Amadou m’Bow, Director General of UNESCO tried, without apparent success today, to avert a clash over Israel at the 20th general conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization that opened here Tuesday. Departing from the prepared text of his speech, m’Bow stressed that there is “no issue over Israel” or Israel’s response to previous UNESCO resolutions.
He also released a report on education in the Israel-occupied Arab territories that contains numerous favorable references to Israeli activities in that field. The Arab bloc and its allies had sought to suppress that part of the report while Israeli diplomats repeatedly pressed for release of the full report which they felt vindicated Israel’s policies.
In spite of m’Bow’s extemporaneous plea, the Arab rejectionist front said it would try to obtain Israel’s condemnation at the current UNESCO conference and its temporary exclusion from the organization. The Arabs and their allies claim that Israel has failed to respect a UNESCO resolution barring its archaeological digs in East Jerusalem and has refused to permit the appointment of a UNESCO observers team to supervise educational facilities on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Observers said that m’Bow for his part was anxious to avoid a repetition of the situation that developed in 1974 when UNESCO adopted a series of anti-Israel resolutions. One consequence was the refusal of the U.S. to pay its contributions to the UNESCO budget until last year when Israel was fully reinstated in all UNESCO activities.
Meanwhile, Napoleon LeBlanc, a professor at Laval University in Quebec, was unanimously elected President of UNESCO at the plenary session yesterday afternoon. The Canadian had been challenged by the Arab and African bloc which supported the Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister of Jordan, Abdul-Salam Majali, for the office. Tuesday, LeBlanc won a 60-54 victory over Majali in the nominations committee, a decisive defeat for the Arabs and their supporters.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
