UN General Assembly Endorses Full UN Membership for Palestinian Terrorist State

The United Nations once again indulged the Palestinians’ quest to become a full-fledged member of the UN club. This followed the United States’ veto of a Security Council resolution that would have recommended to the General Assembly that it upgrade the Observer State of Palestine to full member state status.

According to the UN Charter, the General Assembly can only admit a new member state upon such a Security Council recommendation, not on its own. But that did not stop the General Assembly from passing its own meaningless resolution on May 10^th, entitled “Admission of new Members to the United Nations.” This resolution enshrined the fiction that the Palestinians are ready to become a UN member state with full rights and privileges. The Palestinians are far from ready for prime time, however. At minimum, they first need to overcome the seemingly irreconcilable division of governance authority between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, build a viable foundational infrastructure, and end completely the Palestinian campaign of genocidal terror carried out against Israeli civilians.

The General Assembly resolution asks the Security Council to reconsider the Palestinian Authority’s application for full UN membership status. Until the Security Council formally recommends such full UN membership status, which will not happen unless the Biden administration buckles, the Observer State of Palestine will not have the same voting rights as a real member state.

In the meantime, however, the General Assembly decided to give the Palestinians some consolation prizes. Effective on September 10^th when the new General Assembly session begins, the Palestinian Observer State will have certain additional rights, such as;

• To be seated among the real member states in alphabetical order;
• Submit proposals and amendments and introduce them;
• Co-sponsor proposals and amendments, including on behalf of a group
• Propose items to be included in the provisional agenda of the regular or special sessions and the right to request the inclusion of supplementary or additional items in the agenda of regular or special sessions; and
• The right of members of the delegation of the Observer State of Palestine to be elected as officers in the plenary and the Main Committees of the General Assembly.

The United States was one of a handful of countries that voted against the General Assembly resolution, which passed by a vote of 143 countries in favor, nine against and 25 abstaining.

U.S. Deputy Ambassador to the UN Robert Wood explained that the U.S.’s negative vote does not reflect U.S. opposition to Palestinian statehood itself but is rather “an acknowledgement that statehood will come from a process that involves direct negotiations between the parties.” He added, “This resolution does not resolve the concerns about the Palestinian membership application raised in April in the Security Council…and should the Security Council take up the Palestinian membership application as a result of this resolution, there will be a similar outcome.” Hopefully, that will be the case but you can never tell as President Biden wavers more and more in his "ironclad" support of Israel.

The Palestinians’ many apologists claimed it was the moral duty of the United Nations to grant “Palestine” full-fledged UN membership. Ambassador FU Cong of China to the UN, for example, said that “Palestine” should have the same status at the UN as Israel. He criticized the United States for obstructing the international community’s efforts to correct the “historical injustice long visited on Palestine,” which, Ambassador Fu Cong said, “is not commensurate with the role of a responsible major country.” These are the words of the representative of one of the world’s worst abusers of human rights that aggressively bullies its neighbors on a regular basis.

Riyad Mansour, the Permanent Observer of the Observer State of Palestine, loves to schmooze with all the Israel-hating delegates and bureaucrats at the United Nations. He told the General Assembly that people had to decide whether to “stand by the right of a nation to live in freedom and dignity on its ancestral land, standing with peace and recognizing the rights of Palestinians--or they can stand on the sidelines of history.”

There is a third choice, which is to stand on the right side of history. This requires the moral clarity and courage to reject the phony Palestinian victimhood narrative and their revisionist history that makes excuses for the Palestinians’ genocidal terrorism against Jews. They could have had an independent state of their own for the last 75 years. Instead, along with their neighboring Arab countries, they chose war, rejecting the UN’s original 1947 original two-state solution that called for partitioning the contested land into a Jewish state and an Arab state. 

Israel was forced to defend itself repeatedly and won the wars launched to destroy it. Now Israel is engaged in a war of survival against Hamas, whom the Palestinian Permanent Observer at the UN, Mr. Mansour, not too long ago referred to as his “brothers.”

Israel is the ancient ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, not of the Palestinians who like to think of themselves as an “indigenous” people. The Palestinians’ ancestors were Arabs who came originally from Egypt, Syria, and other Arab nations and often squatted on land that did not belong to them. The Zionists who arrived at what was to become the Jewish state of Israel, on the other hand, purchased their lands lawfully from absentee landowners. The Zionists were coming home to the Jews’ ancestral land. They invested in developing cities and viable farmland, which attracted more Arabs from neighboring countries to emigrate there.

After Israel became an independent state, recognized as such by most UN members at the time, thousands of Jews were forcibly expelled from neighboring Arab countries such as Iraq where their ancestors had lived for hundreds, in some cases thousands, of years. 

Israel was their only safe haven. Jews who managed to survive the Holocaust and Russian Jews seeking to escape brutal Soviet Union antisemitic repression also came to live in Israel as their only safe haven. That is called migration, which the United Nations itself celebrates every year on what it calls International Migration Day.

But somehow the Jews who themselves, or whose white and non-white ancestors, migrated to Israel before and after it became independent are called “colonizers.” The Arab Muslims who themselves, or whose ancestors, migrated to what they refer to as “Palestine,” on the other hand, are called “indigenous” people. It sometimes feels like we are living in a bizzarro world.

Israel’s UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan exposed the UN’s hypocrisy in his remarks to the General Assembly. “You have opened up the United Nations to modern-day Naziism. It makes me sick,” he said. “I will hold up a mirror — this is your mirror so you can see exactly what you are inflicting upon the UN Charter with this destructive vote.” Displaying his disdain for the General Assembly’s vote to appease “murderous dictators” by endorsing the Palestinians’ bid for full UN membership, Ambassador Erdan concluded his remarks by inserting the UN Charter cover into a mini portable shredder.

The General Assembly’s latest biased action endorsing the Palestinians’ fictional statehood further shreds the UN’s credibility.

Joseph A. Klein is the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom.