By Alan Elsner The opinions expressed are his own.

On Monday, unless the Palestinians can be persuaded to back down, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) will vote to accept Palestine as a full member state, triggering an automatic cutoff of U.S. funding and wreaking havoc with many of the agency’s programs.

Under legislation adopted by Congress over 15 years ago, the United States is mandated to withdraw from any U.N. agency that accepts Palestine as a full member state in the absence of a peace treaty with Israel.

The U.S.’s withdrawal means that it would no longer fund about 22 percent of the UNESCO budget – around $70 million a year. According to the website of the U.S. mission to UNESCO, some of the programs it funds that presumably will be affected include:

• Systems to provide early warning on tsunamis including special coastal hazards affecting Haiti.
• The study of earthquake threats in the Eastern Mediterranean, including Turkey, which was hit by a major deadly quake last weekend.
• Literacy training throughout the world.
• Vocational schools in Afghanistan.
• General support for World Heritage sites, including the Borobudur Buddhist Temple in Indonesia.
• Programs to study and preserve the health of the world’s oceans … And the list goes on.

A senior U.S. official says Washington has mounted a massive diplomatic effort to try to get friendly countries to put pressure on the Palestinians not to move forward with a vote. This official says there is widespread international dismay at the prospect of the United States being forced to pull out of an agency that does so much valuable work around the world.

“Within a few short months, without discussion at the White House or debate in Congress, the U.S. could find itself shut out of a great many international decisions that have a direct impact on American jobs, lives, safety and security,” former U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth, now President of the United Nations Foundation, wrote in the Los Angeles Times this week.

By Alan Elsner The opinions expressed are his own.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas seems firmly embarked on an attempt to win recognition of Palestinian statehood in the United Nations General Assembly this September but his strategy will only further delay real independence for his people.

Abbas himself outlined his strategy in an oped in The New York Times on May 16, which made it clear that achieving a state through negotiations with Israel was not his immediate aim. Instead, he intends to try to mobilize the international community to impose a peace on Palestinian terms by hounding Israel in every international forum — to isolate and weaken the Jewish state so it will be forced to settle.

“Palestine’s admission to the United Nations would pave the way for the internationalization of the conflict as a legal matter, not only a political one. It would also pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Court of Justice,” Abbas wrote.

A week of intense Middle East activity in Washington, highlighted by major addresses by U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, failed to change the equation. Palestinian leaders reaffirmed their determination to move ahead with their plan.

There are two major problems with this strategy: first, resolutions at the General Assembly are not binding and have no force in international law. Palestine cannot be admitted as a full member of the U.N. without Security Council approval and the United States is virtually certain to exercise its veto if necessary to prevent this from happening.

Second, as a strong democracy with a formidable military and an economy that would be the envy of many in Europe, Israelis are not about to bow to international pressure. Even countries like China and India, which will probably cast their ritual, symbolic votes with the Palestinians in September, are unlikely to do anything that would endanger their burgeoning bilateral trade relationships with Israel. Israel-China trade was $6.7 billion in 2010 while Israel’s trade with India, excluding military exports, was around $5 billion last year and is forecast to triple in the next decade with the signing of a free trade agreement.

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama is not yet commander in chief of the armed forces, but he appears to be warming up to the role as he prepares to take office on Jan. 20 and begin withdrawing troops from Iraq and sending more to Afghanistan.   First, he used his Christmas message to pay tribute to the “selfless sacrifice” of the men and women in uniform, and then on Christmas Day, in his only public outing, he visited a Marine Corps base in Hawaii, where he is holidaying, to thank the Marines and sailors stationed there for their service.   He spent 75 minutes shaking hands, chatting with the servicemen and posing for photographs at their cafeteria, where they had been enjoying a traditional Christmas dinner before his surprise arrival.   Obama is no stranger to the base. He has been visiting it every day since his arrival to work out at the gym there. He broke that routine on Christmas Day, resetting the clock on the seven-day-a-week workout regimen that he religiously follows when at home in Chicago.   Some of the servicemen appeared bemused to see him, while others whipped out their camera phones to snap pictures after he walked into the cafeteria with a bellowed “Hi everybody, Merry Christmas.”   Local media reported that a Marine stationed at the base, Corporal Thomas Reilly Jr, 19, had been killed in an attack in Iraq’s western Anbar province on Sunday.