The United Nations General Assembly passed the resolution moved by the UAE last Friday to recognise a Palestinian state. However, if a country is to be recognized by the UN, the Security Council has to take a decision on the matter, for which this resolution will serve as the prime mover. But the resolution is certain to fail as Israel's chief patron, the United States, has reiterated that it will exercise its usual veto. Thus, the passage of the General Assembly resolution has only symbolic significance. But as an illustration of the prevailing world opinion in favor of Palestine and against Israel, 143 countries voted in favor, 25 members abstained, and nine countries, including the United States and Israel, voted against the resolution. Palestine has had observer status since 2012. A resolution to grant full membership status to a country requires the support of nine of the 15 members of the Security Council. And none of the permanent member states - the United States, Russia, China, France, and Britain - should not apply a veto. However, Friday's vote will give Palestine the right to participate in UN discussions like other members, propose agenda items, and nominate its own representatives to committees.
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It is not surprising that the decision of the General Assembly was strongly criticized by the Israeli side. Israel's representative to the UN, Gilad Erdan, expressed his anger by tearing the UN Charter whose video has been shared in social media. Their response is in the same language as the genocide perpetrated by Israel in the face of the United Nations. Israel Katz, Minister of Foreign Affairs in Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet, criticized the decision saying that it was a reward for the October 7th Hamas attack. A similarity in the responses of Israel and the United States is that both do not accept Palestinian statehood in the current situation. As part of the Zionist movement, when Israel came into being by invading other people's land, it was the United States that was in the forefront to give all the support for it. From the time Israel was founded in 1948 until today, the country has existed only with the support of the U.S. What's more, all of the atrocities, including the recent evictions unleashed in the name of finding Hamas members in Gaza, have not only had the endorsement of the United States but also its full-blooded military and financial support. Even if we look at the history of the UN, out of 85 US vetoes, 42 of them were used in favor of Israel. In 2018, the United States was the first permanent member of the UN Security Council to approve the move of Israel's capital from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and to recognize the Golan Heights as Israel's own land.
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It is not for nothing that even as Washington keeps giving warnings to Israel, it continues to lend funds and arms as help to Israel's pummeling of Gaza. As for the formation of a Palestinian state, the US sticks to a position in favor of a bilateral agreement between Israel and Palestine, and not via a UN resolution. Thus it would outwardly declare that it would support a two-state solution with Israel and Palestine existing together. But it would veto .UN resolutions on the grounds that it should come through a bilateral agreement and not through a UN resolution. When a bilateral agreement is discussed, in the many rounds of negotiations held under the auspices of the US itself, Israel would back out at the critical hour, citing one or the other obstacle at critical stages. Most of the time, it will be blamed on interpretations regarding the Palestinian side's recognition of Israel. Thus, it is often forgotten that it was only Israel that destroyed the world's hopes of establishing peace in West Asia through a two-state solution. The Zionist state does not recognize UN resolutions or UN/US-initiated agreements. It is in this context that armed resistance groups such as Hamas join forces in the conflict, realizing that the language Israel understands is solely military. Those who say Hamas is at fault, should know this context and get rid of the pretence that everything prior to October 7 was milk and honey in the Israeli-Palestinian region. They should also see the use of veto by the US that claims to be an 'honest broker'. Given these equations, if the landscape of Palestine changes in its ownership through any new UN resolution, it will be nothing short of a miracle.
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