12 members of the 15-member Security Council voted in favor, two did not participate, and the US vetoes opposed.
On Thursday, the United States vetoed a resolution that was overwhelmingly supported by the UN and would have allowed the state of Palestine to become a full member.
If there were no vetoes, the resolution would have suggested that Palestine be admitted as the 194th member of the UN by the 193-member General Assembly. The state of Palestine has already gained recognition from almost 140 nations, thus entry would have been permitted.
This is the second attempt by the Palestinians to apply for full membership in the UN, and it comes at a time when the almost 75-year-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken center stage because of the ongoing war in Gaza, which is currently in its seventh month.
The United States has “been very clear consistently that premature actions in New York — even with the best intentions — will not achieve statehood for the Palestinian people,” according to U.S. deputy State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel, who spoke before the vote.
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U.S. Deputy Ambassador Robert Wood stated that Palestinian membership “needs to be the outcome of the negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians.” It “is something that would come about as a consequence of those talks.”
Anything that stands in the way of a two-state solution, which “we all want,” where Israel and Palestine coexist peacefully, “makes it more difficult to have those negotiations,” Wood told reporters.
2011 saw the initial delivery of the Palestinian Authority’s application for U.N. membership by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to then-Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The Palestinians did not receive the necessary minimum support from nine of the fifteen members of the Security Council, which is why their initial bid failed.
After that, the Palestinians addressed the General Assembly, where they were successful in November 2012 in moving up from being a U.N. observer state to a non-member observer state with the support of more than two-thirds of the members. The Palestinian territories were then able to join the United Nations and other international institutions, such as the International Criminal Court.
The Palestinians revived their bid for U.N. membership in early April, backed by the 140 countries that have recognized Palestine as an independent state.
Ziad Abu Amr, special representative of the Palestinian president, said adopting the resolution would grant the Palestinian people hope “for a decent life within an independent state.”
He said such “hope has dissipated over the past years because of the intransigence of the Israeli government that has rejected this solution publicly and blatantly, especially following the destructive war against the Gaza Strip.”
He stressed to the Security Council that it won’t be an alternative “for serious negotiations that are time-bound to implement the two-state solution” and U.N. resolutions and to resolve pending issues between Palestinians and Israelis.
Amr asked the U.S. and other countries opposed to its U.N. membership how that could damage prospects for peace or harm international peace and security when they already recognized Israel and approved its U.N. membership.
“To grant the state of Palestine full membership will be an important pillar to achieve peace in our region, because the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and its different dimensions now go beyond the borders of Palestine and Israel and impacts other regions in the Middle East and around the world,” the Palestinian envoy said.
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have been stalled for years, and Israel’s right-wing government is dominated by hard-liners who oppose Palestinian statehood.
Israeli U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan called the resolution “disconnected to the reality on the ground” and warned that it “will cause only destruction for years to come and harm any chance for future dialogue.”
A half-year after Hamas, the Gaza-based organization, attacked southern Israel, murdering 1,200 Jews in “the most brutal massacre of Jews since the Holocaust,” he charged that the Security Council was attempting “to reward the perpetrators of these atrocities with statehood.”
Speaker after speaker blasted Israel’s military offensive on Thursday, claiming that it had destroyed much of the area and killed over 32,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Erdan enumerated the prerequisites for U.N. membership, including adherence to the Charter’s duties and, most importantly, being a state that “loves peace.”
What a farce, he exclaimed. Is there any doubt that the Palestinians did not fulfill these requirements? Has any Palestinian leader ever spoken a condemnation of the slaughter of our children?
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