For the first time, the UN officially commemorated the flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from what is now Israel on the 75th anniversary of their exodus — an action stemming from the UN’s partition of British-ruled Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas headlined yesterday’s UN commemoration of what Palestinians call the “Nakba” or “catastrophe.”
Palestinian Ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour called the UN observance “historic” and significant because the UN General Assembly played a key role in the partition of Palestine.
Photo: Reuters
“It’s acknowledging the responsibility of the UN of not being able to resolve this catastrophe for the Palestinian people for 75 years,” Mansour told a group of UN reporters recently.
“The catastrophe to the Palestinian people is still ongoing,” he added.
Palestinians still do not have an independent state, and they do not have the right to return to their homes as called for in a General Assembly resolution adopted in December 1948.
Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan condemned the commemoration, calling it an “abominable event” and a “blatant attempt to distort history.”
He said that those who attend would be condoning antisemitism and giving a green light to Palestinians “to continue exploiting international organs to promote their libelous narrative.”
The General Assembly, which had 57 member nations in 1947, approved the resolution dividing Palestine by a vote of 33-13 with 10 abstentions. The Jewish side accepted the UN partition plan, and after the British mandate expired in 1948, Israel declared its independence.
Arabs rejected the plan and neighboring Arab countries launched a war against the Jewish state.
The Nakba commemorates the estimated 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were forced from their homes in 1948.
The fate of these refugees and their descendants — estimated at more than 5 million across the Middle East — remains a major disputed issue in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel rejects demands for a mass return of refugees to long-lost homes, saying that it would threaten the country’s Jewish character.
As the 75th anniversary approached, the now 193-member General Assembly approved a resolution on Nov. 30 last year by a vote of 90-30 with 47 abstentions requesting that the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People organize a high-level event on May 15 to commemorate the Nakba.
The US was among the countries that joined Israel in voting against the resolution, and the US Mission to the UN said no US diplomats would be attending yesterday’s commemoration.
Explaining why a UN commemoration took so long, Mansour said on Friday that Palestinians have moved cautiously at the UN since the General Assembly raised their status in 2012 from a non-member observer to a non-member observer state.
The Nakba commemoration comes as Israeli-Palestinian fighting has intensified and protests over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and its plan to overhaul Israel’s judiciary show no sign of abating. Israel’s polarization and the Netanyahu government’s extremist positions have also sparked growing international concern.
Mansour on Friday said that Palestinian refugees “are being forcibly removed from their homes and forcibly transferred by Israel at an unprecedented rate,” reminiscent of 1948.
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