It was the United Nations that determined the fate of the Palestinian people more than six decades ago – and on Friday it was the UN that heard an impassioned plea to change the destiny of Palestine once more.
It came from Mahmoud Abbas, who was 12 years old when the UN general assembly of November 1947 voted to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab.
Abbas's predecessors, the Palestinian leaders of that earlier generation, famously rejected the partition plan – which envisaged a state on 44% of the land. So the Palestinian president came back to the same body on Friday, asking the UN to bless a Palestinian state on a terrain about half that size.
He did it with a flourish, holding up the formal letter of application he had submitted that hour to the UN secretary general, asking for full membership of the United Nations – a gesture that brought sustained applause from some delegates, impassive silence from others, including the United States and, inevitably, Israel.
"It is a moment of truth and my people are waiting to hear the answer of the world," Abbas said. "After 63 years of suffering: enough, enough, enough."
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