Abbas began his address by stating that "Jerusalem is not for sale", drawing applause from the room. He then turned to denouncing in turn Israel's "racist" nation-state law, the Trump administration's uncritical support of Israel, and both states' refusal to abide by international agreements and UN résolutions.
"This law will inevitably lead to the creation of one racis state, an apartheid state, and thus nullifies the two-state solution, " he said.
In his first speech to the UN since the US moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Abbas said Palestinians now see the US "with new eyes" and no longer as a fair mediator in the peace process.
"This administration has reneged on all previous US commitments and undermined the two state solution," he said.
The PLO leader called on more countries to recognise the state of Palestine and for the UN to enforce the resolutions it has passed on Israel.
"It is insufficient for the general assembly to pass a reinstitution without implementation," he said, saying that Israel had not implemented even one of the over 700 resolution passed by the assembly since 1949.
Abbas raised the issue of UNRWA, which provides relief and humanitarian assistance to over five million Palestinians, and is battling for survival since the US pulled $300m in funding for the organisation.
He accused the US of attempting to "obliterate" UNRWA, and rubbished its estimate that there are only 40,000 Palestinian refugees.
He reiterated several times that the PLO is fully committed to peace and rejects all forms of violence outright, but stressed that cooperation was a two-way street and Palestine would not be bound by agreements that are reneged on by other countries.
Concluding, Abbas paid tribute to martyrs and prisoners and said to all Palestinians that "we are soon approaching our day of freedom and independence and that the darkness of occupation will soon vanish."
Meanwhile, the evil clown Binyamin Netanyahu targeted Iran. Speaking shortly after, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used his address to publicly identify what he claims is a secret, previously unknown nuclear facility in Tehran.
UPFRONT: Why is Iran backing Syria?
Tha Palestinians are finally abandoning a quarter-of-a-century old policy of accepting the harming USA as the main intermediary.
Therefore, the United States said it would shut down the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO)diplomatic office in Washington, DC, over the Palestinian Authority's refusal to enter into US-brokered negotiations with Israel, the latest in a series of measures against the Palestinian leadership.
The move on Monday comes amid deteriorating ties between the two sides in the wake of US President Donald Trump's controversial recognition of Jérusalem as Israel's capital last year and the relocation of its embassy there.
That decision drew universal condemnation from Arab leaders and criticism around the world, while Palestinian leaders, who see East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state, said the US had taken itself "off the table" as a peace mediator.
That decision drew universal condemnation from Arab leaders and criticism around the world, while Palestinian leaders, who see East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state, said the US had taken itself "off the table" as a peace mediator.
Since Trump took office on January 20, 2017, Israel - a traditional US ally that receives $3.1bn in annual military aid from Washington (next year, that figure will increase to $3.8bn under a 10-year deal agreed by former US President Barack Obama) - has taken a series of measures that have been criticised as racist and discriminatory against the Palestinian people.
Trump is meanwhile expected to unveil details of what he has long referred to as the "deal of the century" to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to reports, the deal prohibits the return of more than five million Palestinian refugees and removes the status of Jerusalem from negotiations.
Mouin Rabbani, a resident senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington, DC, told Al Jazeera the Trump administration has largely been guided by Israel with regards to the Palestine question.
"The measures adopted by the United States with respect towards the Palestinians during the past year have several sources: exceptional ignorance, ideological zealotry, internalisation of guidance from Israeli counterparts as sound policy for the United States, keeping funders and supporters onside, and not least the arrogance of power," he said.
While Rabbani noted that the US decision to terminate funding of UNRWA is couched in "political retribution" against the Palestinian leadership's refusal to comply with Trump's embrace of the Israeli agenda, getting rid of the UN refugee agency will not be successful.
"Washington's stated objectives of compelling the United Nations to redefine Palestinian refugees so that their status is collectively transformed to non-refugees, and to eliminate UNRWA altogether will however fail, because there is insufficient support for these objectives, even among its closest international and regional allies," he said.
The US government’s decision to slash funds provided to the United Nations agency that cares for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, is part of a new American-Israeli strategy aimed at redefining the rules of the game altogether.
As a result, UNRWA is experiencing its worst financial crisis. The gap in its budget is estimated at around $217 million, and is rapidly increasing. Aside from future catastrophic events that would result in discontinuing services and urgent humanitarian aid to five million refugees registered with UNRWA, the impact of the US callous decision is already reverberating in many refugee camps across the region. Currently, UNRWA has downgraded many of its services: laying off many teachers, reducing staff and working hours at various clinics.
Nearly 40 percent of all Palestinian refugees live in Jordan, a country that is already overwhelmed by a million Syrian refugees who sought shelter there because of the grinding and deadly war in their own country.
Aware of Jordan’s vulnerability, American emissaries attempted to barter with the country to heed the US demand of revoking the status of the two million Palestinian refugees. Instead of funding UNRWA, Washington offered to re-channel the funds directly to the Jordanian government. Thus, the US hopes that the Palestinian refugee status would no longer be applicable. Unsurprisingly, Jordan refused the American offer.
News of this failed barter resurfaced last August. It was reported that US President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Jared Kushner, tried to sway the Jordanian government during his visit to Amman in June.
Washington and Israel are seeking to simply remove the ‘Right of Return’ for Palestinian refugees, as enshrined in international law, from the political agenda altogether.
Coupled with Washington’s strategy to “remove Jerusalem from the table,” the American strategy is neither random nor impulsive.
“It is important to have an honest and sincere effort to disrupt UNRWA,” Kushner wrote to the US Middle East envoy, Jason Greenblatt, in an email last January. The email, among others, was later leaked to Foreign Policy magazine. “This (agency) perpetuates a status quo,” he also wrote, referring to UNRWA as “corrupt, inefficient and doesn’t help peace.”
This notion that UNRWA sustains the status quo – meaning the political rights of Palestinians refugees – is the main reason behind the American war on the Organization, a fact that is confirmed through statements made by top Israeli officials, too.
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, echoed the American sentiment. UNRWA “has proven itself an impediment to resolving the conflict by keeping the Palestinians in perpetual refugee status,” he said.
Certainly, the US cutting of funds to UNRWA coincides with the defunding of all programs that provide any kind of aid to the Palestinian people. But the targeting of UNRWA is mostly concerned with the status of Palestinian refugees, a status that has irked Tel Aviv for 70 years.
Why does Israel want to place Palestinian refugees in a status-less category?
The refugee status is already a precarious one. To be a Palestinian refugee means living perpetually in limbo – unable to reclaim what has been lost, and unable to fashion an alternative future and a life of freedom and dignity.
How are Palestinians to reconstruct their identity that has been shattered by decades of exile, when Israel has constantly hinged its own existence as a ‘Jewish state’ on opposing the return and repatriation of Palestinian refugees? Per Israel’s logic, the mere Palestinian demand for the implementation of the internationally-sanctioned Right of Return is equivalent to a call for “genocide”. According to that same faulty logic, the fact that the Palestinian people live and multiply is a “demographic threat” to Israel.
Much can be said about the circumstances behind the creation of UNRWA by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1949 – its operations, efficiency and the effectiveness of its work. But for most Palestinians, UNRWA is not a relief organization, per se – being registered as a refugee with UNRWA provides Palestinians with a temporary identity, the same identity that allowed four generations of refugees to navigate decades of exile.
UNRWA’s stamp of “refugee” on every certificate that millions of Palestinians possess – birth, death and everything else in between – has served as a compass, pointing back to the places those refugees come from – not the refugee camps scattered in Palestine and across the region, but the 600 towns and villages that were destroyed during the Zionist assault on Palestine.
These villages may have been erased, as a whole new country was established upon their ruins, but the Palestinian refugee remained – subsisted, resisted and plotted her return home. The UNRWA refugee status is the international recognition of this inalienable right.
Therefore, the current US-Israeli war does not target UNRWA as a UN body, but as an organization that allows millions of Palestinians to maintain their identity as refugees with non-negotiable rights until their return to their ancestral homeland. Nearly 70 years after its founding, UNRWA remains essential and irreplaceable.
The founders of Israel envisioned a future where Palestinian refugees would eventually disappear into the larger population of the Middle East. Seventy years on, the Israelis still entertain that same illusion.
Now, with the help of the Trump administration, they are orchestrating yet more sinister campaigns to make Palestinian refugees vanish, wished away through the destruction of UNRWA and the redefining of the refugee status of millions of Palestinians.
The fate of Palestinian refugees seems to be of no relevance to Trump, Kushner and other US officials. The Americans are now hoping that their strategy will finally bring Palestinians to their knees so that they will ultimately submit to the Israeli government’s dictates.
The latest US-Israeli folly will prove futile. Successive US administrations have done everything in their power to support Israel and to punish the supposedly intransigent Palestinians. The Right of Return, however, remained the driving force behind Palestinian resistance, as the Gaza Great March of Return, ongoing since March, continues to demonstrate.
The truth is that all the money in Washington’s coffers will not reverse what is now a deeply embedded belief in the hearts and minds of millions of refugees throughout Palestine, the Middle East and the world
2017:
. February 16: Trump drops the long-standing US commitment to a two-state solution, says he would back a single-state solution after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Binymain Netanyahu.
. March 24: US Senate approves the appointment of David Friedman, a supporter and donor to illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land, as Washington's ambassador to Israel.
. December 6: Trump announces a controversial decision to relocate US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, formally recognises Jerusalem as Israel's capital, breaking with decades of US Policy.
2018:
. January 3: Trump threatens to cut aid to the Palestinians in a series of Twitter posts, citing their unwillingness "to talk peace".
. January 17: US government cuts more than half its planned funding ($65m out of a $125m aid package) to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees that caters to more than five million registered refugees.
. May 14: US embassy officially opens in Jérusalem on the same day Palestinians commemorate 70 years since the Nakba or "Catastrophe", the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian cities and towns by Zionist paramilitaries in 1948 - also the eve of when the state of Israel was established.
. August 19: Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was tasked along with envoy Jason Greenblatt with reviving the stalled peace process in 2017,embarks on Middle East tour to build support for the yet-to-be-announced Israeli-Palestinian peace plan.
. August 25: US cuts $200m economic aid to the Palestinians after it had planned to provide $251m for good governance, health, education and funding for civil society in the current 2018 budget.
. August 31: US State Department says it is stopping all funding to UNRWA after determining the organisation to be an "irredeemably flawed operation".
. September 9: US slashes one of its last remaining aid programmes ($25m in financial assistance) to a network of six hospitals in occupied East Jerusalem.
. September 10: US closes the PLO mission to Washington, DC, over Palestinian Authority's refusal to enter into US-led talks with Israel.
. September 17: US revokes visas for the PLO envoy and his family in Washington, DC, causing them to leave the country.
. September 17: US cuts $10m in aid for programmes on conflict resolution, designed to bring reconciliation for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel.
PALESTINA
For more than five months, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have protested along the fence with Israel demanding their right to return to the homes and land their families were expelled from 70 years ago.
The Great March of Return rallies culminated on May 15 to mark what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or Catastrophe - a reference to the forced removal of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages to clear the way for Israel's establishment in 1948.
The mass Friday demonstrations have continued since.
Since the protests began on March 30, Israeli forces have killed at least 180 Palestinians in the besieged coastal enclave and wounded more than 18,000 people, according to health officials in Gaza.
The spokesperson for Gaza's health ministry confirmed the killing of six protesters and the wounding of 506 others on the 27th Friday of protests.
Mohammed Nayef al-Houm, 14, was shot in the chest by Israeli sniper fire east of al-Bureij in Gaza's middle district.
Iyad Khalil al-Shaaer, 18, was also killed during the protests, the ministry's spokesperson Ashraf al-Qidra said
A 12-year-old boy, Nasser Mosabih, also succumbed to his wounds after being shot in the head east of Khan Younis in Gaza's South.
Mohammed Ali Mohammed Anshasi, 18, was also killed in Khan Younis.
Two other Palestinians killed by Israeli gunfire have not yet been identified.
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#StopTheWar is a hashtag coming from many activists in #Gaza who urge the international community to hinder Israel’s attempts to launch another large-scale aggression against the occupied, blockaded, unlivable, and exhausted Gaza Strip. #GazaUnderAttack.
The people of Gaza have been subjected to decades of expulsion, occupation, siege and massacre. They have now seized control of their Fate. They are risking life and limb as they protest nonviolently to reclaim their basic rights. It takes just one minute to send a video showing your support for Gaza in its moment of truth. Do it now! Send your videos to METOOGAZA.COM.
Renowned scientists urge cientific Community to consider the facts before engaging in activities with Israeli colonial-based Ariel University, and not engage any attemps to use science to normalise Israel(s occupation of the Palestinian territory. Check it out here.
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