He recently declared that he would bar the Palestinian delegation from entering the US to attend the UN General Assembly session where a vote is expected on the recognition of the state of Palestine. At the same time, he opens his arms to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has a warrant out for his arrest and extradition to the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. With such actions, Trump is effectively defying the entire international community, the overwhelming majority of which have already declared their intention to recognise Palestine.
The UN is not subordinate to the US government or any of its departments. The Trump administration has no authority to decide who may or may not attend its sessions. The US is merely the host country and to become this, it had to agree to the international organisation’s rules for hosting. Those rules state that the UN is an independent international body governed by its own laws and regulations – not by the whims and caprices of the host country’s president.
Trump appears not to have learned the lesson from the US’ refusal, in 1988, to grant Yasser Arafat and his colleagues in the Palestine Liberation Organisation entry visas so he could address the General Assembly. On that occasion, 154 member states agreed to convene the session at the UN’s headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Only two countries opposed the decision: the US and Israel. As the US veto doesn’t work in the General Assembly, there was nothing they could do about it.
That was the first time the General Assembly met outside New York since relocating there in 1952. Washington’s attempt to sabotage the UN session backfired. It proved embarrassing to the US and called into doubt the seriousness of its commitment to international agreements. The episode also cost the UN nearly half a million dollars to cover travel expenses to Geneva for the delegations of the world’s 40 poorest countries.
Will history repeat itself? How can UN members, in good conscience, carry out a vote on the recognition of Palestine when the host country bars from the session the very people whose statehood is under discussion while welcoming the delegation of the occupying power that denies them their right to self-determination? How can the UN credibly hold a vote while allowing the war criminal who heads that occupying power to address the session and spread falsehoods, while overseeing a campaign of deliberate mass starvation, forced displacement, and genocide?
* A version of this article appears in print in the 11 September, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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