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November 13, 1974

United Nations General Assembly Official Records, 29th Session : 2282nd Plenary Meeting, Agenda Item 108, 'Question of Palestine (continued)'

As other documents in this collection on Moroccan nationalists in 1947 and 1950 have exemplified, the United Nations was an important arena in decolonization struggles for Arabs, as it was for Asians and Africans as e.g. Alanna O’Malley’s The Diplomacy of Decolonisation: America, Britain, and the United Nations during the Congo crisis, 1960-1964 (2018) has shown. In this regard, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was founded in 1964 and taken over by the Fatah movement in 1969, was no exception.

To be sure, Palestinian organizations including Fatah and the PLO decried key UN actions. One was the UN Palestine partition plan of 1947; another was UN Security Council resolution 242 of November 1967. Calling upon Israel to withdraw “from territories occupied” during the Six-Day War in June and calling for the “acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace,” it did not mention Palestine or the Palestinians. Even so, the PLO sought to get access to the UN and UN recognition. A crucial landmark on this road was the address to the UN in New York in November 1974 by Yassir Arafat (1929-2004), a Fatah co-founder in 1959 and from 1969 PLO chairman.

Arafat did not speak at the Security Council, which was and is dominated by its five veto-carrying permanent members Britain, China, France, the United States, and the USSR/Russia. Rather, he addressed the UN General Assembly (UNGA), where from the 1960s Third World states were in the majority; his speech was the first time that the UNGA allowed a non-state representative to attend its plenary session. The UNGA invited the PLO after having decided, in September, to begin separate hearings on Palestine (rather than making Palestine part of general Middle Eastern hearings), and after the PLO was internationally recognized as the sole representative of the Palestinian people, a landmark accomplishment for the organization. The UNGA president who introduced Arafat, Abdelaziz Bouteflika (1937-2021), was the Foreign Minister of Algeria, which since its independence in 1962 had supported the Palestinian cause organizationally, militarily, and politically. Arafat spoke in Arabic; the below text is the official UN English translation. Arafat did not write the text all by himself; several PLO officials and Palestinians close to the PLO, including Edward Said, assisted, as Timothy Brennan has noted in Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said (2021). Later in November 1974, the UNGA inter alia decided to give the PLO observer status and affirmed Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

Date unknown

Campaign against Prince Farid

Report on the pacificts' response to Lebanese participation in a meeting between directors of General Directorates of General Security in the Baghdad Pact countries, Lebanon, and Jordan during which it was decided that the countries would cooperate in fighting Communism and Zionism.

February 10, 1955

Agreement to Combat Communism and Zionism

January 19, 1955

Agreement to Combat Communism and Zionism

January 9, 1955

Agreement to Combat Communism and Zionism

An agreement between Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Egypt to cooperate in combating Communism and Zionism.

November 5, 1948

Adeeb Farzli and Zionism

Report that Adeeb al-Farzli has gone undercover to the town of Tel [Nahaas] in order to conduct surveillance on Zionists.

July 29, 1949

Activities of a Jewish Company in Lebanon

Report regarding a deal between the founders of a Jewish engineering company and a Russian engineer, details of meetings between the founders and the engineer while in Damascus.

April 21, 1956

Communist Activitity in Syria

Syrian communists attempt to transform politics in their favor in order to stand against Zionism, support the Baghdad Alliance, exploit refugees through propaganda, and other policy goals.

May 9, 1949

Untitled report on Soviet policy towards Zionist Jews

Fragment describing repression of Zionist Jews in the Soviet Union.

May 20, 1969

Letter from Gamal Abdel Nasser sent to Haxhi Lleshi

This document is a letter from the United Arab Republic President Gamal Abdel Nasser to Haxhi Lleshi, the Chairman of the Presidium of the People’s Council of the People's Republic of Albania. President Nasser appreciates the support of the People’s Republic of Albania for the UAR struggle against imperialism and Zionism. Nasser reveals that the policy of the UAR is based on the principle of non-alignment in order to decrease the chance of hostilities between the two blocs and to increase the prospect of peace. In addition, the UAR objects having foreign bases or foreign troops on its territory and asks for their liquidation elsewhere. In the case of a Soviet ship anchoring at a UAR port, this does not imply that the Soviet Union uses that port as its own base. Nasser also adds that the United States openly supports Israel and its 6th Fleet is a sign of an American guarantee to Israel in its ventures directed against the UAR. On the other hand, the presence of Soviet fleet units in the Mediterranean has hindered the transformation of the region into an American lake. As a consequence, the Soviet presence in the Mediterranean establishes equilibrium there. This document contains both the original Arabic letter and the Albanian translation of the original.