Palestinian Flag Raised at United Nations for First Time
The Palestinian flag was raised outside the United Nations headquarters in New York for the first time.
The ceremony on Wednesday afternoon was attended by diplomats in the U.N.’s Rose Garden shortly after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly, criticized Israel and said that the Palestinians were no longer bound by the Oslo Accords.
On Thursday, the flag will be hung in a permanent location alongside U.N. member flags, CNN reported.
The General Assembly voted 119-8 on Sept. 10 to allow the Palestinian flag at headquarters. Israel and the United States were among the dissenters, along with Canada and Australia.
Since 2012, the Palestinian Authority has had nonmember observer status at the world body. The Vatican, which is also a nonmember observer, won the flag-raising right in the same vote as the Palestinian Authority and raised its flag on Friday without ceremony.
Abbas dedicated Wednesday’s ceremony to “the martyrs, the prisoners and the wounded, and to those who gave their lives while trying to raise this flag,” Al Jazeera reported. Hundreds of Palestinians gathered in Yasser Arafat Square in the West Bank city of Ramallah to watch a live broadcast of the ceremony on a large screen.
Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Council, told Al Jazeera that the flag raising was as “an important symbolic step.”
“In essence, it will honor the many Palestinians who were killed by Israel while trying to raise that flag in the occupied Palestinian territories,” he said.
Before the Sept. 10 vote, Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told the General Assembly that “raising the Palestinian flag outside the U.N. headquarters is not an alternative to negotiations and will not bring [Israel and the Palestinians] closer to peace.”
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
