Trivialising memory with gratuitous gratitude

From scant details reported on the Bureau of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People’s meeting with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, it would seem as if the representatives arranged a meeting to thank and praise each other. The Palestinian people were just an exploited backdrop to the reported charade. 

The Committee’s Chair Cheikh Niang was reported to have “praised the Secretary-General’s principled and strong positions in defence of the rights of the Palestinian people and their fill realisation as soon as possible.” However, Guterres’s track record shows otherwise, with his insistence on the two-state paradigm and absolute refusal to consider decolonisation. 

Riyad Mansour, Permanent Observer to the State of Palestine to the UN also heaped accolades on Guterres “for his positions and steadfast defence of Palestine”, this time purportedly on behalf of the Palestinian people and leadership. Mansour cannot speak of the Palestinian people’s gratitude for a UN diplomat who upheld Israeli colonialism and spoke too late about the genocide in Gaza. How can a colonised population be grateful towards a representative who refused to discuss Gaza in the context of Israel’s genocide in 2025? In response to a journalist’s question in 2025, Guterres merely used the phrase ‘history will remember’ to embellish his contradictory sentences, including that the UN was the first to fight for the interests of the Palestinian people. No. Not in 1947, and not in any year up till now.  

As regards the Palestinian Authority’s gratitude for Guterres, that is of course believable.

Mansour conveyed PA leader Mahmoud Abbas’s “appreciation” for Guterres’s leadership at the UN, “foremost among them the question of Palestine.” And yet, under Guterres’s leadership, Israel escalated its colonialism to genocide. 

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It seems that after receiving all these accolades, according to the report, Guterres in turn thanked the Committee’s efforts “to help the Palestinian people fully realise their rights”,  and stressed the importance of defending the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) “until the question of Palestine is resolved in all its aspects.” Without a Plan B, of course, one must add, which only leaves absolute impunity for Israel to colonise the entirety of Palestine with the UN’s blessings. 

Of course, Guterres didn’t accomplish this level of impunity on his own. There are decades of happenings in which the UN invoked international law and worked against it to sustain Israel’s colonisation of Palestine. However, ‘history will remember’ Guterres for refusing to speak out on genocide earlier.

Focusing mostly on UNRWA is by now the established safe zone for diplomats and representatives – the humanitarian paradigm serves the international community before those needing humanitarian aid. Gaza, however is not just a humanitarian crisis. It is a territory marked by genocide. 

Under Guterres’s watch, Palestinians have been forced into 30 percent of land which Israel does not yet militarily occupy. Humanitarian aid is a small fragment, no matter how much Guterres magnifies it by speaking about UNRWA. One would expect history to remember the UN Secretary General who played decades of oblivion to perfection, to the detriment of the Palestinian people. Those heaping gratitude on Guterres should be remembered in the same way.

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