UN hails Arab world’s defiance of UN!

This spring marks 75 years since the State of Israel was established in keeping with the resolution of the UN General Assembly on November 29, 1947. 75 years after the UN Partition Plan was adopted by the General Assembly the current plenary voted on November 30 to celebrate the Palestinians’ rejection of the historic UN decision.

In his speech to the UN General Assembly, Israel’s UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan showed pictures of Jewish refugees who were forced to leave their Arab homelands after the November 1947 UN decision. Photo: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

The Arab world’s decision to defy the UN and attempt to eliminate the newly formed Jewish state is described by the Palestinians as “Nakba”, the Arabic word for disaster, referring to the formation of Israel, the failed Arab war of aggression and the subsequent Palestinian refugee crisis.

The Jewish state – which in turn recognized the UN’s decision – had to accept approximately the same number of Jewish refugees in the next few years because persecution in their homelands led them to flee from the surrounding Arab countries and from Iran.

The pro-Palestinian UN resolution that this November (2022) deplored the birth of Israel passed in the General Assembly by a vote of 90-30, while 47 countries abstained. The UN General Assembly also voted to commemorate the “seventy-fifth anniversary of the Nakba”, among other things, by organizing a commemorative event in the General Assembly Hall on 15 May 2023 – the date when Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Jordan, with support troops from Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Yemen, in 1948 attacked Israel and thereby rejected the UN partition plan.

The UN resolution was backed, among other things, by the countries that defied the UN decision 75 years ago. Israel, Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States were among the countries that voted against.

Arab and Muslim states with which Israel has relations voted in favor, including Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates, writes the Times of Israel.

The proposal to commemorate the Nakba was one of five anti-Israel resolutions presented at the same time.

During 2022, 15 UN resolutions were directed at the Jewish state, compared to 13 resolutions directed at countries in the rest of the world, notes UN Watch, a Geneva-based non-governmental organization whose mission is “to monitor the performance of the United Nations according to the yardstick of its own charter”.

Compared to votes on similar texts in previous years, several countries changed their vote in favor of Israel, such as Albania, Costa Rica, Croatia, the Czech Republic, India, Italy, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. However, Australia, which previously voted in defense of Israel, went in the opposite direction.

Israel’s UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan pointed out that the General Assembly resolutions only sought to blame all the problems in the Middle East on Israel while absolving the Palestinians of any responsibility for their own situation.

– Within these resolutions, the Palestinians have planted a clause that reveals to all their distorted vision of truth, namely a request to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of Israel with a high-level event in the General Assembly Hall. It was 75 years ago that the Assembly voted on Resolution 181, through which the international community expressed its support for a Jewish state, which immediately led to an attempt by five Arab armies to destroy and annihilate Israel, he pointed out.

The day before the UN vote, Erdan opened an exhibition – the first of its kind at the UN headquarters in New York – documenting the Arab world’s expulsion of the Jews. In addition to images from the deportations, it also contains historical documentation and photos illustrating the life of Jewish communities in the Arab countries and in Iran.

In 2014, the Knesset decided to officially memorialize the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries and from Iran. The date, November 30, was chosen for the official observance – one day after November 29, the day the Partition Plan was adopted by the United Nations.

From the UN podium, Gilad Erdan reminded his listeners that the Jewish communities forced to flee weren’t rebelling against the decisions of the international community, nor were they trying to annihilate another people.