Palestine Withdraws Bid For UN Vice Presidency Following U.S. Threats

Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations Riyad Mansour (Wikimedia Commons)

The Palestinian delegation to the United Nations has withdrawn Ambassador Riyad Mansour’s candidacy for one of the General Assembly’s twenty-one vice president posts. The withdrawal came after the Trump regime threatened to revoke the visas of the entire Palestinian delegation unless Mansour stepped aside. The Palestinian U.N. delegation relayed, through an Arab country, that Ambassador Riyad Mansour would refrain from running for a vice president position for the coming two years, a span that, conveniently, runs to the end of Trump’s term, a source close to the issue told NPR. Lebanon’s ambassador will run for the seat instead.

The United States is the host nation of the United Nations, and under the 1947 headquarters agreement it is obligated not to refuse entry to officials traveling to UN business in New York. That is the condition under which the UN agreed to sit on American soil at all, the bargain that makes the institution function as something other than an American possession. The regime did not argue that Mansour was a security threat, or that he had committed a crime. It argued, in a cable marked sensitive but unclassified, that Mansour has a history of “accusing Israel of genocide” and that his candidacy “fuels tension” and undermines Trump’s plans for Gaza.

The objection is that a Palestinian diplomat described what was done to Palestinians. A United Nations commission of inquiry concluded that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. The International Court of Justice found it plausible enough to order provisional measures.

Let’s take a look at the other half of the complaint, the idea that the Palestinian ambassador “fuels tension”. If tensions were fuelled by anything, they were fuelled by the bombardment of a besieged population, by the starvation used as a method, by the strikes on hospitals and shelters and the people sheltering in them. Mansour did not create that tension by stating it happened in the UN General Assembly, when he choked up describing the children killed in Israeli airstrikes, pounding his fist on the table. To call the reflection of fact the cause is to demand that the victim hold still and quiet so the room can stay calm.

This is not the first time the USA had forced a withdrawal of a bid by the Palestinian delegation. In February, Mansour withdrew a bid for president of the General Assembly after the same kind of American and Israeli lobbying, a withdrawal Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador, publicly celebrated. Much like the USA’s war on Iran, yet another U.S. decision seems to benefit Israeli politicians more than anyone in the USA.

Former officials called the manoeuvre unusual, and it is, by the standards of the institution’s own past. Hady Amr, who handled Palestinian affairs at the State Department under two administrations, noted that short of espionage or election interference, weaponising visas this way is rare and tends to backfire.

Washington has reached for it before, against Iranian officials, Russian officials, and Yasser Arafat, who in 1988 was denied a visa and addressed the Assembly from Geneva instead, the body relocating itself rather than accept the ban. But those were dressed in the language of national security. This one is not. This one is dressed in nothing at all, it’s simply a reaction to a threat, much like a mafia and a business being shaken down for a bribe.

So Lebanon will take the chair, and the regime gets what it wanted without ever having to defend it in the open. A diplomat was told that the price of describing his people’s destruction was his delegation’s access to the institution meant to prevent it, and the price was paid. This is unfortunately the world we live in.

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