Top UN Official Justifies Palestinian "Armed Struggle" to the General Assembly

On October 25, 2016, Ms. Rima Khalaf, head of the UN's Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, told the members of the General Assembly that she supported Palestinian "armed struggle." She made the remarks in the context of presenting her report on the "Permanent sovereignty of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and of the Arab population in the occupied Syrian Golan over their natural resources."

In her report, Ms. Khalaf – who once claimed that Hitler sought to facilitate the emigration of Jews to "Palestine" – blamed Israel for everything from the "loss of wildlife" in Gaza to the dropout rate of Palestinian students in East Jerusalem. Nowhere in her report is Hamas or the Palestinian Authority, or their continuous campaign of terror, mentioned as bearing any responsibility for the living conditions of Palestinians.

In her oral presentation to the General Assembly's Second Committee, (a committee of the whole composed of all 193 member states), she reaffirmed "the inalienable right of all peoples to self-determination, freedom, and independence...and also the legitimacy of their struggle for liberation from colonial and foreign domination and alien subjugation by all available means, including armed struggle," before lauding Desmond Tutu's comparison of Israel to the former South African apartheid government.

Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian representative would later echo this senior UN official's apartheid comparisons.

• Iran: "...[P]articularly in the West Bank the extensions and expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land lie at the heart of apartheid Israel policies and are human rights violations."
• Palestinian Representative: "Israel has managed to establish a system of apartheid..."
• Saudi Arabia: "United Nations reports mention a great number of blatant violations carried out by the Israeli occupiers as part of their military, the bellicose policies against the Palestinian people. This is a kind of apartheid."

Following Ms. Khalaf's extreme one-sided presentation, the representative of the "State of Palestine" suggested the report was not one-sided enough. He objected to the use of the phrase "Israeli security forces" instead of "Israeli occupying forces," and the use of "illegal armed Israeli settlers" instead of just "armed Israeli settlers," since, on the ground that allegedly "all settlers, without exception, practice violence."

The Palestinian representative went on to describe accusations of antisemitism against critics of Israel as "diplomatic terrorism." In his words:

"Israel does not allow representatives of the United Nations or other international organizations to work freely in the occupied Palestinian territories...This is diplomatic terrorism which is characterized by accusations of antisemitism against all of those who criticize Israel."

During the same meeting, the representative of Syria complained of Israel's assistance to "terrorists." He was referring to Israel's humanitarian efforts to save and medically treat Syrians trying to escape from Assad's brutality through the Golan Heights. He claimed:

"... the Israeli occupying authorities ... are providing logistic and medical help to the mercenaries and terrorists of Nusra Front... And also there are recent reports that say that the Israeli authorities are trying to talk the Syrian people in these zones out of their land and try to lure them out by way of migration."

Saudi Arabia made the inflammatory announcement that "Jewish people have no right to the mosque," referencing earlier comments on the "al-Aqsa Mosque" which sits in Jerusalem on Judaism's holiest site, the Temple Mount. In the tradition of classic antisemitic revisionism, the Saudi Arabian representative told the UN "any reference to the Torah in these places is based on historic 'tales' preached by the occupiers of Palestine."