"LandepNews"
Palestinian Bid for Statehood
Huge crowds erupted in the streets of the main Palestinian cities in the West Bank as the President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas demanded on Friday that the Palestinians be given a state of their own, thus being respected their right to have a state like all nations across the world. Palestinians cheered the bid for statehood the president made and pledged to defend the new state “with the soul and with the blood.”
Abbas’s speech began with the congratulating of the authorities of South Sudan, the newest member state of the United Nations, whose application was accepted soon after July 9, when it declared independence.
He also congratulated Ban Ki-moon for his election for a new term as the secretary general of the United Nations, wishing him strength to solve the complicated situations that lie ahead of the international community.
The congratulations were made on behalf of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, a body that represents all Palestinians in the world.
He then addressed what he called the “Question Palestine” by reminding that last year at the UN General Assembly everybody was expecting things to move into the right direction with the new direct talks initiated at the beginning of September.
The president made it clear that the Palestinian side was always opened to propositions, to negotiations, and to negotiation formats, and praised the contribution of the United States, Jordan and Egypt in the last round of negotiation conducted in September 2010 only to ascribe the blame for their failure on the Israeli government.
He identified the issues that get in the way of finding a negotiated solution to the Question Palestine: the refuse of Israel to commit to terms of reference for negotiation that are based on international law, and the continuing building of settlements on the territory of the State of Palestine.
He called the settlement policy the core of Israeli “colonial military occupation of the land of Palestinian people,” a policy of “aggression and racial discrimination against the people of Palestine,” and a breach of international humanitarian law, saying that it was the main reason why negotiations broke down last year.
He said that the resumption of settlement buildings was the collapse of all the hopes that emerged from the Declaration of Principles signed in 1993 between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel, a declaration that was meant to bring a new era of fruitful cooperation.
Abbas Addressing the UN
Abbas referred to the nature of these settlements that are being built in different zones of the West Bank, eating up entire tracts of Palestinian land and fragmenting the West Bank into small islands and cantons, which makes it impossible to integrate into an united state.
He then accused what he called “the occupying Power” of having displaced thousands of families from their lands and of pushing them out of the land of their fathers, their ancestral homeland.
The occupying Power, he said then, is excavating near the Palestinian holy places, thus putting them at risk of caving in. Abbas also spoke about the blockade on Gaza and about the targeting of civilians by the IDF, as well as of a siege of the Holy City of Jerusalem, which is surrounded with a ring of settlements meant to separate it from the Palestinian territory.
Then, Abbas invoked the memory of the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization Yasser Arafat, who in 1974, told the UN General Assembly that the Palestinian endeavor to create a state for Palestinians was a peaceful and positive one. “Don’t let the olive branch fall from my hand,” Arafat warned at the time.
In 1988, the same Arafat submitted the UN General Assembly a Palestinian peace program. Abbas mentioned that Palestinians were taking a very painful and serious step in adopting this program, especially those who had been forced to leave their homes and go into exile, himself included.
The uprooting of the Palestinians ended, in Abbas’s opinion, a vibrant and cohesive society that had been pioneering and leading the cultural, educational and economic renaissance in the Arab Middle East.
The plan exposed by Arafat in 1988 was painful because by it the Palestinians were agreeing to establish a state of Palestinians on only 22% of the territory of the historical Palestine. He called this a major concession made only to achieve a compromise, so necessary after decades of conflict.
Abbas exposed five goals of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and of the Palestinian people, among which the realization of the inalienable national rights in an independent State of Palestinians with East Jerusalem as capital, and territory comprising the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem; the renouncement of violence and rejection and condemnation of violence; the return to negotiation table to the effect of having a final negotiated solution, only after the cessation of settlement building and the establishing of the negotiation format within the international law frame.
The PA president summarized his speech by saying that he brought a message from the Holy Land, where both the prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ ascended to heaven, and from the people of Palestine, who, after 63 years of suffering, say: “Enough!”
He then announced the audience that in his capacity of President of the State of Palestine and Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization he submitted an application to UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon by which he demands the admission as full member of Palestine within the borders of June 4, 1967 and Al-Quds Al-Sharif (East Jerusalem) as capital.
He then called upon the secretary general to transmit the application to the Security Council, where it is to be approved or not.
At the end, he assured the member states representatives that voting on favor of the Palestinians application was their greatest contribution to peace in the Middle East.
While Palestinians cheered this detailed exposition of grievances against Israel, Israeli politicians gave a very angry response to Abbas’s speech. Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman called it was an incitement to violence. Lieberman went on to say that it proved that the Palestinians had no will to negotiate.
Netanyahu Addressing the UN
Benyamin Netanyahu started his speech, soon after Abbas, with pointing out that Israel is systematically criticized at the United Nations for its actions that should be praised: the condemnation of the Zionism as racism and racial discrimination in 1975, by the Resolution 3379 adopted on November 10; the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, which was condemned by the UN.
Netanyahu said that 21 out of 27 General Assembly resolutions condemned Israel, which is the only true democracy in the Middle East. He said that this was one “unfortunate part of the UN,” and that it was “the theater of the absurd.”
More than accusing UN of having condemned Israel on various occasions, Israeli PM said that it was on various occasions that the UN gave villains the leading role, and he illustrated this allegation with the fact that Saddam and Qaddafi chaired at some point commissions of this organization.
He went on to say that these abnormalities do not pertain to history, but that they are now present as “Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon now presides over the UN Security Council.” The bitter conclusion Netanyahu draws is that “a terror organization presides over the body entrusted with world’s security.”
His lashing out at the UN General Assembly went on in a ironical note, as he said that by majority vote the UN can even decide where the sun sets or that parts of the holy city of the Jews, Jerusalem, are Palestinians territory.
He then recounted a personal experience in which a rabbi told him, as he was appointed as Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, that he would be serving in “a house of many lies.” He expressed though confidence that even there the truth may come out.
Speaking of the world’s realities, he said that decades ago West and East were divided by the Cold War, and that since the war was over many old civilizations have emerged, most of them by peaceful means.
But a malignancy was arising anew between the West and the East, and that malignancy was in his opinion the militant Islam. From there he went on reminding that it was militant Islam that brought the Twin Towers down on 9/11, and lashed out the “rants” of the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who addressed the UN on Thursday.
The he went on to remind all the peace offers Israel made the Palestinians and how they were rejected. Most importantly, he added, Israel did not just make propositions, but actually left the occupied land: Lebanon in 2000, and Gaza in 2005.
He added that drawdown from Gaza the Israeli government uprooted the settlements in Gaza by buldozing synagogues, thousands of people, even the graves of the deceased ones.
He than said that Israel hoped that after the withdrawal from Gaza there would be peace, but what all the Jewish state got was war, and Grad rockets supplied by Iran.
Benyamin Netanyahu justified the fact that UN Security Council Resolution 242 did not require Israel to pull out completely from the territories it captured during the Six-Day War by the reality that the territory of Israel is only 9 miles wide, making it impossible to defend against surrounding nations bent on destroying it. That is why, he said, Israel must maintain a presence in some strategic spots of the West Bank.
He said that when he told president Abbas of this need to secure the boundaries of the country, the Palestinian president said that if Palestine were to become an independent country, Israeli military presence on its territory would be inconceivable. Netanyahu adds that he had pointed out to other countries that had such military presence for security purposes: Japan, that has US troops, Cyprus, that has UK troops.
He argues that in order for the two-state solution to be implemented, these security matters that are life-and-death issues for Israel must be agreed upon through negotiations with the Palestinians.
Reminding that the imprisonment of Gilad Shalit, the soldier that had been in arrested in Gaza for five years was a violation of international law, Netanyahu said that 64 years after the same UN General Assembly recognized the state of Israel as the Jewish state, it was time that the Palestinians did the same thing.
Speaking about the fact that president Abbas places the question of settlements at the heart of the negotiation for peace, he said that the conflict with the Palestinians is far older than the first Israeli settlement, which compelled him to ask the audience whether Abbas was referring to the settlements in the West Bank or to the Israeli cities, towns, and villages on Israeli territory when he said that “Israel has been building on Palestinian land for 63 years.”
By that, he implied the thesis first put forward by Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, who had said that Palestinians did not want a two-state solution, but a one-state solution, with their state in the place of Israel.
The speech ended with the hope that the Palestinian president Abbas would heed to the propositions he and the US president Barack Obama had been making and that he would return to the negotiation table, so that a solution could be found to the Middle East conflict. He invited the Palestinian president: “Let’s talk doogri!” that is: “Let’s talk straightforward!”
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