Palestinians Headed for UN Flag Victory
The Palestinian Authority’s draft resolution for raising its flag at the U.N. headquarters will easily pass a vote by the world body’s general assembly, diplomats said.
Israel and the United States oppose the Palestinian Authority’s bid to have its flag at the United Nations headquarters in New York, but diplomats serving there told the Agence France-Presse news agency that the Palestinian draft resolution on the matter will easily pass at the 193-member voting forum when it brought up on Sept. 10, AFP reported Friday.
Ahead of a U.N. General Assembly vote, Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Ron Prosor, wrote a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Sam Kutesa, the General Assembly’s president, to block the move, which would break with the U.N. practice of flying only the flags of member states.
The Palestinian move was an attempt to “score easy and meaningless points” Prosor wrote, adding that this was “not the path to statehood, this is not the way for peace,” AFP reported.
The Palestinian observer mission to the United Nations on Wednesday appealed to the world body’s member states to support its call to be allowed to fly its flag at U.N. headquarters as a “non-member observer state” – a status that the Palestinian Authority obtained in 2012 following a general assembly vote.
“We … respectfully appeal to the member states of the General Assembly to support the draft resolution on the raising of the flags of the non-member observer states,” the Palestinian mission’s statement said.
The U.S. State Department on Tuesday described the Palestinian flag initiative as “counterproductive.”
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is scheduled to visit the U.N. headquarters on Sept. 30.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO