The right of Palestine and Palestinians to exist, the urgency of action to stop the genocide against Palestine, was posed as the moral test of the United Nations, of international law, and humanity itself, from the very opening of this year’s UN General Assembly General Debate this morning.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the first world leader to speak, began his speech by addressing the Palestinian delegation, welcoming its “taking part in this opening session for the first time, albeit as an observer member,” and in particular, welcoming the presence of Palestine’s President Mahmoud Abbas.
The next two leaders of the Global South to speak, Türkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, followed by King Abdullah II of Jordan, centered their speeches on the genocide underway against Palestine, and in particular, Gaza, demanding that humanity come together to stop it. We report separately Erdogan’s blistering address, detailing the genocide and calling for the UN General Assembly to exercise its right, under the “Uniting for Peace” mechanism, to order the measures required to stop the genocide which the Security Council has been unable to take, due to U.S. obstruction.
King Abdullah II of Jordan dedicated the entirety of his speech to Palestine and the implications of failing to act. “I cannot recall a time of greater peril than this. Our United Nations is facing a crisis that strikes at its very legitimacy and threatens a collapse of global trust and moral authority,” he warned. He, too, spoke passionately of the horrors of Israel’s war against Palestinians, the violence unleashed unlike anything seen in the region’s too-many previous wars. Not just in Gaza, he reminded, pointing to the killings occurring in the West Bank and the over 10,700 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons—730 of them children.
