The Palestinians will raise their flag at the United Nations (UN) on Wednesday in what president Mahmud Abbas calls a beacon of hope at a time of growing despair of achieving an independent state. But the peace process must be multilateral.
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The Palestinian leader’s address comes against a background of further clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinians at a disputed holy site.
Abbas will be addressing the UNGA on Wednesday, with his article in The Huffington Post indicating that Abbas is ready to take a stronger stand in reference to Palestinian statehood.
The comprehensive matrix of claimed violations, seen by the Guardian, was compiled in July and has been shared with USA and European officials, among others, and is expected to form the basis of Abbas’s speech.
He has put down rumors that he intends to cancel the 1993 Oslo Accords on the grounds that they have failed to achieve a Palestinian state. The same poll also showed 57% of Palestinians support a return to an armed intifada in the absence of peace negotiations, up from 49% three months ago.
In the opinion piece, the Palestinian leader accused the nations of the world of abandoning the Palestinian people and leaving them to suffer Israeli “ethnic cleansing” that is, he said, worse than apartheid.
Abbas’s speech, however, has come to be viewed as a painful metaphor for his mounting political problems at home, faced with both a moribund peace process and growing dissatisfaction among Palestinians over Abbas’s tactics in the past decade to secure a Palestinian state. India was one of the first countries to recognize the State of Palestine in 1988.
“Something has to really shake things up, and preferably for all players involved, it should be a shake-up that is nonviolent to the greatest extent that it can be”, he said. Not when the stars align in the Israeli government.
A peaceful, fair and just solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict exists. “Liberation for the Palestinians, the basic rights of the Palestinians, is not something that we can put off until tomorrow”, Munayyer said. Al-Aqsa is the third-holiest site in Islam but known to Jews as the Temple Mount, the most sacred in Judaism. Under a longstanding arrangement, Jews are allowed to visit but not pray there.
“But today, fewer and fewer people abide by that, and there’s a greater eagerness among Israel’s nationalist religious camp to go up to the Temple Mount”, Kampeas said.
In recent weeks, there have been clashes at the al-Aqsa mosque complex in East Jerusalem.
The latest violence broke out just prior to the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, which always brings more visitors to the compound. Israel has barred Muslim men under the age of 50 from entering the compound in recent days in a move it says is aimed at easing tensions.
The clashes outside Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, saw dozens of youths throw stones at Israeli soldiers, who responded with water cannon and rubber bullets, an AFP journalist reported.
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In Ramallah, about 300 protesters affiliated with Fatah marched toward the Israeli settlement of Bet El.
