Palestinian Authority is re-evaluating its ties with the United States after the Biden administration blocked its bid late Thursday night to be recognized as a full-fledged member of the United Nations.
“The Palestinian leadership will reconsider bilateral relations with the United States to ensure the protection of our people's interests, our cause, and our rights,” PA President Mahmoud Abbas told WAFA, the Palestine News & Information Agency.
A new strategy will be developed to “protect Palestinian national decisions independently and follow a Palestinian agenda rather than an American vision or regional agendas,” Abbas said.
He spoke after the US cast the only no vote on a Security Council resolution to grant membership to the Palestinians. The United Kingdom and Switzerland abstained.
The resolution had the support of 12 of the UNSC members, including France. The US, however, is one of five UNSC members with veto power and its rejection of the resolution was enough to prevent its passage.
Tensions have been high between the US and the PA over Washington’s strong support for the IDF’s military operation to destroy Hamas in Gaza and its failure to unilaterally recognize Palestinian statehood.
Palestine statehood bid: UN dynamics
Some 139 UN member states recognize Palestine as a state, but Security Council approval is a necessary step for membership. Already in 2012 UN General Assembly recognized Pauline as a non-member state, a move which granted it de-facto recognition and allowed it to operate as a state within the UN, albeit one without full rights.
The PA pushed for full statehood recognition on Thursday, for the first time in 12 years, in a bid to maximize growing support among Western countries for unilateral Palestinian statehood in light of the Israel-Hamas war.
Although Hamas began the war with its invasion of Israel on October 7, killing over 1,200 people and seizing 253 hostages, international public sympathy has been with the Palestinians in Gaza in light of the high fatality count of over 33,000. Israel has said that over 13,000 of those are combatants.
Abbas told WAFA that US policy stands "have generated unprecedented anger among the Palestinian people and the region's populations, potentially pushing the region towards further instability, chaos, and terrorism.”
China's foreign minister Wang Yi on Saturday said, ”A prompt admission of Palestine into the United Nations is a move to rectify a prolonged historical injustice," state media Xinhua quoted Wang as saying.
In Seoul on Friday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the Biden administration was committed to Palestinian statehood but believed it should be done through a peace process toward a two-state resolution to the conflict.
“The resolution that was voted at the Security Council will have no effect on actually moving things forward and achieving a Palestinian state. Again, that can only be accomplished by diplomatic means.”
“We’ve been working on that, including as part of a potential normalization process between Israel and Saudi Arabia – something that we’ve intensely engaged on over the last several months and weeks,” he stated.
Blinken also noted that had the Biden administration supported the text, it would have been bound under law to cut all funding to the UN.
“Even if we had wanted to vote for this resolution, had we done so, under our law it would have obligated us to cut off all of our funding to the United Nations – clearly not in the interests of anyone, including the Palestinians, particularly given the contributions we make to programs that are vital to them,” Blinken stated.
Palestinian statehood efforts
At the UNSC in New York late Thursday US Ambassador Robert Wood said there were “unresolved questions as to whether the applicant [the PA] meets the criteria to be considered a State.”
“We have long called on the Palestinian Authority to undertake necessary reforms to help establish the attributes of readiness for statehood and note that Hamas – a terrorist organization – is currently exerting power and influence in Gaza, an integral part of the state envisioned in this resolution.”
“The United States continues to strongly support a two-state solution. This vote does not reflect opposition to Palestinian statehood, but instead is an acknowledgment that it will only come from direct negotiations between the parties.”
Palestinian Authority Ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour pushed back at Wood, stating that UN membership for his people was an “investment in peace.”
“The people of Palestine will not disappear. We will not be buried” or “erased,” he stated.
“We came to the Security Council today at an important historic moment, regionally and internationally, so that we could salvage what can be saved,” Mansour stated.
“We place before you before a historic responsibility to establish the fountains just and comprehensive peace in our region,’ he explained.
Mansour reaffirmed the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to a two-state resolution to the conflict and called for an International conference to advance a peace process for two states based on the pre-1967 lines.
“But the question remains: is there a true partner for peace in Israel?” he asked. “Is there a partner in peace with us in Israel?”
He spoke at a time when most of the Israeli government opposed Palestinian statehood.
“Israel believes that the state of Palestine is a permanent strategic threat to it and will do its best to block the sovereignty of a Palestinian state,” he said.
“It is up to you now to determine who loves peace and who is the enemy of peace?” Mansour said.
He warned that delaying UN membership would give Israel the time it needed to “annex Palestinian land will give it the immunity to evict the people [Palestinians] and kill them?”
Israel's response to Palestinian statehood bid
Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, thanked the United States for blocking the resolution, explaining that the PA “does not meet even the most basic criteria and “has no authority over their territory.”
The PA, he said, is a “terror-loving entity” that had a policy of issuing monthly stipends to Palestinians who have killed civilians in terror attacks.
“The Palestinian representative [Mansour] called Hamas, his brothers after the [October 7 massacre]. They don't even recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. You won't find even one Palestinian leader who will tell you that he recognizes Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state,” Erdan said.
He warned UNSC members who supported unilateral Palestinian statehood that they were emboldening the PA to reject future peace process offers, such as it had done in the past.
“Please remember this the next time that Palestinians reject another peace plan or refuse to even come to the negotiating table,” he stated.
Reuters contributed to this report