ABSTRACT
At the autumn 1974 general conference Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow of Senegal was elected as the sixth director-general of Unesco. A sometime teacher of history and geography, he had served in the French army, been minister of education in his country and, for some years, assistant director-general for Education at Unesco. John E. Fobes of the United States was his deputy. The old top tandem withdrew: Adiseshiah retired to India, where he continues to be very active in developmental training, Rene Maheu was to die about a year later of the leukemia which had gravely undermined his health for a long time. It was the end of an era. The new administration inherited two of its unresolved problems. The first was the Arab-Israeli conflict which had given rise to a strongly partisan drift over the years, culminating in a series of anti-Israeli resolutions adopted by the 1974 General Conference following a pattern which originated at the UN. This represented an unprecedented assault on a member state in good standing, only matched by that launched against South Africa since its withdrawal in 1956, or Portugal for a short period when it, too, had withdrawn. The United States was greatly displeased by it, already contemplating withdrawal from Unesco at the time and withholding its contribution for two and a half years. Nevertheless, the equation of Zionism with racism was never adopted or endorsed at Unesco, as it was at the UN.
