Joyous Crowds Welcome Abbas After U.N. Win
Returning in Triumph: Palestinians welcome President Mahmoud Abbas back to Ramallah after his successful bid for statehood at the U.N. Image by getty images
Joyous crowds welcomed President Mahmoud Abbas back to the West Bank on Sunday and celebrated the United Nations General Assembly’s de facto recognition of Palestinian statehood.
“Abbas, onwards, we are with you until liberation,” flag-waving Palestinian well-wishers chanted at their president, returning from the assembly which voted 138 to nine with 41 absentions on Thursday to implicitly recognise Palestine.
Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited self-rule in the territory Israel captured in a 1967 war, gave civil servants half the day off to attend celebrations at the presidential headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
The festivities included a ceremonial release of balloons in the red, green, white and black colours of the Palestinian flag into the sky. Palestinian onlooker Mohammad Stayyeh said he was there “to thank the president for the historic achievement and dream that he achieved for us and our children”.
Revelling in his most stunning diplomatic achievement in years, Abbas waved at the crowd and said, “the recognition of Palestine as a state changes a lot of facts, and aims to establish new ones.”
IMPACT LIMITED
He suggested though that in the absence of a peace deal with Israel, the largely symbolic U.N. decision may have limited impact on the ground, at least for now.
“We have to recognise that our victory provoked the powers of settlement, war and occupation,” Abbas said, alluding to an Israeli decision announced on Friday to build as many as 3,000 new settler homes on land Palestinians want for a state.
The United States joined Europe in denouncing the planned settlement expansion as counter-productive to Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, frozen since 2010.
Israel, reeling from the U.N. vote it saw as a diplomatic blow, told the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank on Sunday it would withhold Palestinian tax revenues this month worth about $100 million, a step that would add to the cash-strapped authority’s economic woes.
The authority largely depends on the tax money to pay the salaries of some 153,00 civil servants.
Israel has charged that merely by approaching the U.N. for recognition, the Palestinians violated past agreements it says bind both sides to avoid taking unilateral steps instead of seeking negotiated settlement.
Palestinian celebrations were also marred by a political split in their ranks, between Abbas, whose Western-backed Fatah movement holds sway in the West Bank, and Islamist rivals Hamas, who rule the Gaza Strip.
Hamas’ leader in exile, Khaled Meshaal, has told Reuters he plans an historic visit to Gaza next week in honour of Hamas’ 25th anniversary. Hamas rejects Israel’s right to exist, and unlike Abbas’s Fatah refuses dialogue with the Jewish state.
In his speech, Abbas said “reviving our national unity” was one of his goals ahead, and the crowd chanted calls for “an end to division”.
Meshaal, in his remarks to Reuters in Qatar on Friday, suggested Hamas’s conflict with Israel last month, in which 170 Palestinians and six Israelis were killed, had enhanced the Palestinians’ diplomatic position.
He challenged Abbas to make the U.N. step a “part of a national Palestinian strategy that includes (armed) resistance”.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
