Palestine’s Abbas calls on UN to ‘suspend’ Israel as Nakba marked
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas insists that Israel must respect UN resolutions on Palestine or cease being a UN member.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has urged the United Nations to suspend Israel’s membership in the world body unless it ends its aggression against the Palestinians and implements UN resolutions establishing separate Israeli and Palestinian states, as well as the return of Palestinian refugees.
Abbas spoke Monday at the first official UN commemoration of the flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from what is now Israel amid the violence of the partition of Palestine 75 years ago.
More than 760,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes in 1948 when Israel was established, an event Palestinians call Nakba — or catastrophe — and is celebrated on May 15 each year.
In an emotional speech that lasted for hours, Abbas asked the nations of the world why more than 1,000 resolutions passed by UN bodies regarding the Palestinians had never been implemented.
He held up a letter from Israel’s foreign minister, Moshe Sharett, after resolutions were passed in 1947 and 1948 promising to implement them, saying, “Either they respect these commitments or they stop joining.”
“We are officially demanding today, in accordance with international law and international resolutions, that Israel respect these resolutions or suspend Israel’s membership of the UN,” Abbas said in his speech.
Abbas accused Israel of “never fulfilling its obligations and conditions for its membership in the United Nations”.
The Palestinian president counted “about 1,000 resolutions” passed by the UN General Assembly, Security Council and Human Rights Council regarding Israel. “To date, no resolution has been implemented,” he said.
Abbas added that Nakba “did not start in 1948 and did not stop after that date”.
“Israel, the occupying power, continues its occupation and aggression against the Palestinian people and continues to deny this Nakba and rejects international resolutions on the return of Palestinian refugees to their homeland,” he said. According to the UN, there are 5.9 million Palestinian refugees living in the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
The UN will commemorate Nakba for the first time this year at its headquarters in New York City after a resolution was passed in November.
Israel’s UN representative, Gilad Erdan, labeled the event “despicable” and wrote a letter to other ambassadors calling on them not to attend.
According to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, 32 countries, including the United States, Canada, Ukraine and 10 from the European Union, did not attend.
UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs and Peacebuilding Rosemary DiCarlo reaffirmed the UN’s “clear position” that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories must end because it is “illegal under international law.”
Abbas also said that the most important right the Palestinians are now demanding is self-determination based on the June 1967 borders.
Abbas added that the Palestinians are not against the Jews, but “I am against those who occupy our land.”
He said Israel should recognize and apologize to the Nakba and pay compensation to the refugees and for the land it now occupies. And he said that if these root causes are not addressed, the Palestinians will continue to pursue legal action, especially at the International Criminal Court, which was greeted with loud applause from the general public in a UN conference room.
Israel has remained defiant.
“We will fight the ‘Nakba’ lie with full force and we will not allow the Palestinians to continue spreading lies and distorting history,” Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said in a statement.