Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority spoke at the United Nations before the General Assembly voted on Palestine's status as a “nonmember observer state” on Thursday.
UNITED NATIONS — An overwhelming majority of countries are expected on Thursday to vote to recognize Palestine as a “nonmember observer state” at the United Nations. Palestinian leaders say the step advances a two-state solution with Israel, but Israeli and American officials condemn it as detrimental to peaceful coexistence.
President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, speaking to the United Nations General Assembly before the vote, called the moment a “last chance” to save the two-state solution and said that the window of opportunity was narrowing.
“The General Assembly is called upon today to issue a birth certificate of the reality of the State of Palestine,” he said just before the vote was scheduled to take place.
The resolution is expected to win backing from a number of European countries, among them France, Spain and Switzerland — a rebuff to intense American and Israeli diplomacy. Others, like Germany, say they will abstain, and a tiny handful of countries are expected to join Israel and the United States in voting no.
The resolution comes shortly after an eight-day Israeli military assault on Gaza that Israel described as a response to stepped-up rocket fire into Israel. The operation killed scores of Palestinians and was aimed at reducing the arsenal of Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, a part of the territory that the United Nations resolution expects to make up a future state of Palestine.
Mr. Abbas directed harsh criticism toward Israel, saying that the “aggression against our people in the Gaza Strip has confirmed once again the urgent and pressing need to end the Israeli occupation and for our people to gain their freedom and independence.”
“This aggression also confirms the Israeli Government’s adherence to the policy of occupation, brute force and war, which in turn obliges the international community to shoulder its responsibilities toward the Palestinian people and toward peace,” Mr. Abbas said early in his speech.
The Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank city of Ramallah, was politically weakened by the Gaza fighting, with its rivals in Hamas seen by many Palestinians as more willing to stand up to Israel and fight back. That shift in sentiment is one reason that some Western countries give for backing the United Nations resolution, to strengthen Mr. Abbas and his more moderate colleagues in their contest with Hamas.
“We have not heard one word from any Israeli official expressing any sincere concern to save the peace process,” Mr. Abbas said.
“On the contrary, our people have witnessed, and continue to witness, an unprecedented intensification of military assaults, the blockade, settlement activities and ethnic cleansing, particularly in Occupied East Jerusalem, and mass arrests, attacks by settlers and other practices by which this Israeli occupation is becoming synonymous with an apartheid system of colonial occupation, which institutionalizes the plague of racism and entrenches hatred and incitement.”
“The moment has arrived for the world to say clearly: Enough of aggression, settlements and occupation,” he said.
The vote is taking place exactly 65 years after the General Assembly voted to divide the former British Mandate of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab — a vote that Israel considers the international seal of approval for its birth.
At the time, Arabs rejected the division of the land and the creation of Israel. But since the late 1980s, the Palestine Liberation Organization has officially endorsed two states, with the state of Palestine defined as comprising the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza — areas beyond Israel’s pre-1967 borders that it captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
Mr. Abbas said the Palestinians wanted to breathe new life into the negotiations. He said the Palestinians would accept “no less than the independence of the State of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, on all the Palestinian territory occupied in 1967, to live in peace and security alongside the State of Israel,” adding they were also seeking a solution to the refugee issue based on the resolutions.
U.N. Will Vote on Status for Palestinians, Defying U.S.
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U.N. Will Vote on Status for Palestinians, Defying U.S.
