United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres issued a statement on November 29th commemorating the “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.” He blamed Israel for the Palestinians’ self-inflicted plight.
Guterres fed into the Palestinian victimhood narrative, claiming that “[P]ersistent violations of the rights of Palestinians along with the expansion of settlements risk eroding the prospect of a two-State solution.” False. It is the rejectionism of the Palestinian leaders and their enablers, starting with their refusal to accept the UN General Assembly’s original two-state partition plan in 1947, and lasting to the present day, that is responsible for the Palestinians’ failure to achieve their aspirations for an independent state. By rejecting the idea of living side by side under secure and durable peace terms with the Jewish State of Israel, the Palestinian leaders and their enablers have nobody but themselves to blame for the decades-old stalemate and violence.
To make matters worse, the Palestinian leaders and their enablers continue to insist on the so-called “right of return” to the land belonging to pre-1967 Israel for millions of descendants of the Palestinians who, for the most part, left their homes of their own accord. UN officials, particularly within the dysfunctional United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), have backed this Palestinian demand, which would lead to the destruction of the Jewish homeland.
Meanwhile, the UN has blatantly disregarded the violence against Jews who were deported from Arab countries and Iran.
The United Nations bureaucracy has encouraged the Palestinian rejectionism. From Guterres on down, the UN bureaucracy has endorsed the Palestinians’ demand for internationally recognized borders between Israel and a new Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines with a divided Jerusalem as the capital of both states. In so doing, the UN has not taken seriously Israel’s legitimate concern for truly secure borders and Israel’s multiple offers to negotiate final status terms directly between the parties. The Palestinian leaders have rejected these offers because they are confident that they can get their own maximalist terms through “international community” pressure.
The UN wants Israel to make all of the concessions with nothing meaningful in the way of security protections in return
Despite the Palestinian terrorists’ persistent use of Gaza as a base for launching thousands of rockets aimed at Israeli cities for the purpose of killing or maiming innocent Israeli civilians, Secretary General Guterres called for “the parties to engage constructively to end the closure of Gaza.” How about insisting first that Hamas and its Islamist terrorist partners destroy all of their tunnels into Israel, their rockets, and their rocket producing facilities under verifiable inspection? Not a chance. Quite the contrary. UNRWA, for example, does not check, much less prevent, Hamas' use of its facilities for terrorist purposes. This includes a tunnel located under an UNRWA school in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza that was discovered during the fighting between Hamas and Israel earlier this year.
The UN wants Israel to make all of the concessions with nothing meaningful in the way of security protections in return. Israel tried that route when it unilaterally withdrew all of its citizens and civilians from Gaza in 2005, only to see it be turned into a terrorist military base and sanctuary.
In response to the November 29th pro-Palestinian conference hosted at UN headquarters in New York, the Permanent Mission of Israel to the UN, in collaboration with the World Jewish Conference, held a demonstration in front of the UN. Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan excoriated the UN at the demonstration for having “the audacity to hold a solidarity event for the Palestinians on the anniversary of the Palestinians own decision to choose violence.” Ambassador Erdan was referring to the November 29 anniversary of the 1947 UN General Assembly vote on Resolution 181 recommending the partition of the territory that had been under the British Palestine Mandate into an Arab and a Jewish state. Instead of embracing this compromise, the Palestinian leaders and their supporters in the Arab world refused to accept it.
The Arab countries have continued to treat the Palestinian people as political pawns
“The Palestinians and the Arab countries not only attacked Israel, the Jewish state they [the Arabs] persecuted, massacred and ultimately expelled the Jewish communities in their own countries; shockingly this atrocity is completely ignored by the UN,” Ambassador Erdan added in his remarks at the demonstration.
The UN did not establish a dedicated refugee organization for the Jewish refugees expelled from their homes in Arab lands. There is no such UN equivalent to UNRWA, which is dedicated to the Palestinians of multiple generations who claim “refugee” status more than 70 years after Israel declared independence and faced immediate attacks by Palestinians and Arab nations who refused to accept the partition.
Israel itself took care of the Jewish refugees, who became full-fledged Israeli citizens. The Arab countries have continued to treat the Palestinian people as political pawns, allowing them to live in squalor rather than welcoming them into their own countries to resettle as full-fledged citizens.
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres issued a statement on November 29th commemorating the “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.” He blamed Israel for the Palestinians’ self-inflicted plight.
Guterres fed into the Palestinian victimhood narrative, claiming that “[P]ersistent violations of the rights of Palestinians along with the expansion of settlements risk eroding the prospect of a two-State solution.” False. It is the rejectionism of the Palestinian leaders and their enablers, starting with their refusal to accept the UN General Assembly’s original two-state partition plan in 1947, and lasting to the present day, that is responsible for the Palestinians’ failure to achieve their aspirations for an independent state. By rejecting the idea of living side by side under secure and durable peace terms with the Jewish State of Israel, the Palestinian leaders and their enablers have nobody but themselves to blame for the decades-old stalemate and violence.
