92. Mr. President, it is my pleasure to congratulate you on your election to the Presidency of the General Assembly at its twenty-third session. We are confident that your vast experience, together with the generous qualities which you are known to possess, will ensure your successful and skilful leadership of the present session.
93. On this occasion I also wish to express to Mr. Manescu, the Foreign Minister of Romania and President of the General Assembly at its twenty-second session the appreciation of the United Arab Republic delegation for the ability and objectivity with which he steered the last session of the General Assembly.
94. The twenty-third session of the General Assembly takes place in a gloomy atmosphere as regards the future o! international relations as well as the future role and efficacy of the order and institutions laid down by the United Nations Charter. In such an atmosphere there emerges the great importance of what we can all do here to recover the confidence in an order based on the principles of the Charter. For our part, we have an unlimited faith in what the human will can achieve for the sake of human welfare and progress. The starting point in facing our responsibilities might well be that we maintain an absolute faith in our ability to face up to the challenge presented by those forces which are determined to impose upon us a state of despair and surrender.
95. In the United Arab Republic, at a time when we refuse to give in to the dictates of aggression and we insist on the absolute necessity of achieving peace based on justice, we have continued to subscribe to every international effort aimed at freeing the human race from aggression and racism, upholding the international system of collective security and recognizing the basic rights of every individual to live in peace and equality, as well as his right to elevate himself in every realm of human progress.
96. We have continued to work for the realization of the principles of non-alignment and international co-operation to which we are committed through our participation in the successive conferences of non-aligned countries, the last most recent of which took place in Cairo in October 1964.
97. A few weeks ago the United Arab Republic took part in the fifth session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the Organization of African Unity, meeting in Algiers, and joined in expressing the will of free Africa in its determination to liberate the African continent from every form of colonialism, racism and foreign domination.
98. We have also been following, with grave concern, the developments in Asia. On every occasion we have insisted that the United States put a complete and final end to the bombing of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam, in order to achieve peace in Viet-Nam and to enable the people of Viet-Nam to decide their own future.
99. We have equally participated in the international effort, pursued this year, to achieve a degree of nuclear security and the establishment of an international régime for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. The United Arab Republic was among the first countries to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as positive step towards the ultimate target of prohibiting the use of nuclear weapons, the realization of general and complete disarmament and the transfer of the enormous human and material resources at present utilized for the making of war to the making of peace and the promotion of development for the peoples of the world.
100. It is my duty to outline to you the grave situation which exists today in the Middle East, as a result of the continued occupation by Israeli forces of Arab territories, a fact which constitutes a continued aggression against the sovereignty and territorial integrity of three Member States of the United Nations.
101. Every day that passes without the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Arab territories constitutes in fact a new aggression and a new violation of the rule of the Charter. It also constitutes a situation fraught with the gravest dangers for peace and security in the Middle East. Indeed, we are facing in the Middle East a colonialist wave emanating from a racist philosophy constantly attempting to impose its will upon the Arab peoples.
102. The deliberations which have taken place in the United Nations throughout the last year, following the Israeli aggression of 5 June, have only emphasized that fundamental principle of the Charter which prohibits the acquisition of territory by force. Resolution 242(1967) unanimously adopted by the Security Council on 22 November last year, has only reaffirmed that principle and, consequently, affirmed the necessity for the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from the territories they now occupy as a result of their aggression on 5 June 1967.
103. Ever since the adoption of the Security Council resolution, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General, Mr. Gunnar Jarring, has continued to exert great efforts in the discharge of his mission. But it has become quite clear that Israel has been following a policy of obstruction to the implementation of the peaceful settlement laid down by the Security Council. This policy is manifested in Israel’s refusal to implement the Security Council resolution of 22 November 1967, Israel’s refusal to withdraw from the Arab territories occupied as a result of its aggression on 5 June 1967, Israel’s insistence on following an expansionist policy which has already led to the
annexation of some Arab territory, Israel’s refusal to recognize the rights of the refugees as stated by the United Nations in numerous resolutions, and Israel’s continued expulsion of Arab citizens from their territories and villages, with the aim of establishing Israeli settlements therein.
104. Equally, Israel continues in its defiance of the United Nations by declaring its refusal to comply with the resolutions of the General Assembly and the Security Council on the Palestine question, as well as the other resolutions concerning the refugees and displaced persons. Israel insists on obstructing their return to their homes. It resists the mission of the Secretary-General’s representative charged with the task of examining the conditions of the Arab population in the occupied territories. It defies the various resolutions adopted by this Organization on Jerusalem, a defiance which has gone as far as to inform the Secretary-General that its annexation of Jerusalem is "irreversible and not negotiable”.
105. At the same time, Israel continues its aggression against the civilian population of the United Arab Republic in Suez and Ismailia, as well as its attacks against the factories in the Suez Canal area, and the Canal’s installations. These attacks have been taking place regularly. Israel did not even hesitate to use force against the civilian boats of the Suez Canal Authority, while they were engaged in surveying the Canal’s floor with a view to releasing the stranded ships in the Canal. This operation has been
undertaken by the Suez Canal Authority in response to the request of foreign countries and owners of the stranded ships. In blind selfishness, Israel continues to cause great losses and damages to many peoples and countries of Africa, Asia and Europe, to whom the Suez Canal is a vital means of international transportation and commerce.
106. In Jordan, Israel commits aggression upon aggression against the civilian population and the refugees, almost on a daily basis. In its attacks, it resorts to the use of airplanes and tanks. Not only does Israel continue its wave of terror and destruction against the people of Palestine, but it also follows the refugees and attacks them in their camps and tents across the cease-fire lines.
107. The Israeli aggressions against Al Karamah in March, Irbid in June, and As Salt in August, are aggressions which Israel adds to the list of massacres which it has committed before against the people of Palestine at Deir Yassin, Tiberias, Haifa, Jaffa, Safd, Gaza, Khan Yunis, Qibya, Hula and As Samu. In the occupied Arab territories, Israel continues its policy of bombardment and destruction of houses and populated areas, as well as demolishing entire villages, torturing refugees and Arab citizens, throwing them into prisons by the thousands, throwing them into concentration camps, looting their property and, ultimately, their expulsion across the cease-fire lines.
108. I do not believe that the world has ever witnessed, since the Nazi occupation of European territories, a policy where, in a mad exercise of force, every rule of law, be it a law of peace or war, has been systematically violated and every right of man been violently denied, such as the policy followed by Israel in the occupied Arab territories. It was only natural, therefore, that the International Conference on Human Rights, meeting in Teheran last May, condemned the Israeli policy in the occupied territories.
109. As for the Israeli policy of evicting the Arab citizens from their territories, and changing the character of these territories and replacing them with Israeli settlements, we believe that this policy constitutes the most ominous form of Israeli racist colonialism exercised in the second half of the twentieth century.
110. While Israel continues its policy of occupying more of the Arab territories and transforming more of the Arab citizens into refugees, it has been undertaking a campaign of international deception in which it claims a desire for peace. Israel occupies Arab territories and claims peace. It resists the return of the refugees and displaced peoples, and claims peace. It carries on a campaign of terror and oppression against Arab citizens in the occupied territories and claims peace. It annexes Jerusalem and claims peace. It plunders Arab property and claims peace. It refuses to implement the peaceful settlement approved by the Security Council, and claims peace. It lays down one obstacle after another to the peace mission of Ambassador Jarring, and it claims peace.
111. Peace, in Israel’s view, is the surrender of the Arab peoples to its will and their acquiescence in its territorial ambitions. But Israel’s concept of its international obligations, whether emanating from the Charter or from its contractual commitments under international agreements, is no different from its concept of peace. Israel declared its renunciation of the armistice agreements to which it affixed its signature in 1949, when it realized that those agreements stood in the way of its ambition to acquire territory beyond the 1949 lines. The Prime Minister of Israel, Mr. Ben-Gurion, declared, during the aggression against Egypt in 1956, that the Egyptian-Israeli General Armistice Agreement was "dead and buried".
112. Today, the Israeli officials declare that all the Arab-Israeli armistice agreements no longer exist. Israel proceeds on the basis that it is entitled to conclude international agreements and then to renounce them, by its unilateral will, as soon as it finds in them a limitation on its freedom to what it considers its right of territorial expansion.
113. During the aggression against Egypt in 1956, at the same time that the Prime Minister of Israel denounced the Egyptian-Israeli General Armistice Agreement, he likewise proclaimed the annexation of a part of the Egyptian territory, namely, the Sinai Peninsula. Today, at the same time that Israeli officials declare their renunciation of the Arab-Israeli armistice agreements, the present Prime Minister speaks of the “greater Israel”, which includes many Arab territories. Not a single day passes without an Israeli official’s revealing Israel’s intentions of expansion. Merely as an example, the Defence Minister of Israel declared, on 5 July of this year, in a speech before the Kubbutzim Youth Federation meeting in the occupied Syrian territories, the following:
“Our fathers reached the frontiers that were recognized in the partition plan of 1947. Our generation reached the 1949 frontiers. But the ‘six-day generation’, that is the generation which unleashed the 5 June aggression, were unable to reach Suez, Jordan and the Golan Heights in Syria.”
Mr. Moshe Dayan added:
“This is not the end; for after the present cease-fire lines there will be new lines, but they will extend beyond the Jordan River, maybe to Lebanon and perhaps to central Syria as well.”
114. These are not mere words. But the words here do express the actual policy of Israel manifested by its occupation of Arab territories and its eviction of Arab citizens from those territories, and the establishment, in their place, of Israeli settlements.
115. Israel’s renunciation of the armistice agreements that it signed is in line with its renunciation of the Protocol of Lausanne, which it signed with the Arab States, also in 1949. That Protocol was aimed at the solution of the refugee problem. Israel renounced it as soon as it achieved the purpose for which it affixed its signature, namely, admission to membership in the United Nations.
116. This is Israel’s attitude towards international agreements to which it affixes its signature. Today it calls upon the Arab States to hand it the instrument of their surrender. Israel relies upon its occupation of Arab territories to impose this surrender upon the Arab States. We refuse to surrender while at the same time insisting on the termination of aggression and the realization of peace.
117. The entire international community is called upon to reject Israel’s policy of imposing a fait accompli, based on the use of force and aggression, as a substitute for international legality.
118. We cannot imagine that Israel could have continued its policy of aggression and defiance of the United Nations and its resolutions, had it not been receiving the political and material support of the United States. The provision, by the United States, of weapons and planes to Israel, while Israel insists on the occupation of the territories of three Member States of the United Nations, can in no way contribute to the achievement of peace in the Middle East. Any military or economic assistance provided to Israel while it occupies Arab territories is nothing but support for the Israeli aggression and an act against the Arab countries and peoples.
119. There is no precedent in contemporary history for Israel’s policy in the Middle East, except the policy of Nazi Germany against the peoples of Europe in the first half of this century. Both policies emanate from a blind, racist philosophy which imagines that a group of people are entitled to impose their will upon other peoples. Israel today is compiling, against the Arab peoples in the Middle East, the same record that Nazi Germany compiled against the peoples of Europe.
120. Israel considers itself entitled, as Nazi Germany considered itself before, to cross any national frontier by force for the purpose of imposing a fait accompli and, consequently, demanding from the occupied countries negotiations to confer legality upon its territorial gains. Equally, Israel proceeds from the premise that it is entitled to evict Arab citizens from Arab territories and to transform those territories into Israeli settlements, in the same way as Nazi Germany imagined itself entitled to empty European territories of their original inhabitants for the purpose of transforming them into German territories. Israel’s policy of deception aimed at international public opinion, follows in the footsteps of Nazi Germany in its mastery in the uttering of words of peace to cover up its policy of aggression and occupation.
121. The catalogue of crimes being systematically committed by Israel against the people of Palestine and other Arab peoples, such as launching wars of aggression in which tens of thousands have died, and violating Arab territories, together with the policy of oppression and terror in the occupied territories, constitutes, in fact, the same catalogue of crimes for which the Nazi war criminals have been tried.
122. In fulfilment of the role of the Charter and in defence of all the values for which the struggle of the peoples of the United Nations has been waged, the peoples of the world, who have stood up to the Nazi menace in the first half of the twentieth century, are called upon today to stand up and resist the wave of colonialists and racists who are raiding the Arab peoples in the Middle East.
123. The policy of defiance and disrespect for the United Nations resolutions and renunciation of international agreements which it has signed, a policy systematically followed by Israel, is the same policy it follows with regard to the Security Council resolution of 22 November and the peace mission of Ambassador Jarring. At the same time, Israel declares that it wishes to co-operate with the Special Representative of the Secretary-General, it continues, in fact and in deed, to undermine the resolution of 22 November and Ambassador Jarring’s mission.
124. Co-operation with the Special Representative of the Secretary-General could mean only the acceptance and the undertaking to implement the Security Council resolution of 22 November, and entering into serious and substantive talks with him for the implementation of that resolution. In short, something which Israel so far has failed to do.
125. While Israel continues to insist on its aggression and its refusal of the peace settlement approved by the Security Council, the United Arab Republic has taken a clear and consistent position, namely, to implement the peace settlement as embodied in the Security Council resolution of 22 November. We have informed the Special Representative, from the very beginning of our talks with him, of our full acceptance of the Security Council resolution as well as of our readiness for its implementation. We have formally proclaimed that position on more than one occasion. I declared our acceptance of the Security Council resolution on 13 March last in a declaration which was circulated as an
official document of the Security Council and reaffirmed, on a later occasion, in a letter which I addressed to the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on 9 May last.
126. Throughout the talks, which started almost a year ago, we have exerted every effort to co-operate with the Special Representative for the implementation of the Security Council resolution. We have affirmed to him that the faithful implementation of the Security Council resolution represents the road to peace, and that, as far as we are concerned, we are ready to implement that resolution.
127. We have also proposed to the Special Representative that he set up a timetable for the implementation of resolution 242(1967) of 22 November. We have indicated to him that the setting up of such a timetable would provide the framework of time within which all provisions of the Security Council resolution would be implemented.
128. We have formally conveyed this proposal to Ambassador Jarring, in a letter which I addressed to him on 9 May last. Throughout the talks with the Special Representative, and in connexion with the proposed timetable, we have set forth our detailed views on the substance, the form and the timing for the implementation of every provision of the resolution of the Security Council. Israel, however, has been deliberately refusing to consider, with Ambassador Jarring, any programme for the implementation of the Security Council resolution.
129. Our proposal to set up a timetable to implement the resolution still stands. It still offers an opportunity to bring about peace in the Middle East under the supervision and guarantees of the Security Council.
130. We consider it necessary that the Security Council undertake the supervision, and guarantee the implementation, of the resolution of 22 November, for the achievement of peace in the Middle East. For Israel’s traditional policy of unilaterally renouncing its signature of international agreements, and its contractual obligations deriving therefrom, together with its record of territorial expansion, make it all the more imperative for us, and for peace in the Middle East, to secure the supervision and the guarantee of the Security Council in the implementation of its resolution.
131. The systematic violation and organized usurpation by Israel of the rights of the Palestine people stands in complete violation of all the values and rules which bind the family of man. It equally represents a source of permanent threat to peace and security in the Middle East. Historically, legally and morally, this Organization bears an inescapable responsibility towards the people of Palestine, a responsibility which commits the United Nations to continue to be a principal party to the Palestine question.
132. Similarly, the big Powers, which bear the responsibility for their decisions concerning the people of Palestine, continue to be bound to the recognition of the rights of the people of Palestine and to putting an end to Israel’s aggression against those rights.
133. The people of Palestine who are subjected to the Israeli aggression and exposed to the instruments of massacre and destruction which Israel possesses, continue to struggle for the right of the Palestinian man to live securely in his home, to till his land, and to exercise his fundamental and national rights. Those people are engaged today in a struggle against a new stage of Israeli aggression; they are engaged in that struggle under the most difficult and arduous circumstances which any people could possible endure in the struggle for their rights. The people of Palestine deserve the support and admiration of all peoples that have struggled against aggression, racism and tyranny.
134. The situation in the Middle East could be summarized as follows: First, Israel launched its aggression against the Arab States on 5 June for the purpose of territorial expansion; Second, the Security Council resolution of 22 November 1967 affirmed that Israel must withdraw its forces from the territories it has occupied as a result of its aggression of 5 June 1967. It also laid down a settlement of the various questions in the area for the realization of peace; Third, we have declared our acceptance and readiness to implement that resolution, as well as our support of the mission of the Secretary-General’s Special Representative, Ambassador Jarring; Fourth, Israel refuses to implement that resolution, for it frustrates its ambitions for territorial expansion and the annexation of Arab territories; Fifth, Israel continues to follow a policy aimed at undermining the mission of Ambassador Jarring, while it cloaks that policy in semantic manoeuvres and deceptive statements; Sixth, Israel, which threatened world peace when it committed its aggression on 5 June 1967, continues to persist in its aggression and in its refusal to achieve peace.
135. It is our duty, and the duty of this international Organization, to suppress Israeli aggression and to bring peace to the Middle East. We have, however, to distinguish between a true peace based on justice and the respect of all rights and a situation in which one State aims at imposing its domination upon the destinies of other peoples. Any attempt to impose a solution by force and occupation is not peace. It is a fiction in the minds of those who believe that in their total domination and the surrender of others lie their own peace and security. In our opinion, that is an illusion, an escape from reality, and a way of ignoring history.
136. The withdrawal of the Israeli forces from every inch of the Arab territories occupied by them as a result of the aggression of 5 June is an obligation that belongs among the highest and most sacred category of international obligations. Every State Member of this international Organization is committed, under the Charter and in the interest of international relations, to stand up against aggression and against the policy of territorial expansion.
137. This is not the first time that the people of the United Arab Republic have faced destructive raiders; neither is it the first time in our history that a foreign Power, blinded by racism, has attempted to impose its will upon the people of the Nile Valley. But the history of our people is the history of an ancient people who have always stood up to the raiders and refused to surrender. We are no different from many other peoples which, in the absolute belief that to give in to the rule of force and tyranny would only be tantamount to a negation of the very will to live, have refused to surrender.
138. Our people, who have given to humanity one of its oldest civilizations and contributed to the growth of human knowledge, consider that peace is a basic necessity in order to continue to build, construct and share positively in the movement for progress. Every man and woman of the people of the United Arab Republic is committed, because of its past, present and future, to the recovery of every square inch of the territory occupied day by the forces of aggression of Israel.
139. The faith of our people is absolute that the forces of goodness and justice throughout the world shall stand by us for the achievement of peace based on justice.