Palestine Joins UNESCO

After the Palestinian bid for full UN membership stalled in the Security Council in September 2011, the Palestinian leadership turned to the specialised agencies, where admission requires only a two-thirds vote of the member states. On 31 October 2011 the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, meeting in Paris, voted to admit Palestine as a member state — 107 in favour, 14 against, 52 abstentions.

Speaking after the vote, UNESCO’s director-general Irina Bokova said she was worried for the stability of the organisation’s budget: “It is well-known that funding from our largest contributor, the United States, may be jeopardized.” It was. United States law passed in the 1990s prohibits funding any UN agency that admits the Palestinians as a member state, and Washington stopped paying within days; Israel followed. UNESCO lost its voting rights for the United States and Israel in 2013 over the arrears, and both countries announced their withdrawal from the organisation in 2017, effective at the end of 2018. The United States rejoined in 2023.

Membership had a practical consequence: Palestine could nominate sites to the World Heritage List. The first inscription came in June 2012 — the Birthplace of Jesus: Church of the Nativity and the Pilgrimage Route in Bethlehem, placed simultaneously on the List of World Heritage in Danger because of water damage to the church’s fabric, and removed from the danger list in 2019 after restoration. Battir’s ancient terraced landscape south of Jerusalem, threatened by the route of the separation barrier, followed in 2014, and the old town of Hebron/al-Khalil in 2017. UNESCO today lists the State of Palestine as a member since 2011 with six World Heritage properties.

The votes were bitterly contested, and Israel and the United States objected that the organisation was being used to advance a political claim by other means. The Palestinian argument was the same one that had been made in the Security Council: that recognition of Palestinian statehood was not a reward to be granted at the end of negotiations but a right, and that the heritage of a people under occupation needed international protection precisely because it was under occupation. The 2011 vote set the pattern for what followed — non-member observer state status at the General Assembly in 2012, and accession to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 2015.

Sources

• UNESCO votes to admit Palestine as full member — UN News, 31 October 2011
• State of Palestine — UNESCO Member States and Country Profiles