A meeting of 15 foreign ministers and ambassadors, scheduled to be held Sunday in Ramallah, has been canceled after four envoys were denied entry by Israel, Palestinian officials told Palestinian news agency Ma’an. Israel, which controls access to the West Bank, denied entry to delegations from Indonesia, Malaysia, Cuba and Bangladesh en route to attend a Non-Aligned Movement conference, Palestinian officials said.
A meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement ministers held in La Havana, Cuba, during 2009 (Photo: Juventud Rebelde)
Other guests, including the foreign ministers of Egypt and Zimbabwe, declined to attend in solidarity with those prevented from taking part, they added. “We have cleared entry for representatives of countries which have diplomatic relations with Israel and we have not cleared those which do not,” Yigal Palmor, an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, told Reuters.
A day after announcing that it would restart its bid for statehood recognition at the United Nations, a campaign strongly opposed by the United States and Israel, the Palestinian Authority bristled at the Israeli move. Palestinian officials had hoped entrance into UN agencies and attendance of international gatherings in the capacity of a state would improve their standing internationally and undermine Israel‘s 45-year occupation of the West Bank.
PLO executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi said Israel’s denial of entry to the envoys was “a blatant and crude exercise of power and a form of political siege.” “Israel‘s treatment of Palestine as an internal issue and its attempts to isolate the Palestinian people from the rest of the world further emphasize why we need to achieve state status at the United Nations as a step towards our exercise of self-determination and freedom,” she said in a statement.
She added: “We applaud the position of solidarity adopted by representatives of the other Non-Aligned Movement countries in response to Israel’s arrogant refusal to allow international diplomats from having access to Palestine.” The Non-Aligned Movement, founded during the fifties to advocate the causes of the Third World, was to convene an unprecedented, high-level meeting in the West Bank in solidarity with the Palestinian leadership, in advance of an annual meeting in Iran at the end of the month.
