Arab delegates participating in the Security Council’s Middle East debate appeared today to be aiming for a new resolution or an expansion of Resolution 242 that, would emphasize the right of the Palestinians to self-determination in any solution of the Middle East conflict.
This strategy became evident in the opening speech last week of Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohammed H. el-Zayyat and was continued at this morning’s session by the representative of Kuwait, Abdalla Yaccoub Bishara, and the Algerian Foreign Minister, Abdel Aziz Boutiflika.
It was el-Zayyat last Thursday who introduced the concept of “secure and recognized borders” for the Palestinians and implied that the only valid borders for Israel were those specified in the UN’s 1947 partition resolution. Bishara today claimed that the root of the Middle East tragedy was “denial of the rights of the Palestinians in their homeland.”
He claimed that peace would come to the region only when Israel abandoned its policy of acquiring territory by force. But he implied that the rights of the Palestinians were more important than the territorial dispute. He quoted former Premier David Ben Gurion, Premier Golda Meir and Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan to “prove” that Israel is a state that negates the right of statehood in Palestine for peoples other than Jews.
The Algerian Foreign Minister denounced Israel as a “colonialist, imperialist” country. He insisted that the main problem in the Middle East is the dispossession of the Palestinian people from their homeland.
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