Committee on Palestinian Rights

The United Nations General Assembly announced today the makeup of a 20-member committee “On the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People” and Israeli Ambassador Chaim Herzog immediately told the Assembly session that Israel would neither cooperate with nor recognize the committee.

Only three countries on the committee–Turkey, Rumania and Malta–have diplomatic relations with Israel. The other 17 countries represent the Communist and Third World countries which have consistently voted for anti-Israel resolutions during the current Assembly session, though none of the Arab states were included. The 17 countries include Cyprus, Cuba, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, East Germany, Yugoslavia and the Ukraine.

The committee was named under Assembly Resolution 3376 on the Palestine question adopted in November. The resolution requested that the committee consider and recommend to the General Assembly a program of implementation of “the rights of the Palestinians” relative to previous UN resolutions. One of them, Resolution 3236, adopted last year, calls for the return of the Palestinians to their “homeland.”

Resolution 3376 also called on the new committee to submit its recommendations to Secretary General Kurt Waldheim no later than June 1, 1976, and also requested that Waldheim submit the report to the Security Council.

Herzog said the committee stemmed from a resolution “which is entirely one-sided, biased and partial and is a resolution which, by its very nature, is irreconcilable with the process of negotiation toward peace in the Middle East. Accordingly, we reject this committee out of hand and will have none of it.”

Herzog, in his final appearance at the current Assembly session which ends today, charged that implementation of the resolution “will destroy the present negotiating process prevailing in the Middle East,” and also would annul the existing agreements already reached in the Middle East. (By Yitzhak Rabi.)