Palestinian president, again denied a visa to speak at UN, addresses leaders on prerecorded video
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas addressed the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday, delivering prerecorded remarks from his office in Ramallah after the United States denied him and other top Palestinian officials visas to attend the gathering for the second year in a row.
The 90-year-old leader's popularity at home and relevance abroad have both waned. But in his remarks, Abbas made clear he did not intend to quietly accept being sidelined.
“We will not leave our homeland. We will not accept displacement. And we will not allow anyone to decide our future on our behalf,” Abbas said.
Though world leaders have repeatedly invoked the plight of Palestinians in speeches throughout the week, Abbas urged the international community to take more tangible action against Israel.
"How long will some countries continue to remain silent about Israel, or continue supplying it with weapons that it uses against our people? The world has witnessed the enormous cost in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank," Abbas said. “What, then, is the international community waiting for before it acts to protect the Palestinian people?”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to speak in person early in the afternoon and arrived in New York in the morning. As Abbas spoke, the Israeli delegations' seats in the General Assembly hall sat vacant.
“The Palestinian people face one of the most dangerous periods in their history,” Abbas said.
In Gaza, he said, “Neighborhoods, cities, refugee camps, institutions, schools, universities, hospitals, mosques, and churches have been destroyed. Every foundation of life, and the future of entire generations, has been targeted.”
Though negotiations have not taken place for years, Abbas urged the international community to push for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and said Palestinians could live “alongside the state of Israel.”
Netanyahu has said no Palestinian state will be established while he is Israel’s leader and has argued that the Palestinian Authority is not a partner for peace.
“Saving the (two-state) solution begins with preserving the land on which the Palestinian state is to be established,” he said, referring to expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank. “We do not want another process designed merely to manage the conflict while realities on the ground change every day."
Since 2005, Abbas has led the Palestinian Authority, which is the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people. But his support among Palestinians has withered during years of corruption and anger toward the authority's security cooperation with Israel.
Under Abbas, Palestine has been recognized as a country by a majority of U.N. member states. But on the ground in the West Bank, the mostly symbolic moves have not affected Israel’s decades long military occupation. Throughout the war in Gaza, Abbas and the authority have been largely sidelined from negotiations over the territory's postwar future.
The international community has instead backed President Donald Trump’s plan for a group of apolitical administrators to govern Gaza under the Board of Peace. Yet Abbas said the territory could not remain politically separate from the West Bank and east Jerusalem for the long term.
He said the Gaza Strip, east Jerusalem and the West Bank needed to be governed by “one state, one government, one law and one legitimate entity authorized to bear arms.”
The Palestinian Authority was created under a series of peace agreements with Israel in the 1990s and administers semiautonomous areas of the West Bank, while relying heavily on foreign aid.
It was ousted from Gaza after Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006 and violently seized control the following year. Abbas was elected to what was supposed to be a four-year term in 2005. The authority has not held presidential or legislative elections since 2006, though in his speech Abbas promised that both were on the horizon. Elections have long been demanded by international donor countries as preconditions for aid to the Palestinian Authority.
Israel captured the West Bank and east Jerusalem in the 1967 war, and the Palestinians want both as part of their future state. The Palestinians and much of the international community view the settlements as illegal and as an obstacle to creating a viable, contiguous Palestinian state.
Abbas recorded the video on Wednesday.
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