Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called upon the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday to impose a two-state solution on Israel in order to “protect” Palestinians from Israel.
Amid a wave of Palestinian violence, incited by Fatah, the military wing of the Palestinian Authority, Abbas spoke to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. The recent wave of unprovoked attacks perpetrated by Israeli Arabs and Palestinians against Israeli citizens throughout the country did not deter Abbas from making his claims.
Abbas also said that the Palestinian Authority would continue its unilateral initiatives to achieve statehood via the international community, such as joining the International Criminal Court. He categorically rejected interim peace initiatives such as reopening negotiations with Israel.
Continuing to play the victim, Abbas called on the UN “more urgently than any time before, to set up a special regime for international protection for the Palestinian people, immediately.”
He added, “The Security Council is requested to shoulder its responsibilities and to establish a special regime of protection for the Palestinian people,” going on to say that the Palestinians “can no longer bear all these attacks” by Israel.
He signed off by asking for protection from Israel: “Protect us, protect us, we need you.”
In a reference to a recent Israeli government decision to stop returning the corpses of terrorists, Abbas told the Human Rights Committee that Israel is carrying out “extrajudicial killings against unarmed civilians and detaining their corpses.” He neglected to condemn the stabbing attacks perpetrated against Israelis or mention that many of those killed were shot while carrying out stabbing attacks against innocent civilians.
Saying that he had called for a “peaceful popular resistance”, Abbas blamed the escalation in attacks perpetrated by Palestinians in recent weeks on Israeli aggression and the failure of the international community to respond harshly against Israel. “Our people’s angry upheaval and the recent successive events are the inevitable outcome of what we had previously warned of … as well as the failure of the international community to address this injustice,” he said.
Abbas added some flare to his speech by requesting that the Security Council to set a timeline for which Israel would be forced to leave Judea and Samaria. “Is that too much to ask? Is it too much? Isn’t it high time for the international community to move from merely talking about the justice of the Palestinian cause to taking practical measures and procedures which would serve justice to my Palestinian people?” he asked.
Abbas also repeated a threat made at the United Nations a month earlier to cancel the 1993 Oslo accords if Israel did not abide by its commitments as he claimed they were failing to do.
