UN votes in favour of commemorating ‘Nakba’

The United Nations General Assembly last Wednesday voted to adopt a pro-Palestinian resolution to commemorate the “Nakba”.

The resolution calls for a “commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Nakba, including by organising a high-level event at the General Assembly Hall” in May 2023.

The initiative was sponsored by Egypt, Jordan, Senegal, Tunisia, Yemen and the Palestinians and passed by a vote of 90 in favour, 30 against and 47 abstentions.

Israel, Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK and the US were among the countries that voted against.

Arab and Muslim states that Israel has ties with including Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates voted in favour.

“Nakba” is the Arabic word for “catastrophe” which Palestinians use to recall the displacement and dispossession they experienced during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948.

The item was one of several similar resolutions put forward during the meeting on the “Question of Palestine”.

Another resolution said it was “noting with deep regret the passage of 55 years since the onset of the Israeli occupation” and 75 years since the UN partition plan and “the Nakba” with no resolution to the conflict.

Israel’s ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan said the resolutions’ “sole purpose is to put all the blame for what is happening in the Middle East solely on Israel while absolving the Palestinians of any responsibility”.

“Try to imagine the international community commemorating your country’s Independence Day by calling it a disaster. What a disgrace,” Erdan said of the Nakba resolution. “The Palestinians’ lies must no longer be accepted on the world stage, just as this body must stop allowing the Palestinians to continue pulling its strings. I urge you all to stop blindly supporting the Palestinians’ libels.

“This General Assembly, this body, voted to adopt Resolution 181 – the Partition Plan. My people, the Jewish people, accepted this resolution without hesitation. But the Arabs and the Palestinians did not,” Erdan said. “Five Arab armies, together with the Arabs living in Israel, tried to destroy and annihilate us.”

Erdan also unveiled an exhibit at the UN on the “Jewish Nakba”, the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries and Iran in the 1940s and 1950s following the partition plan.

“Their only crime was being Jewish. This is the true Nakba. This is the disaster carried out against the Jewish people, and this is the disaster that this body has ignored for decades,” he said. “I will fight in every way the false narrative that the Palestinians spread at the UN.”

He said UN resolutions targeting Israel pushed the Palestinians away from bilateral talks and concessions, and a resolution to the conflict.

The Palestinian envoy to the UN Riyad Mansour said at the event, “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.”

He called on the international community to pressure Israel, for the UN to grant the Palestinians full recognition and for a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

“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 blasted the partition plan, saying the UN had not “understood the consequences” of the outline.

“The plan was, and in many cases still is, to displace our people on their ancestral land,” he said, claiming “75 years of Israeli policies aiming to uproot our people” since the plan’s adoption. He repeatedly referred to Israel as a colony, denying Jews’ ancestral ties to Israel and roots in Israel and the Middle East.

TIMES OF ISRAEL