Debate at the United Nations Security Council on Thursday centered on the question of whether to approve a resolution recommending that Palestine be admitted as a full member of the United Nations, a recognition of statehood the Palestinians have long sought.
But as expected, the United States will vote no, the State Department said. The U.S. has veto power over the council, meaning the resolution will be dead on arrival.
The 15-member council started to vote later in the day on the draft resolution, which recommends to the U.N. General Assembly that “the state of Palestine be admitted to membership of the United Nations.”
A majority of U.N. member states already recognize Palestinian statehood. But the U.S. has long maintained that it will only do so as part of a negotiated agreement with Israel, and not through any U.N. resolution.
During the morning debate, a top Palestinian official, Ziad Abu Amr, challenged the United States on its opposition, asking how giving Palestine the same U.N. status that Israel has long enjoyed could damage prospects for peace.
“How could this recognition and this membership harm international peace and security?” Mr. Abu Amr asked. The passage of the resolution, he added, “would insist on respecting international law, human rights and the right of the Palestinian people to live in freedom and dignity.”
Mr. Abu Amr pointed out that Israel itself was established through a U.N. resolution, not through negotiations. He was referring to Resolution 181, which called for Palestine to be partitioned into a Jewish state and an Arab state. It was passed by the U.N. General Assembly in 1947, and Israel was admitted as a full member of the U.N. in 1949.
Palestine was granted the lesser status of a nonmember observer state in 2012. The previous year, it had tried to gain full membership but failed to secure the votes of at least nine of the council’s 15 members. Even if Palestine had been able to secure the votes at the time, the U.S. had said it would veto the effort.
The State Department confirmed on Thursday that the United States would also veto the revived Palestinian bid, more than a decade later.
“It remains the U.S. view that the most expeditious path toward statehood for the Palestinian people is through direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority with the support of the United States and other partners,” Vedant Patel, a State Department spokesman, told reporters at a news briefing.
The fresh effort for Palestinian statehood comes six months into Israel’s devastating military offensive in Gaza, which has displaced more than three-quarters of its entire population, forced hundreds of thousands to the brink of famine, and killed nearly 34,000 people, including nearly 14,000 children, according to local health officials and the U.N.
The push also comes as Israel expands its settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are widely recognized as illegal under international law, and where the U.N. says Palestinians are facing record rates of violence.
Israel’s actions in the West Bank “risk undermining the contiguity of a future Palestinian state and deny hope to a generation of Palestinians,” António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, told the Security Council. He urged an end to the occupation and the establishment of a “sovereign Palestinian State, with Gaza as an integral part,” saying the international community had a moral obligation to help establish a separate state for Palestinians.
Israel has remained fiercely opposed to the establishment of such a state, despite growing international support. The Israeli ambassador to the U.N., Gilad Erdan, on Thursday denounced not only the draft resolution but the United Nations itself for taking up the matter, calling it a “prize for terror.”
“The only thing that forced, unilateral recognition of a Palestinian State will do is to make any future negotiations almost impossible,” Mr. Erdan said, accusing the Palestinian Authority of supporting and perpetrating the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks and the U.N. of being committed to “multi-terrorism” rather than multilateralism.
Several Arab nations also spoke in strong support of the draft resolution on Palestinian membership, which was put forth by Algeria, the only Arab member of the Security Council. Palestinian statehood is a “historic right,” Algeria’s foreign minister, Ahmed Attaf, told the body. “The lack of implementation of this right is the cause of the prolongation of this Arab-Israeli conflict,” he said.
