There is no gainsaying the plain truth that in diplomacy, as in everyday life, all's well that ends well.

This year's annual session of the heads of state at the UN General Assembly (UNGA80) ended on a note of grace after the final speaker, Osman Mohammed, Eritrea’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, delivered his address to the international body, calling for “peace and prosperity for humanity as a whole”.

In the week-long talks, the carnage in Gaza dominated the speeches delivered by world leaders, one that, alas, media commentators continue to refer to as a "war," projecting the image of one army pitted against another, rather than one army against an occupied civilian population.

Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, addressed this imbalance directly, warning that “the Palestinian people are at risk of disappearing” and insisting that they “will only survive with an independent State integrated into the international community,” a principle that more than 150 UN Member States have reaffirmed. 

The question of Palestinian statehood took centre stage at a sideline summit hosted by France and Saudi Arabia, where kings, presidents, statesmen and diplomats from across the globe gathered to affirm their commitment to Palestinian self-determination, and where UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres declared that "statehood is a right, not a reward" and that "denying it [to Palestinians] would be a gift to extremists everywhere."

It remains unclear though, what recognition of the state of Palestine by some heavyweight European countries with strong ties to Israel means in their lexicon, since in this case definitions belong to the definers, especially if they are a dominant group in the world able to impose its chosen narrative on the defined.

What is clear, however, is that not since November 1974, when Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) leader, Yasser Arafat, spoke to the General Assembly at its 29th session, memorably telling its members in his address, "Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun, [so] do not let the olive branch fall from my hand”, has the international community so demonstratively rallied around the Palestinian people.

That speech secured the PLO’s recognition as the representative of the Palestinian people and earned it UN observer status — but it did not deliver a state.

Today, more than fifty years later, the cause has become embedded in the conscience of the global dialogue of cultures, echoing across generations.

Eight decades of betrayal

Yet, the relationship between Palestine and the United Nations has always been fraught, marked by the deep anguish Palestinians have felt about the failure of this international body to implement its own resolutions — resolutions lacking enforcement mechanisms passed by a General Assembly that repeatedly affirmed and reaffirmed, year in, year out, with unutterable monotony, these people's inalienable right to live as free men and women.

The end result of this failure? Palestinians in the occupied West Bank were, over the last six decades, tormented beyond endurance by an occupier's boot pressing on their collective neck, and in Gaza were, over the last two years, made to feel as if simply to continue living means choosing to be less human.

The saga of this relationship harks close to eight decades back when in November 1947, members of the General Assembly (all 51 of them at the time) were called upon to debate and then vote on the Palestine Partition Plan encoded in the body's Resolution 181. 

That resolution had no chance of passing, since a straw vote earlier had shown that the two-thirds majority needed for its approval was mockingly remote.

Some countries had their own sound reasons for voting against partition — aside from the moral injustice they saw in imposing partition on a country against the will of its people, including the absurd injustice of how the resolution cavalierly gave away 56 percent of the land to Jewish immigrants, who then owned a mere seven percent of it and made up one third of the population.

Enter then US President Harry S. Truman, who had already made his mercenary position on the issue clear when he declared in May 1948: "I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arab voters among my constituency."

Everyone knew, of course, which constituency he did have in mind: the growing influence of Jewish-American voters and donors in an election year.

He soon was on the phone speaking to his UN ambassador, Warren R. Austin, warning him that if Resolution 181 failed to pass, "There will be hell to pay." (Austin, a former US Senator from Vermont, was a guileless diplomat who was reported in the media at the time to have said: "I hope [Muslim] Arabs and Jews [in Palestine] will settle their differences in a Christian spirit.")

Our guide on the minutiae of the General Assembly proceedings during those fateful days that preceded the passing of that notorious resolution on November 29, 1947 (the Security Council was yet to be established the following year) was Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and then CIA station chief in the Middle East. His CIA role is telling: the agency had been formed only months earlier, and Washington was already deploying it to bend the politics of the Middle East to its will.

His authoritative account of the ferocious battle waged by the American establishment to win approval for the resolution, The Partition Plan: A lesson in Pressure Politics, first appeared in the January 1948 issue of The Middle East Journal, the official journal of the Middle East Institute, the oldest think tank in Washington.  

He wrote: "The delegates of nations [mostly from what was then called the Third World that had already committed during the debates to vote no] and their home governments were swamped with telegrams, phone calls, letters and visits, many from congressmen and others who invoked the name and prestige of the US government. A former state governor, a prominent Democrat, with White House and other connections, personally telephoned Haiti, urging that its delegation be instructed to change its vote. He spoke firmly and might be presumed to speak with authority."

Other delegates were manipulated in a similar manner. Some, Roosevelt continued, received promises of economic rewards in exchange for their support. After receiving such promises, for example, Liberia offered its vote.

Others, after receiving threats of aid cuts, reversed themselves and voted for partition, such as the Philippines, whose UN ambassador found himself embarrassingly switching sides after he had, during the debates, given a speech at the General Assembly podium against partition.

From partition to pariah

Fast-forward almost exactly 50 years after this state was established via extreme arm-twisting and subversion of the ethics that governed United Nations protocols by Washington.

In March 1997, the Israeli government, then led by Benjamin Netanyahu during his first term in office as prime minister (1996-1999), controversially approved the construction of a new Jewish neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem called Har Homa, located on a hill known by its displaced Palestinian inhabitants as Jabal Abu Ghneim.

The act drew widespread international criticism and prompted the UNGA to pass a resolution condemning it as a violation of international law. The only member states that voted against it, alongside Israel, were the United States and Micronesia.

The Har Homa episode was no aberration but rather part of the relentless expansion of illegal settlements, which over time hollowed out any practical vision of a Palestinian state.

And last week, it was the same Netanyahu who delivered his fiery rant at the General Assembly (sounding more like the mandarin of a newly reconstituted Prussian Empire than an insufferable prime minister of a garrison state bristling with arms) he did so to a mostly empty hall, after a majority of the delegates had either walked out or not bothered to show up in the first place.

The only pathetic round of applause he got came from his own delegation — a telling metaphor about the Zionist state's pariah status in the world today.

Today, the international community is trying — just trying — to make good the havoc it wrought on the people of Palestine close to eight decades ago. 

A dismembered nation, they have endured absurd loss and wanton injustice, yet even in the midst of carnage, they have seen to it that the centre holds. That resilience now finds massive echo in the cry “Free Palestine,” shouted from millions of throats around the globe.

Whether this time the United Nations will match the rhetoric with real enforcement remains uncertain, but for the first time in years, the international community appeared, in its own characteristically circumspect way, to join that cry.