Abbas urges UN to suspend Israel during first commemoration of 1948 flight of the Palestinians

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas urged the United Nations on Monday to suspend Israel’s membership unless it implements resolutions establishing separate Jewish and Arab states and the return of Palestinian refugees.

Abbas spoke during the first official UN commemoration of the flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from what is now Israel following the UN's partition of British-ruled Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states 75 years ago.

Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Gilad Erdan, had sent letters to General Assembly ambassadors condemning the commemoration and urging them not to attend what he called an “abominable event” and a “blatant attempt to distort history.” He said those who attended would be condoning antisemitism and giving a green light to Palestinians “to continue exploiting international organs to promote their libelous narrative.”

Israel and the United States were among those that boycotted the commemoration of what is known as the Nakba.

In an hourlong emotion-charged speech, Abbas asked the world’s nations why more than 1,000 resolutions adopted by UN bodies regarding the Palestinians had never been implemented. He held up a letter from Israel’s foreign minister, Moshe Sharett, after resolutions were adopted in 1947 and 1948 promising to implement them and said: “Either they do respect these obligations, or they stop becoming a member.”

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. The Arabs rejected the plan and neighbouring 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 over 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 it would threaten the country’s Jewish character.

Abbas specifically blamed Britain, as Palestine's ruler before the 1947 partition, and the United States, Israel’s most important ally, for the flight of the Palestinians.

He said the most important right Palestinians are demanding now is self-determination based on June 1967 borders. He reiterated that the Palestinians have agreed to accept 22% of the 1947 territory as part of a two-state solution to the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not the 44% they were given in the partition.

Abbas said Palestinians are not against Jews, but “I am against those who occupy our land.”

He said Israel should recognize and apologize for the Nakba and pay compensation to the refugees and for land it now occupies. And he said that if these root causes are not addressed, the Palestinians will continue to pursue legal action, especially at the International Criminal Court, which was greeted by loud applause from the large audience in a UN conference room.

Israel has remained defiant.

"We will fight the ‘Nakba’ lie with full strength and we won’t allow the Palestinians to continue to spread lies and distort history,” Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said in a statement.

As the 75th anniversary approached, the now 193-member General Assembly approved a resolution last Nov. 30 by a vote of 90-30 with 47 abstentions requesting the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People to organize a high-level event on May 15 to commemorate the Nakba. The United States was among the countries that joined Israel in voting against the resolution.

Explaining why a UN commemoration took so long, Palestinian UN Ambassador Riyad Mansour told The Associated Press on Friday that the Palestinians have moved cautiously at the United Nations since the General Assembly raised their status in 2012 from a non-member observer to a non-member observer state.

UN recognition as a state enabled the Palestinians to join treaties, take cases against Israel’s occupation to the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, which is the UN’s highest tribunal, and in 2019 to chair the Group of 77, the UN coalition of 134 mainly developing nations and China, he said.

The Nakba commemoration comes as Israeli-Palestinian fighting has intensified and protests over 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 said on Friday that Palestinian refugees “are being forcibly removed from their homes and forcibly transferred by Israel at an unprecedented rate,” reminiscent of 1948.

In a speech to the UN Security Council on April 25, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Malki renewed his call for countries that haven’t yet recognized the state of Palestine “to do so as a means to salvage the moribund two-state solution.” He also urged countries to support the Palestinian request for full membership in the United Nations, which would demonstrate international support for a two-state solution where Israelis and Palestinians lived side-by-side in peace.

To hurt Israel economically, Malki urged countries to ban products from Israeli settlements and trade with settlements, to “sanction those who collect funds for settlements and those who advocate for them and those who advance them,” and to list settler organizations that carry out killings and burnings as “terrorist organizations.”

And he urged the international community to take Israel to the International Court of Justice. The General Assembly asked the court in December to give its opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, a move denounced by Israel.

• World