BY FIDEL CASTRO
Mr. President, there can be no doubt that the problem of the Middle East has become one of the situations of greatest concern in today’s world. The Sixth Summit Conference examined it in its twofold dimension.

On the one hand the conference reaffirmed that Israel’s determination to continue its policy of aggression, expansionism, and colonial settlement in the occupied territories—with the support of the United States—constitutes a serious threat to world peace and security. At the same time the conference examined the problem from the standpoint of the rights of the Arab countries and of the Palestinian question.

For the Nonaligned countries the Palestinian question is the very crux of the problem of the Middle East. These two problems form an integral whole and neither can be settled in isolation from the other.

No just peace can be established in the region unless it is based on the total and unconditional withdrawal by Israel from all the occupied Arab territories, as well as the return to the Palestinian people of all their occupied territories and the restoration of their inalienable national rights, including the right to return to their homeland, to self-determination, and to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in accordance with Resolution 3236 of the General Assembly.¹

This means that all measures taken by Israel in the occupied Palestinian and Arab territories—including the establishment of colonies or settlements on Palestinian land or other Arab territories, whose immediate dismantlement is a prerequisite for a solution of the problem—are illegal, null, and void.

As I stated in my address to the Sixth Summit:

We are not fanatics. The revolutionary movement was always educated in hatred of racial discrimination and pogroms of any kind. From the bottom of our hearts, we repudiate the merciless persecution and genocide that the Nazis once unleashed on the Jews. But there is nothing in recent history that parallels it more than the dispossession, persecution, and genocide that imperialism and the Zionists are currently practicing against the Palestinian people.

Pushed off their lands, expelled from their country, scattered throughout the world, persecuted and murdered, the heroic Palestinians are a moving example of selflessness and patriotism, living symbols of the greatest crime of our era.² [Applause]

No one should be surprised that the conference, for reasons stemming not from any political prejudice, but rather from an objective analysis of the facts, was obliged to point out the role of U.S. policy in the region. The U.S. government has aligned itself with Israel, supported it, and has worked to attain partial solutions favorable to Zionist aims and to guarantee the fruits of Israel’s aggression at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs and the entire Arab nation. By so doing it has played a major role in preventing the establishment of a just and comprehensive peace in the region.

The facts, and only the facts, led the conference to condemn U.S. policies and maneuvers in that region.

When the heads of state or government arrived at a consensus condemning the Camp David agreement and the Egyptian-Israeli treaty of March 1979,³ their formulations had been preceded by long hours of detailed study and fruitful exchanges. This allowed the conference to consider those treaties not only as a total abandonment of the cause of the Arab countries, but also as an act of complicity with the continued occupation of Arab territories.

These words are harsh, but they are true and just.

The Egyptian people are not the ones who were judged by the Movement of Nonaligned Countries. The Egyptian people command the respect of each and every one of our countries, and enjoy the solidarity of all our peoples. The same voices that were raised to denounce the Camp David agreements and the Egyptian-Israeli treaty praised Gamal Abdel Nasser, a founder of the Movement and an upholder of the fighting traditions of the Arab nation….

¹UN General Assembly Resolution 3236, approved November 22, 1974, reaffirmed the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, national independence, and sovereignty.

²The text of Castro’s keynote address to the Sixth Summit conference of the Movement of Nonaligned Countries is contained in Fidel Castro Speeches: Cuba’s Internationalist Foreign Policy 1975-80 (New York: Pathfinder, 1981), pp. 162-79.

³Following Cairo’s defeat in the 1973 war with Tel Aviv, accords between Egyptian president Anwar al Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin were signed at the U.S. presidential resort at Camp David, Maryland, in September 1978. Under terms of a subsequent peace treaty, signed in Washington in March 1979, the Egyptian government extended formal diplomatic recognition to Israel.  
 
 
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