“Item seven provides a forum…to identify ways to ensure that Israel is held accountable for the violations it has committed for the confiscation of the fundamental rights of the Palestinians for more than seventy years.”
“During the past seventy years, they [Palestinians] have been driven from their homes and their homeland, militarily occupied and obliged to live in conditions resembling apartheid.”
“Throughout seven decades, the Israeli military occupation of Arab conflict lands itself in situation of conflict that is continuous and has taken its heavy toll on the livelihood and human rights and fundamental rights on human lives on the occupied Palestinian and Arab territories.”
“Lebanon is concerned with the occupation of Arab lands by Israel over 70 years ago, which constitutes a violation of international law and human rights.”
Accusing Israel of 70 years of occupation — meaning, from the moment of its birth — is to deny Israel’s right to exist. Israel recently celebrated 70 years since it declared independence on May 14, 1948, on the basis of the November 29, 1947 UN partition resolution (A/RES/181(II)) that called for Jewish and Arab states to succeed the British Mandate in Palestine. Israel was admitted a year later to the United Nations as a member state.
While the Jewish people had accepted the UN partition plan, the Arab side rejected it. Palestinian Arabs launched a war against the Jewish community with the stated aim of destroying the nascent Jewish state. On May 15, 1948, when the British withdrew, the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq joined the war against Israel. The conflict ended in January 1949 with armistice agreements signed between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. When the United Nations admitted Israel as a member state several months later, it was within those internationally recognized armistice lines. Arabs living in Israel were granted Israeli citizenship.
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