MIFTAH
Thursday, 18 April. 2024
 
Your Key to Palestine
The Palestinian Initiatives for The Promotoion of Global Dialogue and Democracy
 
 
 

Following is the unofficial translation (from Arabic into English) of the full text of the speech of the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, before the UN General Assembly yesterday, Thursday 21 September, 2006:

In the name of God, the Compassionate and Merciful. Your Excellency President of the General Assembly Sheikah Haya Rashed al-Khalifa. Your Excellency General Secretary of the UN Kofi Annan.

Your Majesties and Highness and Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, Allow me first to extend my congratulations to you after you were elected to be President of this term, wishing you all success in achieving the goals agreed upon by all peoples in the world who believe that this international organization was born to protect the world peace and human rights and the rights of peoples in self determination and I can recall on this occasion the words of late US President Woodrow Wilson who said: "There is no other place on earth where noble men and women gather reflecting the brightest images of beauty and potential deeply rooted in sympathy, cooperation and consultation through their efforts to achieve justice, and alleviate suffering and lead the weak on the path of power and hope."

So, I hope that the works and results of this term will lead to encouragement of cooperation among the peoples and nations for their joint interests and these are the principles stipulated in the UN Charter and abiding by them is one of the basic conditions to join this organization.

We have to point to the effective role and the good will efforts exerted by the Secretary General of the UN in the past years to reinforce the status of our international organization and in activating its role, including his efforts on the Arab-Israeli conflict and its core, the Palestinian cause.

President of the General Assembly,

A few weeks ago, the war in Lebanon stopped and despite the gravity of the losses and destruction and the tragedies, the international community rushed successfully and achieved an effective intervention and put an end to this and is working to provide support to Lebanon and to its people and its legitimate government to protect its security and independence and end the wars on its territories; as we praise this international role, we do hope to see this positive and influential role expand at the political and practical levels in order to tackle and handle the roots of the conflict and wars witnessed in the region for long decades. I don’t need to prove once again, after all the experiences and wars and sufferings that we passed through, that keeping the cause of Palestine without solution and the continuous occupation of the Palestinian and Arab territories since 1967 will constitute causes of explosion and tension and will keep the flames of the conflict alight and will open the room in front of all forms of violence and terrorism and regional confrontations and international crises.

It is unfortunate to see today that international plans and schemes, mainly the roadmap plan, which gained the ratification of the UN Security Council, reached a state of stalemate and retreat and even the call to resume negotiations is facing obstacles and preconditions as despair and frustration increase in light of the work of the bulldozers that are building the illegitimate settlements to change the demographic nature of Jerusalem and as the apartheid separation wall is being built inside our occupied territories and within its various parts while the horrible siege continues through military checkpoints that transformed our cities and districts into cantons, and as the wave of killings and assassinations continues leading to the death of hundreds of citizens, and the home demolition and as arrest campaigns continue resulting in the detention of more than 8,000 Palestinians, including members of the parliament and government, and some of those Palestinians have spent more than three decades in prison, and their families and people are waiting for their release to enjoy their freedom.

I have the right to ask under these conditions, how can the international community expect to see reduction or retreat of extremism or to see a decrease in waves of violence? How can we and all forces of moderation and peace in the region intervene and convince the public opinion in our country that there is still hope in the horizon and that choosing the path of dialogue and negotiations and clinging to international legitimate is the strategic option and path, which we call for and which we will never give, can lead to any real success?

I, who am living amidst this tragedy, am not the only person who should give the answer to this big question. The international community and the influential international forces are invited to provide concrete evidence that they will support the unconditional resumption of negotiations and that they will offer a successful international umbrella to these negotiations to reinforce them and make them successful and to work on halting the settlements and the collective punishment measures and the separation wall so that we can achieve a positive atmosphere towards launching the negotiations to reach the aspired destination which is to achieve a just peace based on the two state solution as called for by President George Bush.

This solution must be based on international legitimacy which was the basis of the Arab Peace Initiative through the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the borders of June 4, 1967 with East Jerusalem as its capital and to reach a just and agreed upon solution to the cause of the refugees, who constitute more than half of the Palestinian population, according to Resolution 194.

We have heard from the government of Israel recently that it will give up the policy of unilateral steps; this is encouraging on condition that the alternative to this should not be the stalemate and continuation of the policy of imposing the status quo, but the alternative should be to return to the negotiations table and reach a comprehensive solution to all issues of the final status in a manner that guarantees a secure future for our children and their children.

President of the General Assembly,

Recently, I exerted efforts with all colors of the Palestinian political spectrum to establish a national unity government that responds and meets with the Arab and international legitimacy and that works in harmony with the principles set by the international Quartet Committee, and based on our commitment to these criteria, I would like to affirm the following: any Palestinian future government will abide by the past commitments of the PLO and the PNA in terms of agreements, especially the letters of mutual recognition dated on September 9, 1993, between the two late big figures Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. These two letters include mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO and denounce violence and adopt negotiations as a means to achieve a permanent solution based on the establishment of the independent state of Palestine next to the state of Israel.

Any coming government shall abide by the necessity to impose security and order and end the phenomena of several militias and end eth security chaos and abide by the rule of the law because this is a Palestinian national need in the first place.

The efforts we exerted came to establish national unity with real content to achieve a Palestinian national consensus around our national goals which match with the international legitimacy and the Arab Peace Initiative and on the peaceful means to achieve those goals, and when such a consensus is achieved and when a new national unity government is established, one has to view this as a substantial achievement and not a step backward or retreat from the approach that we have always clung to and that we have insisted on all the time under the worst conditions.

I would like to affirm that the negotiations with Israel have always been and will remain an affair and a responsibility of the PLO which I head and I will present all the results coming from those negotiations to the Palestinian National Council which represents the highest Palestinian national authority or to a national referendum.

What we have achieved so far should be adequate to lift the oppressive siege imposed on our people and which has caused major and grave damage to our society, its standard of living and its means of growth and progress.

President of the General Assembly,

I came here carrying the wounds of people bleeding every day, a people who are seeking to live a normal life where the children can go to their schools feeling secure and where there are children who were born to live and to die, and young men who want to look for decent work to provide them with a dignified path to move securely into the future and to be partners in formulating and designing their history and not victims of the barbarism of history and women who bring birth to their babies in hospitals and not at the occupation checkpoints and families that could gather in the evenings to dream about a new day free of killing, prison or arrest.

To put it very simply, I want tomorrow to be better than today. I want for my homeland Palestine to be a homeland and not a prison, an independent homeland like all peoples in the world and I want Jerusalem to become the meeting point for dialogue of all prophets and a state for two countries living side by side in peace and equality.

Late President Yasser Arafat said on this same podium his famous appeal 32 years ago: "Don’t make the olive branch fall from my hand", and here I repeat the same appeal: Don’t make the olive branch fall from my hand, Don’t make the olive branch fall from my hand.

Peace be upon you.

 
 
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