I’ve seen bias from the UN before, but I don’t recall ever seeing a document that looks like it was written by a hardened Israel hater.
The right to self-determination is an “inalienable right” of the Palestinian people, as affirmed by the General Assembly. The origins of Palestinians’ right to self-determination can be traced back more than a century, preceding the first codification in the Charter of the United Nations. The people of Palestine (Muslims, Christians and Jews), like other peoples in the Levant, also had their right to self-determination recognized under the Covenant of the League of Nations of 1919. Article 22 of the Covenant stipulated that “Class A” mandates (Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Trans-Jordan and Syria) would enjoy provisional independence “until such time as they are able to stand alone”. The “wishes” of the local communities were to be “a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory”.
The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.
The culmination of centuries of antisemitism and persecution of Jews in Europe in the genocidal horror of the Holocaust strengthened support for political Zionism. This movement saw Palestine as the land to realize a “State for the Jews” through settlement and colonization. However, in that land a native Palestinian Arab population had resided for millennia. In 1947, the United Nations resolved to reconcile the separate claims to the land of the indigenous Palestinian people and the largely European Jewish settlers and refugees from Europe, by recommending the partitioning of British Mandate Palestine into an “Arab State” and a “Jewish State”. Soon after, the creation of the State of Israel in most of the territory of Mandate Palestine was accompanied by massacres and the mass expulsion, wholesale denationalization and dispossession of most of the Arabs of Palestine. They continue to be deprived of their right to self-determination, together with their descendants, the refugees further displaced in 1967 and other non-refugee Palestinians.
The transformation of the Gaza Strip into a heavily populated, impoverished enclave controlled by Israel through a suffocating sea, land and air blockade, is part and parcel of that same settler-colonial design. The containment of the colonial population into heavily controlled reserves is at the core of the settler-colonial goal to ensure the demographic supremacy and prevent Palestinian self-determination.
{Reposted from EoZ}
