The UN overwhelmingly supports a 75th anniversary commemoration of the Nakba, the catastrophe in which Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland for the creation of Israel.
reposted from Middle East Eye, December 1, 2022
The UN General Assembly has approved a resolution to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, a term used to describe the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the lead-up to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
Ninety countries voted in favour of the measure, with 30 voting against it and 47 abstaining.
The resolution was one of five that were voted on in the UN on Thursday which related to Israel and Palestine. The UN also voted in favour of renaming a journalism training programme after Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian journalist who was killed by Israeli forces during a raid in the occupied West Bank.
And another adopted resolution called for a “halt to all settlement activities, land confiscation and home demolitions, for the release of prisoners and for an end to arbitrary arrests and detentions”. A final resolution called for Israel to rescind its control over the occupied region of the Golan Heights.
The Nakba resolution includes the organising of a high-level event at the General Assembly on 15 May 2023.
The Nakba, “the catastrophe”, is the name Palestinians give to the massacres and forced expulsion they endured at the hand of Zionist militias in 1948.
Entire Palestinian villages were massacred, with Zionist gangs indiscriminately killing unarmed civilians and burying some in mass graves. The Israeli campaign left an estimated 15,000 Palestinians dead and some 750,000 fleeing their homes to live as refugees.
The raids continued after Israel announced its independence on 15 May 1948. Israel refers to the events of 1948 as the war of independence.
Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, condemned the measure’s passage and asked delegates: “What would you say if the international community celebrated the establishment of your country as a disaster? What a disgrace.”
The Israeli diplomat said the passage of the resolution on the Nakba would hinder any chance of a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Two-state solution nearly dead
Meanwhile, the Palestinian envoy to the UN, Riyad Mansour, warned the UN that the two-state solution was at imminent risk and urged the international body to pressure Israel as well as to grant Palestinians full recognition. [NOTE: A growing number of analysts – many of them Palestinian – no longer see the two-state solution as a viable option for Palestinians. A new movement, One Democratic State, is gaining momentum. Read about it here.]
Mansour called on the UN to acknowledge a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
“We are at the end of the road for the two-state solution. Either the international community summons the will to act decisively or it will let peace die passively. Passively, not peacefully,” Mansour told the UN.
“Anybody serious about the two-state solution must help salvage the Palestinian state,” he said. “The alternative is what we are living under now – a regime that has combined the evils of colonialism and apartheid.”
Mansour also slammed the incoming far-right coalition in Israel, led by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as “the most colonial, racist and extremist government in the history of Israel”.
However, the Palestinian representative also hailed the UN’s request for an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands since 1967.
The comments from both Mansour and Erdan come amid heightened tensions following a spike in Israeli violence against Palestinians in the West Bank this year and a resurgence of Palestinian armed resistance.
Israeli forces and settlers have killed 139 Palestinians, including at least 30 children in the West Bank this year, making it the deadliest on a monthly average for Palestinians since the UN began recording fatalities in 2005. [NOTE: other sources have recorded higher numbers. IAK places the number at 161 Palestinians killed in the West Bank and 51 in Gaza in 2022 – of which close to 40 were children.]
Israeli casualties also witnessed a spike in 2022 compared with recent years. At the same time, there has been a steep rise in settler attacks against Palestinians and security forces.
Tor Wennesland, the UN’s envoy to the Middle East, warned on Monday that the tensions were “reaching a boiling point”.
OTHER RECENT NEWS ON ISRAEL-PALESTINE:
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- ADL trying to exploit movement for ‘socially conscious investment’
- Israel has been actively covering up a Shin Bet sex crime for years
- Former Israeli spies working in top jobs at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft
FURTHER READING ON THE NAKBA:
- How Palestine became Israel
- No, the UN did not create Israel – its war of ethnic cleansing did it
- The Nakba: Israel’s ethnic cleansing operation to create a Jewish majority in Palestine
- What “Israel’s right to exist” means to Palestinians
PAST ISRAELI STUNTS AT UN:
- Israeli diplomat’s show-and-tell: a Palestinian “terror rock”
- Anti-diplomacy: Danny Danon ends five-year legacy of Israeli hasbara at the UN
- Is the United Nations anti-Israel? – a survey of UN resolutions
- A history of the US blocking UN resolutions against Israel
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