YouSaid · the spoken record

Ashrawi

lines on the record

14

first

2021-10-19

most recent

2021-10-19

sittings or episodes

1

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un-security-council

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1. “Levy said, it is time to think outside the box and stop doing more of the same, hoping for different results. The time has come for courageous and determined action, not only to undo the injustice of the past but also to chart a clear and binding course for a peaceful future of hope and redemption.”

   2021-10-19 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8883 (2021) · source

2. “Peace is not achieved by normalizing the occupation, sidelining the Palestinian question or rewarding Israel by repositioning it as a regional super-Power. Such an approach keeps in place the causes of regional instability and insecurity, while enabling Israel, as a colonial apartheid State, to superimpose greater Israel on all historic Palestine. Generation after generation, the people of Palestine have remained committed to the justice of their cause, the integrity of their narrative, the authenticity of their history and culture and their inviolable right to live in freedom and dignity as an equal among nations and in the fullness of our humanity. It is time to declaim another type of justice, invoke our collective will to activate the Charter of the United Nations and affirm the relevance of international law. As Mr.”

   2021-10-19 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8883 (2021) · source

3. “We do not shirk our responsibility to speak out against internal violence, human rights abuses, corruption or other such practices that are projected and presented by our own people. It is our responsibility to carry out democratic reform and revitalize our body politic while ending our internal divisions. This is a Palestinian imperative. And we must caution others against exploiting our shortcomings to justify Israeli crimes or international inaction or to condition any positive engagement on the creation of an ideal system of governance in Palestine while we languish under a lawless system of Israeli control. We ask that the Security Council, as trustees of the rules-based order, uphold its responsibilities, provide us with protection from aggression and empower our people to amplify their voice, both in governance and in liberation.”

   2021-10-19 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8883 (2021) · source

4. “Jerusalem is being targeted in a deliberate campaign of annexation and distortion, and now Israel brazenly declares its intent to complete the settlement siege of Jerusalem and destruction of the territorial contiguity of the West Bank with its outrageous settlement plans for E-1, Qalandria or Atarot airport, Pisgat Ze’ev and Givat Hamatos. We cannot be distracted by symbolic gestures that create false impression of progress. We have to look at reality. And claims that the time is not right or that it is difficult now to work for a peaceful solution give licence to Israel to persist in such perilous policies. And repeating the verbal commitment to the two-State solution while one State is allowed to deliberately destroy the other rings hollow. All of this does not preclude our recognition of our own shortcomings.”

   2021-10-19 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8883 (2021) · source

5. “We can talk about settlements wherever we have the numbers, but it is nothing but a collective form of expansion, polarization and invasion, of displacement and replacement, in which Israel is appropriating everything Palestinian: our homes, our land and resources, our cultural and human heritage, our archaeological sites, which we have safeguarded for centuries, our history, our cuisine, the names of our streets and most egregiously the identity of Jerusalem, as we witness in the ethnic cleansing of the Old City — Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, inter alia. Even our cemeteries have been desecrated, such as in the building of a so-called Museum of Tolerance on top of human remains in Mamilla cemetery. And Israel continues to stoke the flames of a holy war with repeated assaults on our holy sites, particularly Al-Aqsa mosque.”

   2021-10-19 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8883 (2021) · source

6. “Similarly, we cannot afford in all things we do to disregard the context of occupation and its systemic aggression as the framing device for all critical assessments and action; everything must be viewed in that context. Occupied Palestine, including Jerusalem, is the target of a comprehensive and pervasive policy of colonization and erasure.”

   2021-10-19 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8883 (2021) · source

7. “These distortions ignore the unequal and unjust laws designed to persecute Palestinians individually and collectively. They are evidenced in the defamation of our political prisoners and the targeting of their families’ livelihoods, as though Israeli military courts or prison systems have anything to do with justice or legality. Council members all know that, since 1967, over a million Palestinians have been imprisoned and over 75,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel. And yet the Council labels all these people as terrorists or not deserving of any kind of rights or attention. The mindless refrains that Israel has the right to defend itself, while the Palestinian people are denied such a right is perverse, and that the occupiers’ violence is justified as self-defence, while the occupied are stigmatized as terrorists.”

   2021-10-19 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8883 (2021) · source

8. “In the meantime, the massive disinformation machine persists in its racist, maligning and demonizing of the Palestinian people, going so far as to label all of them as terrorists, or a demographic threat, which is a dehumanizing formula exploited as a way to deny the right of millions of Palestine refugees to return. Such slander has warped political focus and discourse globally. Some States have gone off on a tangent, pursuing Palestinian textbooks for so-called incitement, as though the occupation is not a source of provocation and incitement, or adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition that conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, or criminalizing the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, or intimidating and censoring academics and solidarity activists who stand up for Palestinian rights.”

   2021-10-19 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8883 (2021) · source

9. “Israel’s impunity is further enhanced using such excuses as being the so-called only democracy in the Middle East or a strategic ally or having shared values, or even for the sake of protecting its fragile coalition. There has also been tacit and at times overt acceptance of Israel’s ideological absolutist arguments, including the invocation of religious texts as a means of dismissing and supplanting contemporary political and legal discourse and action. The so-called Jewish State law, which allocates the right to self-determination exclusively to Jews in all of historical Palestine, is therefore endorsed and normalized.”

   2021-10-19 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8883 (2021) · source

10. “Likewise, the fallacy of confidence-building measures — my apologies to Tor Wennesland on this, but I think there can be very little confidence under occupation — is misguided, since occupation breeds only contempt, distrust, resentment and resistance. The oppressed cannot be brought to trust or accept handouts from their oppressor as an alternative to enjoying their rights to freedom and justice. The misleading and flawed “both sides” argument or “both-side-ism”, as Daniel Levy put it, calling for balance in a flagrantly unbalanced situation, is another attempt at obfuscation and generating misconception, as though both occupier and occupied — oppressor or oppressed — have equal responsibility for this horrific situation.”

    2021-10-19 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8883 (2021) · source

11. “Much of the prevailing political discourse overlooks reality, as has been said, and is diverted and subsumed by chimeras and distractions proffered by Israel and its allies under such banners as economic peace, improving the quality of life, normalization, managing the conflict, containing the conflict or even shrinking the conflict. These fallacies must be dismantled. Volatile situations of injustice and oppression do not shrink; they expand and explode with disastrous consequences. Similarly, the delusion of imposing calm under siege and systemic aggression, particularly as in Gaza, is an oxymoron, for calm or security, on the one hand, and occupation or captivity, on the other, are antithetical and irreconcilable.”

    2021-10-19 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8883 (2021) · source

12. “It is therefore imperative that the Security Council consider where it has gone wrong and what it can do to correct course and serve the cause of justice and peace, particularly in addressing the core issues and thinking outside the box, as my colleague Daniel Levy has again said. Undoubtedly, the absence of accountability for Israel and of protection for the Palestinian people has enabled Israeli impunity to ride roughshod over the rights of an entire nation, allowing for the perpetuation of a permanent-settler colonial occupation.”

    2021-10-19 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8883 (2021) · source

13. “Nevertheless, I do appreciate the opportunity to communicate in a candid manner, not to recite endless statistics — Council members have them — nor to reiterate the ongoing pain of the people deprived of their basic rights, actually including even the right to speak out. They have been admonished not to whine or complain as a means of silencing the victim. The tragedy is that Council members know all of this, yet it has had minimal impact, if any, on the horrific conditions in occupied Palestine. I imagine it must be disheartening and frustrating for the United Nations and its members to find themselves trapped in the cycle of deliberate disdain and futility.”

    2021-10-19 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8883 (2021) · source

14. “Ms. Ashrawi: I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to address the Council today, especially to the Republic of Kenya for this kind invitation. As Council members have been hearing for over 70 years, the United Nations and its various bodies have been seized of the Palestine question, repeatedly reviewing conditions, as we have heard by our colleague Tor Wennesland and his predecessors, adopting resolutions, including resolution 2334 (2016), and dispatching fact-finding missions to no avail. Sadly, the Security Council has been unable to assert its authority, allowing this injustice to become a perpetual tragic human moral, political and legal travesty. It would therefore be disingenuous of me to come before the Council assuming I could inform its members of something that they do not already know.”

    2021-10-19 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.8883 (2021) · source