Memo to Biden: The United Nations Won’t Love You Back

Excerpt

As President Biden visited New York last month to attend the United Nations General Assembly, the U.N. system proved itself as broken as ever — continuing to bite the U.S. taxpayer hand that feeds this giant bureaucracy and proving once again that engagement for engagement’s sake is not a viable strategy for U.N. reform.

Two days before President Biden delivered his remarks to the U.N. General Assembly, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Committee met in Riyadh, adding a Bronze Age settlement located outside the ancient city of Jericho to its list of World Heritage Sites. The listing’s summary claims the ruins “provide unquestionable testaments of . . . one of the most important Canaanite city-states in Palestine” and UNESCO classifies the site as being located in the “State of Palestine.” Words like “Israel,” “Joshua,” and “Jewish” do not appear in the documents accompanying the new World Heritage Site. UNESCO’s action is deliberately calculated to chip away at the Jewish connection to the Holy Land. Indeed, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas exposed the ploy when he praised UNESCO’s decision to recognize Palestinians living in Jericho for “1000s of years.”

Richard Goldberg is a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Enia Krivine is the senior director of FDD’s Israel Program and National Security Network. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.