Palestinian-Israeli Conflict in the UN General Assembly

• 10.02.2015, 18:38
•  Near East,  World

It is obvious that during the UN General Assembly's 70th session the conflicts of the Middle East have a key role. This platform is also used by Israel and Palestine for speaking about their problems. Particularly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his speech to the UN General Assembly "called on Palestinians to resume peace process as soon as possible and solve the conflict that lasted so many years". "I am prepared to immediately resume direct peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority without any preconditions whatsoever. Unfortunately, President Abbas said that he is not prepared to do this," Haaretz quotes Netanyahu's words. 

In his turn, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas noticed in his speech that in light of Israeli policy in the West Bank, the PA would not keep the agreements it signed with Israel over the past 20 years. PA President said his people were no longer bound by mutual agreements with Israel, including the Oslo Peace Accords, which created the foundation for the Middle East peace process. Abbas accused Israel of having systematically violated these pacts, the New York Times reports.  Abbas said that there was no reason that the Palestinians should remain faithful to these accords as long as the Israelis were not.

At the same time Palestinian-Israeli conflict remains the center of the US attention. As AP reports, the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement is "not an impossible dream" and can be achieved. Kerry said the United States is committed to backing negotiations that would lead to a two-state solution. He said now that the Iran nuclear deal has been concluded, the Obama administration will resume efforts to get the two sides talking again.

It should be noticed that earlier in the interview to the London-based "Al-Quds Al-Arabi" newspaper Abbas spoke about US Secretary of State John Kerry's initiated Israeli-Palestinian talks, which collapsed in 2014 without any progress. The main reason for the failure of negotiations, according to the Palestinian leader, was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's demand to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. "If Israel is a Jewish state, then no one should be surprised if Gaza faces The Islamic state," Abbas said.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict was also discussed in the UN General Assembly by the Middle East Quartet. Representatives of the Quartet – United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, United States Secretary of State John Kerry, European Union High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy Federica Mogherini – met in New York. They called on Israel and Palestine to take steps that will contribute to the settlement of the conflict based on two-state principle.

However, taking into consideration the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, including the wars in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, analysts do not expect positive changes in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the visible future.