TEL AVIV – Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon slammed UN General Assembly President Peter Thomson for wearing a Palestinian flag scarf at a special meeting Tuesday to mark “Palestinian Day.”
Thomson, president of the 71st session of the UNGA, addressed the event marking the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people hosted by the UN’s Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) while wearing a scarf with the colors of the Palestinian flag and the keffiyeh that has come to symbolize the Palestinian cause.
Danon said it was “unacceptable” that someone purportedly in a role of “neutrality and stateliness [chose to] wrap himself in a Palestinian flag” and attended a session organized by a committee “whose sole purpose [was] to attack and besmirch the state of Israel.”
“This is living, unequivocal proof of the bias against Israel and the slander spread about us at the UN,” Danon added.
In his address, Thomson said peace between Israel and the Palestinians was “fundamental to our efforts to realize the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, and to ensure that they are able to enjoy lives of dignity, opportunity, prosperity, and equality.”
The General Assembly was scheduled to adopt six anti-Israel resolutions, including one that ignores Jewish historical ties to Jerusalem and another calling for Israel’s transfer of the Golan Heights to Syria.
“The UN’s assault on Israel today with a torrent of one-sided resolutions is surreal,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based non-governmental watchdog organization.
“It’s astonishing,” said Neuer. “At a time when the Syrian regime is killing its own people by the hundreds of thousands, how can the UN call for more human beings to be placed under Assad’s rule? The timing of today’s text is morally galling, and logically absurd.”
Palestine Day, organized by the UN’s Palestinian delegation, is held on the anniversary of the UN Partition Plan of November 29, 1947, which led to the creation of the State of Israel. In his address to the General Assembly that day, Danon held up the front page of the New York Times from November 30, 1947, the day after the vote, which published the headlines, “Assembly Votes Palestine Partition” and “Arabs Walk Out… Disavow Any Partition Role.”
Danon said he wonders whether “the Palestinians even want a state.”
“History tells us that the answer is no,” he said. “If the Palestinians really wanted peace, we could have had peace decades ago. The Palestinians reject every Israeli offer and every plan and respond with waves of violence and terror.”
Danon added that the Palestinian Authority “pays lip-service to these [peace] initiatives because it pays well. The real goal of the PA is to continue to exist as a corrupt entity living off the goodwill of the international community without the responsibilities of governing. And they know the only way to do so is to continue the conflict.”
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