The August 29 decision by the Trump administration to deny visas to Palestinian leaders and staff invited to attend the U.N. General Assembly is ill-advised and reflects a brazen attempt to silence Palestinian political voices.
Marco Rubio, the current secretary of state and one of the biggest beneficiaries of the pro-Israel lobby while running for office (receiving over $1 million as of March 2024 from AIPAC), abused America’s obligations to the United Nations by denying visas to a moderate Palestinian leader, President Mahmoud Abbas, and 80 other Palestinian officials.
The denial is based on a flimsy rationale, as articulated by the secretary. The official statement noted that Palestinians “must repudiate terrorism, including the October 7 attacks, before being considered partners for peace.” Yet under Abbas, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority leadership has consistently condemned terrorism and adopted nonviolence, and, as recently as July 29, it went further by supporting the French-Saudi initiative calling for Hamas’s disarmament and “its exclusion from Palestinian governance.”
Denying a visa to a U.N. invitee whose country (Palestine) has been recognized by the U.N. General Assembly as a non-member state exposes an unholy collusion between the United States and Israel. The U.S. is making a terrible mistake by siding without reservation with a far-right-wing Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, both of whom face arrest warrants sought by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for war crimes.
The visa ban came at the same time that a further ban on all Palestinian passport holders wishing to come to the U.S. for medical or educational purposes was imposed by the same secretary of state. France’s President Emanuel Macron and other Western leaders have called on President Trump to reverse the decision and allow Palestinian leaders to make their case for Palestinian statehood as the best way to bring peace to the Middle East.
What is very worrying is that such an unusual act is aimed squarely at suppressing Palestinian nationalism. For more than three decades, bipartisan U.S. policy upheld the two-state solution as the key to peace. Now the Trump administration is actively working with Israel to extinguish Palestinian aspirations for statehood. Former U.S. diplomat in the Middle East Ed Abington called the decision punitive and argued that it aims to liquidate the Palestinian cause. Posting on his Facebook page, Abington said, “I have worked on the Israeli Palestinian issue on and off since 1970, and I’ve never seen such a punitive policy towards Palestinians in the last 55 years. I can only conclude that the Trump and Netanyahu regimes have developed a plan to try to liquidate the Palestinian cause following the catastrophic Hamas October 7 attack and Israel’s genocidal military campaign against Palestinians in Gaza.”
This is not the first time that Palestinian leaders have been denied a visa to the U.N. in New York.
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan blocked Yasser Arafat from addressing the body in New York, a decision that forced the UNGA to move its session to the U.N.’s Geneva site. What is different, however, is that Trump is banning a Palestinian leader whose organization, the Palestinian Authority, and the umbrella Palestine Liberation Organization, are recognized internationally, have direct ties with Washington, and cooperate with Americans and Israelis on political security and even on intelligence.
The irony is that the American decision to silence Palestinian leaders comes at a time when Israel has been physically eliminating Palestinian journalists. Israel has killed more than 200 journalists in the past two years, including five in a hospital bombing just last week—all on the eve of a breakthrough among Western countries to recognize Palestine.
Already, 146 countries have recognized Palestine, and by the end of September, four-fifths of U.N. member states and most permanent members of the Security Council are expected to do so, including, this year, Australia, Canada, and the U.K. The U.S. and Israel are furious that the world is finally delivering on its long-stated commitment to a two-state solution, while Washington clings to leaders accused of genocide and man-made famine in Gaza.
Hanan Ashrawi, legislator and veteran of the Oslo peace talks, condemned the move: “Instead of expelling Israel as a rogue state from the U.N. and all its agencies, the U.S. is denying Palestinian representatives access to the U.N. for daring to seek accountability, protection, and justice.”
Matt Duss, vice president of the Center for International Policy, called the U.S. position “a perfect expression of decades of U.S. policy toward the Palestinians: We’ll punish you for violence, but we’ll also punish you for nonviolence.”
The Trump administration and the Netanyahu government appear to share an identical policy: denying Palestinians a voice, whether through the killing of journalists or the denial of visas to nonviolent leaders advocating for a peaceful Palestinian state living side by side with Israel. The real danger is that by its policy, the United States appears to be supporting the Israeli occupiers’ efforts to remove Palestinians from their homeland and erase Palestinian nationalism.
But none of this will quash the national aspirations of Palestinians for freedom and statehood. As goes the common saying in Spain, a country that has already recognized Palestine, attempts to deny these rights are like trying to “tapar el sol con un dedo,” or “to cover the sun with a finger.”
The post The World Is Recognizing Palestine. The U.S. Is Banning Its Leader. appeared first on New Republic.
