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.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Most Popular
- 1
News Student protesters being deported are not ‘martyrs and heroes,’ says former antisemitism envoy
- 2
News Who is Alan Garber, the Jewish Harvard president who stood up to Trump over antisemitism?
- 3
Fast Forward Suspected arsonist intended to beat Gov. Josh Shapiro with a sledgehammer, investigators say
- 4
Politics Meet America’s potential first Jewish second family: Josh Shapiro, Lori, and their 4 kids
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion Why can Harvard stand up to Trump? Because it didn’t give in to pro-Palestinian student protests
-
Culture How an Israeli dance company shaped a Catholic school boy’s life
-
Fast Forward Brooklyn event with Itamar Ben-Gvir cancelled days before Israeli far-right minister’s US trip
-
Culture How Abraham Lincoln in a kippah wound up making a $250,000 deal on ‘Shark Tank’
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.