The UN General Assembly this week passed a resolution to characterize the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948 as a “catastrophe,” in what has been heralded as a major victory for pro-Palestinian activists.
The word “Nakba,” which means catastrophe or disaster in Arabic, was also a term coined by the Palestinians to commemorate the Jewish state’s founding.
The UN resolution acknowledges the Palestinian version of the events that led to Israel’s creation, and calls for the “commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Nakba,” with a “high-level event” at the global body on May 15th, 2023. May 15 is the day Palestinians mark the Nakba, which is the day after Israel’s independence was declared in 1948.
Egypt and Jordan have peace treaties with Israel, but that didn’t stop them from co-sponsoring the resolution along with the Palestinians and Senegal, Yemen and Tunisia.
Israel’s new Arab allies from the Abraham Accords, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan, all voted in favor of the anti-Israel resolution.
The U.S. and several European countries, including the UK, Italy, Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungary, and the Netherlands voted against the resolution.
Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan called it a “shameful resolution.”
“Today the #UNGA passed a shameful resolution calling for an official event to commemorate the Palestinian ‘Nakba’ on the 75th Anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel,” he wrote on Twitter. “By passing such an extreme and baseless resolution, the UN is only helping to perpetuate the conflict.”
“Try to imagine the international community commemorating your country’s Independence Day by calling it a disaster. What a disgrace,” Erdan added. “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.”
According to former Israeli Ambassador to France David Shek, many of the UN resolutions “have budgetary implications in favor of aid to the Palestinians.”
“Then looking a little bit lower, the symbolic dimension and symbolic importance — clearly the Palestinians need this in order to keep the issue alive,” he told i24 News.
The irony of the United Nations vote is that it came near the anniversary of the vote on November 29, 1947, to partition the British Mandate for Palestine into a Jewish state and Arab state. The Arab states rejected the vote and launched a war on Israel when it declared independence in 1948.
Palestinians, some of whom took up arms, and who were often encouraged to leave the country by Arab leaders, were often displaced as a result.
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