Mr. al-Jamali observed that in one generation the world had suffered the painful consequences of two world wars. The state of mind of the majority of mankind was still one of uncertainty, hopelessness and confusion. Man had begun to lose faith in himself and his fellow man. To cure those human ills, far-sighted statesmen like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt had set a new moral and political pattern in international relations. President Wilson’s Fourteen Points were well known; the principles underlying them constituted some of the most fundamental rules for settling international disputes.
21. After the First World War, the world had put its faith in the League of Nations, in the Permanent Court of International Justice, and in open diplomacy and parliamentary methods. For reasons well known to all, however, that world structure had crumbled beneath the weight of power politics and the desire for domination which had led to the Second World War. It was during that second war that the Atlantic Charter had been promulgated and that President Roosevelt had spoken of the Four Freedoms. The idea of the United Nations had been born. Those representatives who had been at San Francisco would remember the hard work, coupled with deep faith and bright hope, which had brought the United Nations Charter into being. Many had not been altogether satisfied with the formulation of the Charter, especially with the unanimity rule whereby the five great Powers in the Security Council controlled the right of recommendation and investigation — a weakness in the Charter which was becoming recognized more and more by all sides except the USSR and the other Members in the Soviet group. Some Members, including Iraq, had wanted the Chapters on Trusteeship to be more clear and positive about the future independence of the dependent Territories. Nevertheless, they had been pleased with the Charter. It was the best that could be achieved; it was the best possible under the circumstances.
22- It could be asked, however, whether the United Nations had so far fulfilled the hopes of the world. What were some of the points of its strength and weakness? The truth was that the United Nations was what its Member States made of it. It could be made a great force for peace and prosperity for the world if all the Member States wished it to be so. If they did not wish that, it could become impotent and stagnant.
23. No one could deny that great work was being achieved by the United Nations in the social, economic and cultural fields and in the formulation of human rights. In the political field, however, it was still lagging and sometimes erring. The blunt truth was that the great Powers had not so far been able to make the Organization into a “united nations". There were signs of disunity. As for the smaller nations, the bitter fact was that the people of Iraq felt greatly disappointed in what the United Nations had so far effected in Palestine.
24. He would not have touched upon the subject of Palestine at that juncture had it not been for a statement issued by the Israeli delegation on the opening day of the current session, in which it had claimed that Israel could never consent to be separated from Jerusalem, and that Jerusalem would never cease to be part of Israel. It had further stated that it would pursue its efforts to emphasize the paramount duty of the Arab States to help to resettle the refugees who, it claimed, had been uprooted and dispersed by the action of those States.
25. That statement showed clearly that Israel was denying the natural, legal and human rights of the Arabs to their own country, which they had inhabited for thousands of years, and was trying to make Members of the United Nations forget their obligation to guard those rights. Unfortunately, the United Nations was faced at that very time with the task of relieving the miserable, starving, sick and homeless refugees. But who had brought that state of affairs about? Under what principles of human and political rights had those conditions been created? How could Arab rights to their own homes, which they had inherited in Palestine, be a matter of bargain and negotiation? It had been alleged that the Jews had not come to Palestine to dispossess the Arabs of their homes and that there was room in Palestine for Arabs and Jews alike; yet hundreds of thousands of Arabs were rendered homeless in neighbouring countries, while an average of one thousand Jews entered the country each day to replace them. That was happening under the very eyes of the United Nations and as a result of its decision, which had inevitably led to those sad and tragic consequences.
26. It had been stated that the Arabs of Palestine had left their homes of their own choice or that the Arab States had caused the exodus. Nothing could be further from the truth, The fact was that a reign, of terror had been inflicted upon the Arabs when acts of complete annihilation of masses of Arabs, including women and children, had been committed by the Jews, That truth had been well described in a statement by the Stern Gang leader, reported in the Washington, D. C., Star of 9 August 1948, according to which it was universally recognized that it had been the Deir Yasin attack that had struck terror into the hearts of the Arab masses and caused their stampede. The statement went on to speak of the attack as a “blessed miracle”, which had dealt the enemy a far greater blow than all the combined wisdom of the Hagana commanders could have done.
27. That was the answer to the Israeli statement in which it absolved itself from any responsibility towards the refugees and denied their rights to settle in their own land.
28. When Hitler’s atrocities had become known to the civilized world, all nations had been shocked. What was the attitude of the world towards the fact that the very people who had suffered at the hands of Hitler were applying his methods to the innocent Arabs of Palestine?
29. The Arabs of Palestine had a natural and legal right to their own homes in that country, a right recognized by all human, moral and legal codes of the civilized world. Such a right could be denied by no one but an aggressor who had no intention to abide by the United Nations Charter or by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
30. The Conciliation Commission for Palestine, which had been working on behalf of' the United Nations in Lausanne, had created an. Economic Survey Mission for the Arab States and Palestine. It was to be hoped that it was not intended thereby to evade the issue of a political settlement which must recognize the full rights of all the Arabs of Palestine to their own homes there. Iraq had not taken part, in the Lausanne conferences, partly because it believed that there was no room for bargaining or haggling about such rights, partly because it believed that no political settlement could be valid or lasting which did not recognize such rights, but mainly because it had so far seen no sign of goodwill or readiness on the part of Israel to keep its word or to recognize Arab rights in Palestine. It was an excellent idea for the United Nations to help in the economic development of the Arab world, but it was fatal to the very principles of the United Nations to make that development a price for dispossessing hundreds of thousands of innocent and peace-loving Arabs of the right to return to their homes.
31. There could be no lasting peace in the Middle East until a just territorial settlement was made in Palestine. The human side of the refugee problem, which needed the most generous and most immediate consideration by the United Nations, should not supersede a fair and quick territorial settlement. But how was a political settlement to be achieved? The Conciliation Commission appointed by the United Nations had not, unfortunately, succeeded in effecting a territorial settlement, mainly because the Jews were not willing to abide by the decisions of the United Nations.
32. The statement issued by the Israeli delegation, to which he had alluded, was proof of that. The truth was that unless and until the United Nations forced the Jews to recognize the Arabs’ rights in Palestine and to abide fully by its successive decisions there was no hope of a settlement. Left to themselves, the Jews had unlimited ambitions; the demands of their extremists of thirty years ago were the achievement of today. The Jews did not wish to abide by the plan of partition approved by the General Assembly in its resolution, 181 (II) of .29 November 1947. They had rejected the Bernadotte plan. During the truce and the armistice they had occupied territories which had not been inhabited by Jews nor allotted to them by the United Nations decision. Some Jewish elements were already speaking of enlarging the Jewish State to include Jordan.
33. According to the Washington, D. C., Star of 9 August 1949, Jewish ex-terrorists who had made Palestine too hot for British rule were confidently planning a new campaign, their objective being Jewish control of Jordan
34. It was the responsibility of the United Nations to enforce its authority on the Jews to make them abandon aggressive intentions and to bring about a just territorial settlement. Otherwise there could be no peace in the Middle East and, in such circumstances, the seeds of future trouble had a mysterious way of growing. The settlement should be such as to minimize the agony of injustice created in Arab hearts. It was by that means and that means alone that faith in the United Nations could be partly re-established in the Middle East.
35. If, on the other hand, the Jews, relying on the support which they could always secure in the way of charity and political influence from a great country like the United States, continued to flout United Nations decisions and to deny Arab rights to Palestine, the United Nations would have to face a great blow to its prestige. By a decision which had led to trouble and unrest in the most sensitive part of the modem world, it would have achieved the greatest blunder in its history.
36. Mr. al-Jamali reiterated that material help to the suffering refugees, no matter how vital and urgent, could never be a substitute for a just and speedy territorial settlement, which must be the first achievement. The question of settling refugees who did not wish to return to Palestine might well be considered after territorial settlement, for in his opinion the question of refugees would be largely liquidated if a just territorial settlement were to be effected.
37. Another question which was a test of United Nations goodwill was that of Libya. According to the fundamental principles of the Charter, the valiant people of Libya, who had fought for nearly thirty years to win their freedom, deserved to be free and independent. The Iraqi delegation believed that the world still had a great reservoir of goodwill and sympathy for freedom-loving peoples and that the enforced mutilation of any country or people was not calculated to win the approbation of the civilized world.
38. Palestine and the former Italian colonies were examples of a score of problems which required the careful consideration of the General Assembly. The guide in approaching all those problems should be the letter and spirit of the Charter, not power politics, expediency or secret machinations. Mr. al-Jamali urged Members not to think in terms of domination of other peoples and other lands, or of great Powers and small ones, or of developed and under-developed countries, but to look at the world as an integral whole and to give each section of it, irrespective of might, race, wealth, geographical situation, colour or religion, the treatment, sympathy and cooperation that it needed, applying one code of human rights, one code of international justice. He appealed to them to be true to the Charter in deed as well as in word, and pledged his country’s full co-operation.