Majority of UN General Assembly backs Palestinian bid for membership

© Eduardo Munoz/ReutersPalestinian Ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour gestures to delegates. Resolution does not give Palestine full UN membership, but recognises them as qualified to join and extends rights.

The United Nations General Assembly on Friday overwhelmingly backed a Palestinian bid to become a full UN member by recognizing it as qualified to join and recommending the UN Security Council "reconsider the matter favorably."

The vote by the 193-member General Assembly was a global survey of support for the Palestinian bid to become a full UN member — a move that would effectively recognize a Palestinian state — after the United States vetoed it in the UN Security Council last month.

The assembly adopted a resolution with 143 votes in favor and nine against — including the US and Israel — while 25 countries abstained.

It does not give the Palestinians full UN membership, but simply recognizes them as qualified to join.

The resolution "determines that the State of Palestine ... should therefore be admitted to membership" and it "recommends that the Security Council reconsider the matter favorably."

The Palestinian push for full UN membership comes seven months into a war between Israel and Palestinian terror group Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and as Israel is expanding settlements in the occupied West Bank, which the UN considers illegal.

"We want peace, we want freedom," Palestinian UN Ambassador Riyad Mansour told the assembly before the vote. "A yes vote is a vote for Palestinian existence, it is not against any state. ... It is an investment in peace."

"Voting yes is the right thing to do," he said in remarks that drew applause.

Under the founding UN Charter, membership is open to "peace-loving states" that accept the obligations in that document and are able and willing to carry them out.

"As long as so many of you are 'Jew-hating,' you don't really care that the Palestinians are not 'peace-loving,'" Israel's UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan, who spoke after Mansour, told his fellow diplomats. He accused the assembly of shredding the UN Charter — as he used a small shredder to destroy a copy of the charter while at the lectern.

Comment: A gesture as childish as Pelosi tearing up Trump's State of the Union address, because Israel din't get its way.

"Shame on you," Erdan said.

palestine ambassador united nations membership

An application to become a full UN member first needs to be approved by the 15-member Security Council and then the General Assembly.

If the measure is again voted on by the council, it is likely to face the same fate: a US veto.

Deputy US Ambassador to the UN Robert Wood told the General Assembly after the vote that unilateral measures at the UN and on the ground will not advance a two-state solution.

unite nations vote palestine full membership

"Our vote does not reflect opposition to Palestinian statehood; we have been very clear that we support it and seek to advance it meaningfully. Instead, it is an acknowledgment that statehood will only come from a process that involves direct negotiations between the parties," he said.

The United Nations has long endorsed a vision of two states living side by side within secure and recognized borders.

Palestinians want a state in the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, all territory captured by Israel in the 1967 war with neighboring Arab states.

The General Assembly resolution adopted Friday does give the Palestinians some additional rights and privileges from September 2024 — like a seat among the UN members in the assembly hall — but they will not be granted a vote in the body.

The Palestinians are currently a non-member observer state, a de facto recognition of statehood that was granted by the UN General Assembly in 2012.

They are represented at the UN by the Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank.

Hamas ousted the Palestinian Authority from power in Gaza in 2007.

Hamas — which has a charter calling for Israel's destruction — launched the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that triggered Israel's assault on Gaza.

Erdan said on Monday that, if the General Assembly adopted the resolution, he expected Washington to cut funding to the United Nations and its institutions.

Under US law, Washington cannot fund any UN organization that grants full membership to any group that does not have the "internationally recognized attributes" of statehood.

Comment: Washington shouldn't be funding Israel at all, if it bothered to follow its own Leahy Law.

The United States cut funding in 2011 for the UN cultural agency UNESCO after the Palestinians joined as a full member.

On Thursday, 25 Republican US senators — more than half of the party's members in the chamber — introduced a bill to tighten those restrictions and cut off funding to any entity giving rights and privileges to the Palestinians.

The bill is unlikely to pass the Senate, which is controlled by President Biden's Democrats.

Reader Comments

Patrick2017 · 2024-05-11T21:19:41Z

Why didn't the NYP list all nine of the Nazi Zionist Countries that voted "Against" besides the US and Irahell, who are the other seven ? The same as the 29 chicken shit bastard countries that "abstention", the world's people want to know who are all the Communist Zionist that want to take over the world. Come on Fess Up ! things will be better if you do, the people might let you live rotting in a prison cell than being hung.

ReRan · 2024-05-11T21:35:37Z

Patrick2017 Yes, who are they?

NY Post.

Gator · 2024-05-11T21:53:14Z

ReRan Canada abstained....The Israeli Lobby is very strong in Canada, unfortunately !

ReRan · 2024-05-12T00:59:33Z

Gator I'm not really surprised.

KRNABRNY · 2024-05-12T07:03:01Z

The world body approved the Arab and Palestinian-sponsored resolution by a vote of 143-9 with 25 abstentions. The United States voted against it, along with Israel, Argentina, Czechia, Hungary, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Papua New Guinea.

Poland recognized the State of Palestine.

KRNABRNY · 2024-05-12T07:05:34Z

KRNABRNY I will also add that do not count on the US to vote differently.The US cannot do this because they have an identical history.

If the US recognizes Palestine, it will also open the way for Native American claims to its land in America.

This is a Pandora's box for the US, having to dig out all the dirt from under the carpets.

I don't know if you realize how great consequences such a vote would have.

The fact that it went through at all is a huge problem for the US and Israel.

KRNABRNY · 2024-05-12T07:09:13Z

There is link ... [Link]

Gator · 2024-05-12T16:11:54Z

KRNABRNY "If the US recognizes Palestine, it will also open the way for Native American claims to its land in America."

Exactly....and that is happening in Canada right now under UNDRIP/DRIPA. In British Columbia where I live the Premier David Eby's NDP(communist) government just gave all of Haida Gwai back to the Indigenous, and to rule themselves under Indigenous law. [Link]

Peter Jennings · 2024-05-11T23:07:54Z

The UN now lift a finger when there is virtually nothing left of Palestine and its people. It is time the UN took back its dignity and its integrity otherwise it's finished as a international organisation. The failures are piling up.

azigzagidiot · 2024-05-12T05:34:26Z

The Nation

March 29, 2024

The nuclear explosion that makes US aid to Israel illegal

[Link]

[ ...]The problem for Israel—and a key reason for the secrecy involving the tests—was the Glenn Amendment to the US Arms Export Control Act. Passed by Congress in 1977, the amendment aimed particularly at the nuclear pariah states. It mandated an end to arms assistance, and an automatic application of extensive US sanctions, if the president determined that any state (other than the nuclear states authorized by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) detonated a nuclear explosive after 1977. The nuclear test was also a clear violation of the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, to which Israel was a party.

Under US law, Israel must be banned from receiving its annual package of billions of dollars and arsenal of bombs. In a 2016 Haaretz column, Victor Gilinsky, a physicist and former commissioner of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, laid out the penalties: “The sanctions for detonating a nuclear explosion are tough: termination of assistance under the Foreign Assistance Act, termination of sales of defense equipment and military financing, prohibition of loans from US banks, and more. In other words, if the U.S. government were to conclude Israel detonated a nuclear explosion after 1977, the law, unless waived, would effectively end all US aid to Israel.” Newell Highsmith, who spent three decades with the State Department and was responsible for legal issues related to nonproliferation, agrees. “Glenn Amendment sanctions for detonation or receipt of a nuclear explosive device have been viewed as a ‘death sentence’ because of the breadth of sanctions and because there is no presidential waiver,” he wrote last year for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

In addition to the violation of the Glenn Amendment, Israel is also in violation of the Symington Amendment, which has similar penalties for any country that delivers nuclear materials and technology to another country.[...]

Dwoods44 · 2024-05-12T06:27:39Z

azigzagidiot Thanks for the research.

Dwoods44 · 2024-05-12T06:31:29Z

The one thing this proposal does is it isolates the USA and its vassal states. They are shown to be against humanity not for it.

Quote: "The United Nations has long endorsed a vision of two states living side by side within secure and recognized borders." according to the USA ambassador. If that were true, why is the USA supplying weapons to murder women and children? Why is the USA using its Navy to threaten all of the Islamic countries in the Middle East?