’s Director General Irina Bokova. Falt told Barkan the cartoon constituted incitement.

“A cartoon like this endangers the lives of unarmed diplomats, and you have an obligation to protect them,” Falt said, according to an Israeli source. “We understand that there is freedom of the press in Israel, but the government must prevent attacks on UNESCO.”

Barkan tried to explain that in Israel, the government doesn’t control the media, but to no avail. He might have added that if it did, Haaretz – a virulent critic of the Netanyahu government – would have been closed long since. He might further have added that Falt misunderstood the cartoon, which, far from encouraging attacks on UNESCO, was meant to heap scorn on Jerusalem’s anger at the organization: Haaretz, unlike the government, has largely supported the Palestinians’ UN bid, and it reliably opposes any and all Israeli military action. In other words, Falt’s censorship campaign was ironically aimed at one of the UN’s very few champions in Israel.

But that’s beside the point. The point is that UNESCO’s agenda, like that of many other UN agencies, is often antithetical to America’s. That isn’t what Harry Truman intended when he pushed to establish the UN in 1945; he saw it as a tool for promoting American values. But since the “one country, one vote” principle gives the UN’s anti-democratic (and anti-American) majority automatic control, many of its organs have instead become tools for promoting anti-American values – with America underwriting 22 percent of the cost.

Clearly, America shouldn’t quit the UN entirely. But at a time of fiscal austerity, it’s far from clear it ought to continue funding every last UN agency. Instead, Washington should put some of the worst offenders, like the Human Rights  Council, on notice: Either shape up, or kiss your U.S. funding good-bye.

 

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Why Israel Needs a Better Political Class

Note: This piece is a response to an essay by Haviv Rettig Gur, which can be found here

Israel’s current political crisis exemplifies the maxim that hard cases make bad law. This case is desperate. Six months after the coronavirus erupted and nine months after the fiscal year began, Israel still lacks both a functioning contact-tracing system and an approved 2020 budget, mainly because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is more worried about politics than the domestic problems that Israel now confronts. The government’s failure to perform these basic tasks obviously invites the conclusion that civil servants’ far-reaching powers must not only be preserved, but perhaps even increased.

This would be the wrong conclusion. Bureaucrats, especially when they have great power, are vulnerable to the same ills as elected politicians. But unlike politicians, they are completely unaccountable to the public.

That doesn’t mean Haviv Rettig Gur is wrong to deem them indispensable. They provide institutional memory, flesh out elected officials’ policies, and supply information the politicians may not know and options they may not have considered. Yet the current crisis shows in several ways why they neither can nor should substitute for elected politicians.

First, bureaucrats are no less prone to poor judgment than politicians. As evidence, consider Siegal Sadetzki, part of the Netanyahu-led triumvirate that ran Israel’s initial response to the coronavirus. It’s unsurprising that Gur never mentioned Sadetzki even as he lauded the triumvirate’s third member, former Health Ministry Director General Moshe Bar Siman-Tov; she and her fellow Health Ministry staffers are a major reason why Israel still lacks a functional test-and-trace system.

Sadetzki, an epidemiologist, was the ministry’s director of public-health services and the only member of the triumvirate with professional expertise in epidemics (Bar Siman-Tov is an economist). As such, her input was crucial. Yet she adamantly opposed expanding virus testing, even publicly asserting that “Too much testing will increase complacence.” She opposed letting organizations outside the public-health system do lab work for coronavirus tests, even though the system was overwhelmed. She opposed sewage monitoring to track the spread of the virus. And on, and on.

Moreover, even after acknowledging that test-and-trace was necessary, ministry bureaucrats insisted for months that their ministry do the tracing despite its glaringly inadequate manpower. Only in August was the job finally given to the army, which does have the requisite personnel. And the system still isn’t fully operational.

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