Yosef Tekoah, Address to the United Nations General Assembly, New York, 13 November 1974

Mr. TEKOAH (Israel): I come before the General Assembly on behalf of a nation which has struggled through 20 centuries for its liberty and equality and for the restoration of its independence. I rise to speak in the name of a people, which having at long last regained its freedom and sovereignty in its national homeland, remains embattled, beleaguered by those who deny to it the rights of all nations. One third of the entire Jewish people was annihilated in the Second World War, which gave birth to the United Nations. A million Jewish soldiers in the Allied armies and in partisan ranks helped make the United Nations a reality. Representatives of the Jewish people were among those who drafted the Charter of the United Nations.

26. Yet today Arab States, most of which knew not the struggle that made the world safe for the United Nations; Arab States, some of whose leaders collaborated with the forces of darkness in their fight against the United Nations, are in the vanguard of a fanatical assault on the Jewish people, an assault that tramples to dust the ideals of the United Nations.

27. On 14 October 1974 the General Assembly turned its back on the United Nations Charter, on law and humanity, and virtually capitulated to a murder organization which aims at the destruction of a State Member of the United Nations. On 14 October the United Nations hung out a sign reading "Murderers of children are welcome here."

28. Today these murderers have come to the General Assembly, certain that it would do their bidding. Today this rostrum was defiled by their chieftain, who proclaimed that the shedding of Jewish blood would end only when the murderers' demands had been accepted and their objectives achieved.

29. On 14 October, the United Nations and Governments that made the invitation to the PLO possible became the object of world-wide criticism. Editorials and caricatures in the press and demonstrations on all continents expressed revulsion at the spectacle of the United Nations tearing asunder its own principles and precepts and paying homage to bloodshed and bestiality.

30. Today bloodshed and bestiality have come here to collect the spoils of the United Nations surrender. This surrender must be absolute they told the world this morning. The victim of bloodshed and bestiality should not even defend himself.

31. The United Nations is entrusted with the responsibility of guiding mankind away from war, away from violence and oppression, towards peace, towards international understanding and the vindication of the rights of peoples and individuals. What remains of that responsibility now that the United Nations has prostrated itself before the PLO, which stands for premeditated, deliberate murder of innocent civilians, denies to the Jewish people its right to live, and seeks to destroy the Jewish State by armed force?

32. Throughout the years, the United Nations has dealt with the problems of many peoples in many parts of the world. On no people, however, has it lavished greater attention than on the Arab inhabitants of Palestine.

33. Is it because the problems of others have been solved?

34. Has the Kurdish people, subjected to a continuing war of annihilation by the Iraqi Government, ever had its plight discussed and its rights upheld by the United Nations? Has this Organization tried to avert the massacre of half a million non-Muslim Africans in South Sudan? Have the fundamental human and political rights of the hundreds of millions who live under totalitarian regimes been ensured by the United Nations?

35. Is it because the needs of others are less pressing and less deserving than the needs of the Palestinians?

36. Are the Arabs of Palestine suffering starvation as are, according to United Nations statistics, almost 500 million people in Asia, Africa and Latin America? Has the United Nations left the Palestinian refugees without assistance as it has tens of millions of refugees all over the world, including Jewish refugees in Israel from Arab lands? Are the Palestinian refugees the only ones who cannot be reintegrated as others have been? Have the Palestinian Arabs no State of their own? What is Jordan if not a Palestinian Arab State?

37. The real reason for the special consideration accorded to questions concerning the Arabs of Palestine has been one and one only -- the continuous exploitation of these questions as a weapon of Arab belligerency against Israel. As King Hussein said of the Arab leaders: '-They have used the Palestine people for selfish political purposes". This is also the real motivation of the present debate.

38. In fact, no nation has enjoyed greater fulfilment of its political rights, no nation has been endowed with territory, sovereignty and independence more abundantly than the Arabs.

39. Of common language, culture, religion and origin the Arab nation stormed out of its birthland in the seventh century and conquered one people after another until its rule encompassed the entire Arab peninsula, the Fertile Crescent and North Africa.

40. Everywhere in these areas ancient cultures were replaced by the Arab civilization. Everywhere the vanquished were, with a few exceptions, assimilated into the Arab nation. There was, however, one people which refused to disappear and to shed its national identity. Whether in the Land of Israel or in regions such as present-day Yemen, Iraq, the Syrian Arab Republic, Egypt and Morocco, the Jewish people maintained its national personality and preserved its own culture and faith.

41. Now, as a result of centuries of acquisition of territory by war, the Arab nation is represented in the United Nations by 20 sovereign States. Among them is also the Palestinian Arab State of Jordan.

42. Geographically and ethnically Jordan is Palestine. Historically both the West and East banks of the Jordan river are parts of the Land of Israel or Palestine. Both were parts of Palestine under the British Mandate until Jordan and then Israel became independent. The population of Jordan is composed of two elements -- the sedentary population and nomads. Both are, of course, Palestinian. The nomad Bedouins constitute a minority of Jordan's population. Moreover, the majority of the sedentary inhabitants, even on the East Bank, are of Palestinian West Bank origin. Without the Palestinians, Jordan is a State without a people.

43. That is why when, on 29 April 1950, King Abdullah inaugurated the commemorative session of the Jordanian Parliament he declared: "I open the session of the Parliament with both banks of the Jordan united by the will of one people, one homeland and one hope".

44. On 23 August 1959, the Prime Minister of Jordan stated: "We are the Government of Palestine, the army of Palestine and the refugees of Palestine".

45. Indeed, the vast majority of Palestinian refugees never left Palestine, but moved, as a result of the 1948 and 1967 wars, from one part of the country to another. At the same time, an approximately equal number of Jewish refugees fled from Arab countries to Israel.

46. It is, therefore, false to allege that the Palestinian people has been deprived of a State of its own or that it has been uprooted from its national homeland. Most Palestinians continue to live in Palestine. Most Palestinians continue to live in a Palestinian State. The vast majority of Palestinian Arabs are citizens of that Palestinian State.

47. "Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan", declared on 9 December 1970 the late Dr. Kadri Toukan, a prominent West Bank leader and former Foreign Minister of Jordan.

48. Mr. Anwar Nuseibe, another Palestinian West Bank personality and a former Jordanian Defence Minister, stated on 23 October 1970:

            "The Jordanians are also Palestinians. This is one State. This is one people. The name is not important. The families living in Salt, Irbid and Karak maintain not only family and matrimonial ties with the families in Nablus and Hebron. They are one people."

49. This is recognized even by the PLO Covenant, and the Rabat resolutions2 do not alter this reality.

50. Even if the appellation "Palestinian" were confined to the West Bank, there is today, as already indicated, an overwhelming preponderance of Palestinians of West Bank descent in the population of the East Bank, as well as in the Jordanian Government. For instance, Queen Alia, Prime Minister Rifa'i, more than half of the Cabinet Ministers and of the members of Parliament, the Speaker of the Parliament, the Mayor of Amman, all hail from the West Bank.

51. Certain Palestinians might be unhappy with their system of Government, with the constitutional structure of their State or with its leadership. This, however, can in no way substantiate a claim that the Palestinian Arabs have been shorn of their rights as a people. Like all other branches of the Arab nation, the Palestinians too possess the political entity within which they exercise their national, political and cultural rights. To the extent that some of their needs have not been fully satisfied, to the extent that some aspects of their national identity require solutions, they could be dealt with in the context of negotiations between Israel and its eastern neighbour, the Palestinian State of Jordan.

52. In these circumstances it is obvious that the initiators of the discussion of the so-called question of Palestine are concerned primarily not with the realization of the rights of the Palestinians but with the annulment of the rights of the Jewish people. Israel's destruction and the denial to the people of Israel of its rights to self-determination and independence are the officially enunciated objectives of the PLO, at whose behest the Arab Governments have asked for this debate. By doing so, by initiating the invitation extended to the PLO and by the decisions adopted at the recent Rabat Conference,2 the Arab Governments have reaffirmed their association with the umbrella organization of the Arab murder squads. This is not surprising. The PLO did not emerge from within the Palestinian community. It is not representative of the Palestinian community. It is a creation of the Arab Governments themselves. It was established at the first summit meeting of the heads of Arab States at Cairo in 1964 as an instrument for waging terror warfare against Israel. Its Covenant stipulates: "The establishment of Israel is fundamentally null and void. The claim of historical or spiritual ties between Jews and Palestine does not tally with historical realities. The Jews are not one people with an independent personality". In the pursuit of its objectives the PLO employs the barbaric method of deliberate murder of guiltless civilians. This is not the accidental loss of civilian lives that occurs in warfare against military targets, but wilful, cold-blooded, carefully prepared, bestial assaults on innocent and defenceless children, women and men in towns and villages, in schools and market places, at airports, in the air and on the ground. No wonder that associations of anti-Nazi freedom-fighters have repeatedly condemned the PLO atrocities as crimes reminiscent of Nazi savagery.

53. Support for the murderous ideology and sinister objectives of the PLO is expressed in the United Nations in various terms. References are frequently made to "the root problem" of the Palestinian question, a euphemism for Israel's statehood. On occasion, speakers lash out unabashedly against Israel's independence, slander it as colonialism, call for its replacement by a second Palestinian Arab State, in addition to Jordan. At times, the terms employed are more general, such as restoration of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, self-determination, and so on. Since the 8 June 1974 Cairo meeting of the PLO and the Rabat Summit Conference the talk is of establishing PLO authority in territories wrested from Israel, making it clear that this would be only a first step towards Israel's elimination.

54. Indeed, whatever the phraseology, its true meaning remains obvious.

55. In a press conference held at United Nations Headquarters, after the General Assembly vote on 14 October 1974, the PLO representative declared:

            "Our short-term goal, which has been approved by our congress, is to establish in any and every part liberated in Palestine a national authority provided that in no way should that compromise our right to the whole of Palestine."

56. The official organ of the Syrian Government, El-Baath, wrote on 17 October 1974 about the 14 October resolution to invite the PLO:

            "The United Nations resolution constitutes a victory of the principle of armed struggle which began in the war of liberation on 6 October. This is so because the world does not respect anything but the language of revolutionary violence, which is the only language to be used at this time."

57. Yasser Arafat made this view even more specific. In an interview published on 21 October 1974 in the Cairo daily Rose el-Yussuf he declared:

           "I do not see the possibility of a peace settlement in the Middle East, but a fifth war."

58. On 28 October, the Arab Governments and the PLO decided at Rabat that the immediate goal should be the establishment of a PLO base to the east of Israel. The ultimate objective remained the same -- the destruction of Israel and its replacement by an Arab State.

59. At a press conference at Rabat on 30 October, Yasser Arafat had no qualms about confirming that this was the meaning of the decision adopted two days earlier. He said that the establishment of PLO authority in areas that might be evacuated by Israel would be "the first stage towards the creation of a democratic State where Jews, Christians and Muslims could coexist". And this he reiterated in interviews - published in The New York Times on 9 November, in the 11 November issue of Time, and in other recent pronouncements, including this morning's statement [2282nd meeting]. Still fresh in the minds of all are Arafat's own explanations that such terminology is used only because it is more "civilized", and that behind it looms, as always, the design to deprive the Jewish people of its independence, to liquidate the Jewish State and to establish on its ruins another Arab State in which Jews would again live as a minority as they do today, persecuted and tortured in Syria, and as they did in the past in countries such as Iraq, Yemen or Algeria, suffering all the pain and sorrow of oppression.

60. This is the supposedly moderate objective of the PLO leader, the man who continues to serve as commander of El Fatah-Black September, the gangster who received $5 million from President Qaddafi of Libya as a prize for the slaughter of Israeli sportsmen at the Olympic Games at Munich, the criminal who personally directed the murder of diplomats at Khartoum.

61. Some of his henchmen disagree with his "civilized" terminology. They would like him to be more outspoken, more blunt, as he was when he told the Italian weekly L'Europa:

           "Our goal is the destruction of Israel . . . Peace for us means Israel's destruction, nothing else."

62. Arafat, today, prefers the Nazi method. The Nazis killed millions of Jews in death camps, the gates of which bore the sign ''Work brings freedom". Arafat kills Jewish children and seeks to strangle the Jewish State under the slogan of creating a "democratic Palestine". Neither kings nor presidents, neither artifices of speech nor the plaudits of accomplices or of the misguided can conceal this sinister fact.

63. The speakers who opened today's debate have confirmed its real purpose -- to undermine Israel's rights, to question the inalienable right of the Jewish people to its homeland, to strengthen and encourage the PLO in its activities directed against the life of Israel and of its people, to establish a PLO springboard from which the murder organization can continue its efforts to destroy the Jewish State. This is what justice means to the PLO. This is what the PLO's olive branch is.

64. Jewish history is the saga of a people which has remained one with its land through millennia of independence and foreign conquest, of uprooting and dispersion, of struggle to rebuild its statehood and of final restoration of national liberty. Unparalleled national tragedies, centuries of suppression, repeated massacres through the ages culminating in the genocide of 6 million by the Nazis, have never weakened the Jewish people's attachment to its land and its resolve to live in it in freedom and independence. Since the dawn of history thousands of years ago and until the creation of Jordan in a part of Palestine, no people, other than the Jewish people, ever established or even thought of establishing a State of its own in the land of Israel. No people, except for the Jewish people, ever looked upon the land of Israel as a separate entity. To the Jewish nation, however, this land has been the very essence of its existence.

65. Even when defeated by the Roman Empire and carried off to bondage in foreign countries, the Jews of the Diaspora continued to live in spirit in their homeland. They prayed for rain when rain was needed in the land of Israel. They celebrated the harvest when it was harvest time in Israel. They retained the customs of the land, its traditional holidays and its ancient language. Above all, they never ceased to struggle against the consequences of foreign imperialist subjugation. They never stopped striving to regain their independence and sovereignty. In the Land of Israel itself, though decimated by successive conquerors, the Jewish community clung to the soil of its forefathers, determined that the day should come when it would be free again.

66. If in world history there is a classic example of a struggle for national liberty, it is the struggle of the Jewish people, pursued for almost 2,000 years in resistance to imperialism and colonialism, exile and dispersion, racial discrimination and physical annihilation. To vilify this age-long struggle, zionism, to question the Jewish people's equality with other nations, to deny the Jewish people's right to self-determination and independence in its homeland is wilful blasphemy. It is a sacrilege of the most revered concepts of the equality of peoples and of national liberation. It is Nazi-like abuse of the kind that has been heaped upon the Jewish people through the ages by bigots racists and anti-Semites. How sad that such anti-Jewish prejudices should be rampant in the United Nations.

67. The Jewish people, however, has defended its rights, fought and bled for centuries, outlived empires and survived holocausts not to be swayed from its course by a gang of murderers who thrive on Jewish blood or by the whims of regimes which claim to seek justice for Palestinian Arabs, but openly deny it to Jews.

68. The choice before the General Assembly is clear. On the one hand there is the Charter of the United Nations; on the other there is the PLO, whose sinister objectives, defined in its Covenant, and savage outrages are a desecration of the Charter.

69. On the one hand there is Israel's readiness and desire to reach a peaceful settlement with the Palestinian Arab State of Jordan in which the Palestinian national identity would find full expression. On the other hand there is the PLO denial of Israel's right to independence and of the Jewish people's right to self-determination.

70. The choice is between understanding and continued conflict in the Middle East, between suppression of terror and its encouragement, between satisfying the needs of Palestinians through the peacemaking process already under way or undermining that process by trying to introduce into it a murder organization which aims at the elimination of one of the negotiating parties.

71. The question is: should there be peace between Israel and its eastern neighbour or should an attempt be made to establish a PLO base to the east of Israel from which the terrorist campaign against the Jewish State's existence could be pursued?

72. On 14 October, the General Assembly opted for the PLO, it opted for terrorism, it opted for savagery. Can there be any hope that it might now undo the harm it has already done, by that action, to the cause of peace in the Middle East and to humanity in general? Israel has also made its choice.

73. The United Nations, whose duty it is to combat terrorism and barbarity may agree to consort with them. Israel will not.

74. The murderers of athletes in the Olympic Games of Munich, the butchers of children at Ma'alot, the assassins of diplomats at Khartoum do not belong in the international community. They have no place in international diplomatic efforts. Israel shall see to it that they have no place in them.

75. Israel will pursue the PLO murderers until justice is meted out to them. It will continue to take action against their organization and against their bases until a definitive end is put to their atrocities. The blood of Jewish children will not be shed with impunity.

76. Israel will not permit the establishment of PLO authority in any part of Palestine. The PLO will not be forced on the Palestinian Arabs. It will not be tolerated by the Jews of Israel.

77. Israel will continue to strive for peace with the Arab States. Peace would bring a new era of development, social progress and happiness for all the States and all the peoples of the Middle East.

78. In its decision of 21 July 1974, the Government of Israel declared that it would work towards negotiating a peace agreement with Jordan and that in the Jordanian-Palestinian Arab State east of Israel the specific identity of the Jordanians and Palestinians would find expression in peace and good-neighbourliness with Israel. This remains Israel's policy.

79. However, if the peace-making process becomes paralysed as a result of the Rabat and General Assembly resolutions, Israel will find a way, by the exercise of its sovereignty, to ensure its political and security interests, while also doing justice to the Arab population living in the administered areas.

80. No resolution of the General Assembly can mask the murderous nature of the PLO. No resolution can wash the hands of Yasser Arafat and his henchmen clean of the blood of their innocent victims. No resolution can confer respect on a band of cutthroats. No resolution can establish the authority of an organization which has no authority, which does not represent anyone except the few thousand agents of death it employs, which has no foothold in any part of the territories it seeks to dominate. The PLO will remain what it is and where it is -- outside the law and outside of Palestine.

81. A resolution that would respond to the PLO demands would, however, encourage the extremists in the Arab world who reject a peaceful settlement with Israel and call for continued war against it.

82. I repeat, Israel remains ready to take, together with the Arab States, the road of peace. Should they, however, espouse continued hostility and aggression, the Arab States will find Israel equally ready. The Jewish people's independence will be safeguarded with the same determination, with the same perseverance, with the same firmness with which it has been restored after an age-long struggle and defended since. The Jewish people's hymn, Israel's national anthem, says:

           Two thousand years we cherished the hope

           To live in freedom in the Land

           Of Zion and Jerusalem.

To those in this Assembly who challenge or ignore our rights we reply: in freedom the people of Israel shall live now and forever.

SOURCES: UN GAOR, 29th session, 2283rd meeting, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-185176/; Yosef Tekoah, In the Face of the Nations: Israel's Struggle for Peace, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976, 152-63.