Palæstina søgte i september om optagelse i FN. Nu siger en højtstående politiker i Den Palæstinensiske Befrielsesfront (PLO), at også EU skal hjælpe Palæstina og ikke bare presse til “illusorisk dialog” med Israel.
The EU should get ready for Palestine’s renewed push to upgrade its UN status and stop calling for “illusory” peace talks with Israel, a senior Palestinian politician told EUobserver Thursday.
Palestine grabbed world attention in New York last September when it asked the UN for full membership and in November when the UN’s cultural agency, UNESCO, let it join.
The UN campaign then vanished from sight. But Souheil Natour – a legal scholar and a senior politician in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) – told EUobserver in an interview that it will come back on the agenda after Palestinian elections, expected in May or June.
– [PLO chairman] Abu Mazen was initially scared off by US and Israeli threats to withhold funds. But now he is coming back to this, Natour said.
He noted that the elections will count votes from Palestinians in Israeli-occupied Gaza and the West Bank, as well as mass numbers of Palestinian refugees in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria – an act of defiance against Israel, which says the exiles can never come back because it would destroy the idea of Israel as a homeland for Jewish people.
Natour added that after elections Palestine will seek a vote in the UN General Assembly (UNGA) to upgrade its status from “non-voting organisation” to “non-voting state.”
– The EU shouldn’t pressure us to go on with the illusory process of so-called peace talks with Israel … We do not have two states because of Israel. They have no interest in a Palestinian state because they already have their own country, he said to EUobserver.
