Skip to content

Results:

1 - 10 of 249

Documents

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.

October 1950

Four Principles for Unity Between the Chinese People's Volunteer Army and the [North] Korean People

Mao instructs soldiers in the Chinese People's Volunteer Army to support Kim Il Sung and abide by North Korean policies while they help defend the North Korean people from the United States.

September 17, 1947

George C. Marshall, 'A Program for a More Effective United Nations: Address by the Chief of the U.S. Delegation to the General Assembly'

Marshall speaks about Greece, Palestine, and Korea, as well as the international control of atomic energy and the role and structure of the United Nations.

June 15, 1978

Message from the Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea and the President of the People's Republic of Korea, Kim Il Sung, to the President of the [SF] Republic [of Yugoslavia], Josip Broz Tito.

Kim acknowledges Tito's full support for the reunification of Korean peninsula, and says that he is considering the proposal for low level talks between the United States, South Korea and the DPRK.

February 6, 1978

Message from the President of the [Democratic] People's Republic of Korea and the Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, Kim Il Sung, to the President of the [SF] Republic [of Yugoslavia], Josip Broz Tito.

Kim Il Sung criticizes Park Chung Hee and says the United States should "remove" him.

July 7, 1973

Message from the President of Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Kim Il Sung, to the President of the [Socialist Federal] Republic [of Yugoslavia], Josip Broz Tito

Kim Il Sung asks President Tito to support the North Korean government’s efforts for the peaceful unification of the Peninsula.

April 4, 2018

Oral History Interview with Jean duPreez

Member of South Africa’s delegation to the 1995 NPT review conference.

November 30, 2016

Oral History Interview with Sha Zukang

Ambassador for Disarmament Affairs and Deputy Permanent Representative of the People’s Republic of China to the United Nations Office at Geneva.

August 29, 2017

Oral History Interview with Konrad Scharinger

Deputy head of the nuclear non-proliferation section of the economic department in the German Federal Foreign Office.

January 26, 2017

Oral History Interview with Sven Jurschewsky

Senior Advisor for Non-proliferation and Deputy Director of the Non-proliferation, Arms Control and Disarmament Division of the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs.

Pagination