‘OUR right to self-determination is inalienable. It is not tied to a timeframe’, Riyad Mansour, Palestine’s Permanent Observer to the United Nations, Thursday said before the UN Security Council (UNSC).
Speaking before the 15-nation Council, which convened to vote on a draft resolution that recommended that Palestine become a full member of the UN, Mansour added: ‘Our right is eternal, pre-eminence and continuous.’
He added: ‘It cannot be delayed. It cannot be suspended and it has no statute of limitations. It is important that this right not be subject to manipulation, or domination or conditions, especially not by Israel, the occupying power, the ethnic cleansing power, the genocidal power, the colonial power that is determined to evict our people from their homeland, to eliminate their identity and to replace their history and their culture and to uproot their present and their civilisation and to besiege their future and their horizons.’
He asked the Council members: ‘Will you give Israel the time it needs to annex Palestinian land? Will you give it the immunity to evict the people and kill them? Will you give Israel the weapons to kill more people? Will you give her, give Israel the right to veto our right to exist on our land? To veto the Palestinian State’s right to full membership in the United Nations?
‘Please remember that once this session adjourns, in Palestine, there are innocents paying the price with their lives and the lives of their children, the price of this Israeli action, a price to the double standards, the blind bias towards Israel. The price for the delay in justice, freedom and peace,’ he said.
The Palestinian Ambassador added: ‘Our Palestinian people, wherever they are, want life, they cling onto life. Just like the other peoples on this planet, the Palestinians are people who aspire to freedom, to a dignified life, to a peaceful existence.’
‘The people of Palestine will not disappear. The people of Palestine will not be buried. The Palestinian people have never been unnecessary,’ he said, adding that ‘you either do us justice or you do it justice.’
The US vetoed a resolution in the UN Security Council on the Palestinian application to be granted full membership of the United Nations. The cowardly British delegation abstained in the vote.
The resolution got 12 votes in its favour, with Switzerland and the UK abstaining and the US casting its veto.
To be adopted, the draft resolution required at least nine Council members voting in its favour, with no vetoes by any of its five permanent members – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The working class of the world must now right this wrong that has been done to the Palestinian people, who have now been delivered into the clutches of the Zionist killers who so far have killed tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children.
The British trade unions must organise a special TUC Congress to mobilise the entire working class to bring down the Tory government with a general strike, and bring in a Workers Government that will insist on the establishment of the state of Palestine, that will be recognised by the United Nations.
They UK trade unions must also invite the trade union movements of the EU, the USA and the world to take part in the action.
Israel must not be allowed to organise the mass slaughter of the Palestinian people that it is preparing in Rafah.
The time has come for serious mass action to establish the Palestinian state over the whole of historic Palestine where Palestinians and Jews can live side by side in harmony, putting an end to the horrific slaughters that are the hallmark of Zionism.
There is not a moment to lose!
Forward to a special TUC Congress to call the general strike to bring down the Tories and and to create the conditions for the establishment of the Palestinian state ‘From the river to the sea’, where both Palestinian and Jewish workers can live side by side in peace.
Forward to the victory of the Palestinian revolution!