The International Day of Solidarity With the Palestinian People

Well, this past Saturday was November 29, and like every November 29 since 1977, the United Nations, in a truly saintly act of pure non-biasedness, celebrated its (I kid you not) "International Day of Solidarity With the Palestinian People." To explore this exercise in yearly Jew-bashing, we'll journey over to the horse' s mouth itself, the UN's website and its description of the event.

The date of 29 November was chosen because of its meaning and significance to the Palestinian people.

Such impartiality! The beauty of this is, of course, that on November 29, 1947, the only people on Earth calling themselves the "Palestinian People" were Jews.

On that day in 1947, the General Assembly adopted resolution 181 (II), which came to be known as the Partition Resolution. That resolution provided for the establishment in Palestine of a “Jewish State” and an “Arab State”, with Jerusalem as a corpus separatum under a special international regime. Of the two States to be created under this resolution, only one, Israel, has so far come into being.

Notice "Arab State" and not "Palestinian State." Because, again, no Arabs in 1947 were walking around calling themselves Palestinians or "The Palestinian People." And why did this "Arab State" never materialize? Well, the UN kind of doesn't tell us. Instead, it skips to this:

The Palestinian people, who now number more than eight million, live primarily in the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967, including East Jerusalem; in Israel; in neighbouring Arab States; and in refugee camps in the region.

This is just wonderful. We're told that the General Assembly passed a partition resolution in 1947 calling for an Arab State, which was never implemented, and that, now the "Palestinian People" live in the "Palestinian Territory" (there never was such a thing) that has been "occupied by Israel since 1967" and in so-called "refugee camps" without giving any explanation as to why any of these events took place. We're not told that in 1947, the Arabs tried unsuccessfully to wipe the Jews off the map or that in 1967, Israel conquered this so-called "Palestinian Territory" in a defensive war after Egypt blockaded the country (an act of war) and mobilized its forces in the Sinai. The only reason that Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem are in Israeli hands is that Jordan entered the war and began attacking Israeli positions after Israel begged King Hussein to stay out of it. And I've dealt with the refugee issue before, so need to rehash that again here.

And the notion that Judea, Samaria and Gaza constitute "Palestinian Territory" is just mind-boggling. We're talking about land that, in the last 500 years, was controlled by the Turks, British, Egyptians, Jordanians and Israelis. No "Palestinians" on that list.

The International Day of Solidarity has traditionally provided an opportunity for the international community to focus its attention on the fact that the question of Palestine remained unresolved and that the Palestinian people are yet to attain their inalienable rights as defined by the General Assembly, namely, the right to self-determination without external interference, the right to national independence and sovereignty, and the right to return to their homes and property from which they had been displaced.

Really, this is like some kind of sick joke. As I believe the Israeli ambassador pointed out at some point, look at the irony and hypocrisy at play here. You have a day commemorating the fact that "question of Palestine remains unresolved," and that the "Palestinian People" don't have a state of their own where they can exercise their "inalienable rights" to "self-determination," "national independence," and "sovereignty". What day did they pick? The very day on which the Arabs REJECTED a partition resolution which aimed to provide them with a state that would have given them all of those things! This is utter lunacy.

The rest of the article is basically filler, detailing all of the activities and speeches to be done "in observance" of this special day. Yes, they seriously wrote "in observance," as if it's some kind of religious holiday with traditions and obligations attached. What nonsense.

This whole exercise flies in the face of what the UN is supposed to be about. The very first provision of the UN Charter states that the purpose of the UN is to:

maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace.

How this is achieved by openly declaring "solidarity" with one of the parties in a dispute is beyond me. But that's why I'm not a diplomat, I guess.

Incidentally, Sha'i Ben Tekoa does a much better job than I do of dissecting and demolishing this little UN get-together.