For the second year running, the US has banned Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas from attending the UN General Assembly meeting due to be held in New York next week.
Along with Abbas, the US State Department denied visas to the entire Palestinian delegation including members of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and officials from the Palestinian Authority (PA).
According to the State Department, the Palestinian delegation were barred as ‘a consequence of their failure to reform, contrary to their commitments to the United States, and their ongoing activities that undermine the prospects for peace.’
This repulsive hypocritical statement, designed to blame the PA for undermining ‘the prospects for peace’ and absolving the Zionist state from any responsibility for the war crimes being committed daily, was accompanied by a further justification for the ban.
The US explicitly cited Palestinian efforts to pursue the Israeli state through the international courts and gain recognition for the State of Palestine worldwide.
The State Department complained that the PA was ‘taking actions to internationalise the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including through the International Criminal Courts (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ)’.
The Palestinian foreign ministry responded, rejecting the claim by US imperialism that Palestinians had no right to go to the international criminal courts saying: ‘Resorting to international institutions is a legitimate right of the State of Palestine and a peaceful and legal means to protect our people and their rights, and cannot be equated with the policies of occupation, settlement, annexation, displacement, and settler violence which constitutes the real danger to the two-state solution and to the chances for peace.’
US president Donald Trump has already vented his anger against both the ICC and IJC officials, including sanctions on three sitting judges of the ICC, over the issue of arrest warrants for Israeli officials accused of war crimes in Gaza. In November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minster Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes in Gaza.
Meanwhile, the US formally withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council yesterday, the day after a UN fact-finding mission said there are ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe US forces committed war crimes in two air strikes on civilian sites in Iran.
The first was committed on the day that the US-Israeli unprovoked war on Iran began on February 28, when a missile attack targeted a primary school in the city of Minab killing over 160 people including 120 children.
The second was a US strike on a sports complex and nearby residential area involving a precision strike missile that dispersed tungsten pellets across the area killing 22 civilians.
These findings have unsurprisingly been rejected by the Trump administration, with the State Department accusing the UN Human Rights Council of promoting ‘anti-American rhetoric’.
The fact remains that the Zionist regime is waging a genocidal war that has killed over 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza to crush Palestinian resistance or drive over 2 million from their land.
The unprovoked war launched by the US and Israel has proved to be a complete military and political disaster for both Trump and the Netanyahu regime while it has created a global economic crisis driving the capitalist world into recession and collapse.
All Trump’s increasingly desperate attempts to shield US imperialism and its Zionist ally from the wrath of the millions of workers and youth across the world who are rising up against imperialist barbarism has failed to stem the support for the Palestinians and opposition to the war on Iran.
Now is the time for the working class and youth across the world to unite and demand that their trade union leaders take action by organising mass strike action to bring down their capitalist governments and go forward to workers governments and socialism.
Now is the time to build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International to organise and lead the struggle to put an end to capitalism internationally and advance humanity from capitalist barbarism with the victory of the World Socialist Revolution.
