Trump’s ban on Mahmoud Abbas is bad news for Palestine. But it’s dangerous for the UN
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and US President Donald Trump walking through the West Bank city of Bethlehem in 2017
Dahlia Scheindlin writes in Haaretz on 3 September 2025:
The Trump administration’s decision to deny visas to the Palestinian Authority officials slated to represent Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly this month, including barring Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, is dangerous for the UN, in ways that go well beyond Palestine.
Above all, the move is foolish. Banning the Palestinian delegation won’t stop either the French-Saudi initiative that will be debated towards the end of the Assembly pushing for a meaningful plan to establish two states, nor will it prevent the likely formal recognition of the State of Palestine by several UN member states during the session. Banning Palestinian officials won’t change the global consensus on the need for a diplomatic resolution of the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict through an end to occupation, either.
But America’s move opens the door to terrible damage to the UN. Luckily there are ways around U.S. President Donald Trump regarding the ban on Palestine – and there are ways to save the UN from his wrecking ball too.
Why America is wrong
First, banning the Palestinian delegation violates the 1947 Headquarters Treaty, signed by the UN and the U.S., which stipulates that the U.S. authorities must allow such delegations in – in Palestine’s case, as an invited guest of the General Assembly. But the legal question is more complex.
The American government could claim that U.S. laws allow it to circumvent that treaty on national security grounds, but that could open a legal quagmire between the U.S. and the UN.
Despite the treaty, the U.S. has often created visa difficulties, mostly delays, for officials from certain countries over the years. In 2016, the Obama administration denied a visa for a Sudanese minister for a special session of the UNGA. In the final days of Trump’s first term, the U.S. denied a visa for then-Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif for a Security Council meeting, claiming bureaucratic reasons – the application was too late. In 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. appeared to delay a visa for Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for the annual General Assembly, after numerous lower level Russian diplomats had visa trouble during the year; but Lavrov ultimately attended UNGA in 2022 and every year since.
The most pertinent example of the U.S.’s gatekeeping was the Ronald Reagan administration’s 1988 denial of a visa for an invited UNGA guest – Yasser Arafat – on security grounds. The UN General Assembly resolved that the denial was a violation of the Headquarters Treaty. But none of these examples match the present. None involved banning a head of state; the UN General Assembly recognized Palestine as a non-member observer state in 2012; the U.S., of course, voted against, and does not view it as a state.
Further, the State Department’s declared reasoning is explicitly, and primarily, political. The communique offers flimsy arguments about “national security interests” to justify the ban, naming a series of empty conditions. First, the Palestinian Authority must “consistently” condemn terror. Since Mahmoud Abbas has already openly condemned October 7 this June, gave a speech in April calling Hamas “sons of dogs” for its actions and repeatedly condemned terror attacks long before October 7, apparently the Americans don’t mean this as a condition that they can ever accept will be met.
Similarly, the second Trump administration condition is that the PA ends incitement in Palestinian textbooks. This is an oft-repeated mantra unmarred by empirical evidence. When U.S. taxpayers funded a systematic study on in 2013 to look into such incitement, the results were underwhelming, and Israel promptly delegitimized them. A European research organization tried once again in 2021, found similar results and was completely ignored. Nevertheless, Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar posted on Tuesday that France’s support for the Palestinian visas means that France condones Palestinian textbook incitement – someone’s idea of logic.
The final condition reflects mainly confusion. “The PA must also end its attempts to bypass negotiations through international lawfare campaigns” by appealing to international courts, as per the communique; but these issues are unrelated.
South Africa, not Palestine, brought its case alleging that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza to the International Court of Justice, although Palestine joined the case. The International Criminal Court has been investigating alleged war crimes at Palestine’s request, before and after October 7. This shouldn’t hinder negotiations – it should hasten them. The State Department also demands the PA stop advancing unilateral statehood. But many countries are involved in the current efforts toward recognition, and nearly 150 have already recognized Palestine. That is basically a sweeping multilateralism, not Palestinian unilateralism.
Boundless abuse of power
If Trump is allowed to engineer who participates in the UN General Assembly participants according to his political whims, and given his lack of regard for the law, who else would he want to ban? What kind of United Nations would remain if he were to succeed?
At present, the countries likely to recognize Palestine at the upcoming session include Britain and France, Australia, Portugal, Canada, Malta and, most recently, Belgium. Norway did so in 2024 and has said it will divest from U.S. firms implicated in the Gaza war, which puts Norway in the administration’s crosshairs too. The two-state conference of working groups back in June were led by Jordan, Spain, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, Qatar, Japan, Egypt, Ireland, Turkey, Brazil and Senegal, in addition to states above – also by the whole Arab League and the EU. Maybe he would just ban all 138 states who voted for Palestinian statehood status in 2012.
And why stop at Israel and Palestine? If a country fails to obey Trump’s tariff demands, or if Ukraine fails to serve up its territory to Russia to end the war – ban them!
But this episode highlights a danger even deeper than turning the UN into a personal policy arena for a despotic leader.
Trump is antithetical to the basic values of the UN. The institution was established as an audacious effort to create a peaceful world – a tortured, often failed effort, but the best we have. “The first line of the UN Charter is ‘We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,'” recalled Larry Johnson, former UN Assistant Secretary General for Legal Affairs, in an interview with Haaretz. Can America host such a body, under such an administration?
President Trump has worked to brand himself as a man of peace, and boasted of solving six or more conflicts. Any close analysis reveals obvious exaggerations – none have reached a final peace deal. Since the Rwanda-Congo deal in June, for example, there has been a “surge of deadly violence” by militias, with hundreds killed in the weeks following the agreement, according to the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights.
It is admittedly hard to solve conflicts, and any progress is good. But Trump’s efforts look increasingly like a smokescreen for the truth: Like previous U.S. presidents, he is enabling the bloodletting in Gaza, giving Israel free rein after two horrible years to continue the war and advance its occupation, destruction and displacement plans. His embrace of Vladimir Putin prompted further ghastly Russian bombings of Ukraine, and effectively legitimizes his war of aggression. These actions gouge out even the wistful aspirations of the international system.
He’s contemptuous of international institutions, dismissive of international alliances, and as for international law – just consider how he treats American law. Johnson, the former UN deputy legal counsel, speculates that by contrast to the reverence toward the UN expressed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose “dying wish” was to host it in the U.S., and despite the fact that hosting the UN brings several billion dollars’ worth of benefits to his own city, Trump might prefer the land on Manhattan’s East Side waterfront for real estate.
The UN needs to strategize to survive Trump. Starting with the present, for all these reasons, Trump should obviously not be allowed to ban Mahmoud Abbas – not because Palestinians have any love for him, but on principle. There are precedents: Abbas could speak to the General Assembly remotely, looming above everyone on a huge screen, like in COVID times. In 1988, the General Assembly held a special session in Geneva to hear Yasser Arafat – that can happen again, if the UN rules of procedures are met.
Those procedures could also be reformed; but in truth, the UN should think about much bigger reforms. If the U.S. violates both its letter and spirit, perhaps the body can’t be entrusted to the U.S. at all.
For a start, the General Assembly could hold its next regular session next year in Geneva, or anywhere else. If this goes on, it should consider permanently moving the General Assembly to a country more committed to its values (though few come out of the last few years pure). And maybe reform needs to happen where it counts: at the Security Council. When all serious change in global policy is held hostage to the veto of perennially bad actors that are permanently on the council – the UN will never build the credibility it needs, or regain all that has been lost.
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