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| Palestinians in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Sunday hold a chair that is set to tour Arab countries and Europe to raise support for a Palestinian bid to join the UN |
The chair was commissioned by a Palestinian NGO which is hoping to rally support for the campaign to secure full UN membership for a Palestinian state when the General Assembly meets in New York next month.
Made from Jerusalem olive wood and upholstered in crushed velvet in the UN’s trademark air force blue, the chair is embossed with the words: “Palestine’s Right—A full membership in the UN.”
“The wood came from an olive tree in Jerusalem, the olive tree being a symbol of Palestine, while the blue upholstery with white writing came from Nablus,” said Sufian al-Qawasmi, the Hebron-based designer who supervised the project.
The chair will begin its tour in Beirut and then head to Qatar, before moving to Europe where it will be taken to London, Paris, Brussels and Madrid.
It will then be flown to New York—where it will be formally presented to UN chief Ban Ki-moon in the hope that it will serve as the official UN seat for the State of Palestine.
“We were focusing on the upcoming September bid and we had the idea of designing a chair that is an exact copy of regular UN chairs,” said Mohamed Sabih, a businessman and activist with Palestine Deserves, the NGO behind the campaign.
Samir al-Baz, another businessman involved in the initiative, said the chair will first head to Lebanon “because it has 400,000 Palestinian refugees living there, and also because it will head the Security Council next month.”
All applications for membership must go through the Security Council—and next month Lebanon, which is one of the 10 non-permanent council members, will become temporary president of the body.
“Then we will go to Qatar which will preside over the General Assembly in September, then to Paris, London and Brussels, where the EU parliament is based, then to Madrid where the peace talks began” in 1991, Baz said.
“The last stop is New York.”
The campaign is being funded by private sector businessmen and women, six of whom will accompany the chair on its grand tour which is due to kick off on September 4.
The Palestinians are to formally submit their request for membership on September 20 when world leaders begin gathering in New York for the 66th session of the General Assembly.
Yesterday, Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki said the Caribbean nation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines had formally recognised the state of Palestine on the 1967 borders, in a letter delivered to the Palestinian representative in New York.
The move means the number of countries which have formally recognised a Palestinian state now stands at 126, the Palestinians say—just two off the 128 they need to secure a two-thirds majority.
Writer fired over ‘right to terror’ blog
The Jerusalem Post said yesterday it had terminated the employment of a columnist who wrote in a private blog that Palestinians “have the right to use terrorism” against Israelis. The right-leaning daily announced that US-born writer Larry Derfner was being dismissed “due to a professional disagreement... connected to his personal blog.” Derfner could not immediately be reached by AFP but in a post on his Israel Reconsidered blog entitled “I got fired by the Jerusalem Post today,” he wrote that the paper had received “hundreds of notices of cancellations” from subscribers after they read a blog he had posted on August 21. Entitled “The awful, necessary truth about Palestinian terror” the 1,000-word essay expressed Derfner’s position that the Palestinians have the right to fight the Israeli occupation—even violently.