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UNITED NATIONS — The UN Security Council on Monday revived the Palestinian Authority’s hopes of joining the United Nations as a full member.
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But the United States said relations between Israel and the Palestinians are far from ripe. That all but quashes the Palestinian Authority’s UN membership hopes for now.
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“The issue of full Palestinian membership is a decision that should be negotiated between Israel and the Palestinians,” U.S. deputy ambassador Robert Wood told reporters Monday.
After years of failed on-and-off peace talks, the Palestinians have turned to the United Nations to fulfil their dream of an independent state. Israel says such steps are an attempt to sidestep the negotiating process. Israel’s current right-wing government is dominated by hard-liners who oppose Palestinian statehood.
Supporters of the Palestinians’ request for full membership in the United Nations asked the Security Council last week to revive the application for admission submitted in 2011. The Palestinians’ fresh bid for UN membership comes as the war between Israel and Hamas that began on Oct. 7 nears its sixth month and the unresolved decades-old Palestinian-Israeli conflict remains in the spotlight after years on the back burner.
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Israel’s UN ambassador dismissed any possibility of Palestinian statehood, reducing the issue to a question of his country’s very ability to survive.
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“From well before the establishment of the UN, the Palestinians’ goal has been clear: The annihilation of the Jews,” Ambassador Gilad Erdan told reporters. The UN was founded in the wake of the Second World War and “the same genocidal ideology that this body was founded to combat is still prevalent among the Palestinians,” he said.
The Security Council decided to make a formal decision on Palestinian UN membership this month and a committee that weighs membership applications will meet again Thursday, said Malta’s UN Ambassador Vanessa Frazier, the Security Council president.
“This is a historic moment again,” said Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian UN ambassador.
President Mahmoud Abbas delivered the Palestinian Authority’s application to become the 194th member of the United Nations to then-secretary-general Ban Ki-moon on Sept. 23, 2011, before addressing world leaders at the General Assembly.
“It was a historic moment then, and now that historic moment has been revived again,” Mansour told reporters.
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