Palestinians commemorate 1947 UN resolution creating state of Israel on their land

Friday November 30, 2007 02:30 by Saed Bannoura - IMEMC News

On Thursday, November 29th, the Palestinian people commemorated the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people.  November 29th marks the day on which the United Nations signed a resolution in 1947 recommending the partition of Palestine to create a Jewish homeland, called Israel.

Refugees fleeing Palestine in 1948

This date is known as the beginning of the Naqba (Arabic for ‘catastrophe’), in which nearly 800,000 people were displaced from their land inside what is now Israel for the creation of that state.

According to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People was designated by the United Nations General Assembly in 1977, as an occasion to remind all of the suffering of the Palestinian people and to stress the necessity of achieving a just solution to their cause.  Such a solution, according to Abbas, must be based firstly and lastly on the principle of the right to self-determination and an end to the Israeli occupation leading to the establishment of the independent Palestinian State with East Jerusalem as its capital.

The annual commemoration of this occasion by the United Nations is a testament of the importance and centrality of the question of Palestine in relation to international peace and security.

Abbas stated on Thursday that this day was created “to underscore the necessity of bringing an end to the long suffering of our people, who paid a high price without having committed any crime. They have been living for decades either as refugees deprived of their homeland or living under occupation enduring all kinds of practices against them of oppression and subjugation, including the confiscation of their land, mass arrests campaigns and other measures and crimes which occur daily before the eyes and ears of the entire world. Generation after generation have not known the sense of freedom and have not enjoyed the least of what other peoples on earth are enjoying. The time has come to put the past behind us and to begin a new era without occupation and animosity; an era based on the logic of rights not on the logic of force.”

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