Abbas to submit Palestinian statehood bid to UN

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is preparing to submit his bid for UN recognition of Palestine as an independent state today in defiance of a US-led bid to stop him. He said he would deliver the application to UN chief Ban Ki-moon as planned.

A top aide, Mohammed Ishtayeh, said that Mr Abbas asked Mr Ban and the Security Council’s Lebanese president this month to process the application without delay.

“We’re going without any hesitation and continuing despite all the pressures,” Mr Abbas told members of the Palestinian diaspora at a hotel in New York on Thursday night. “We seek to achieve our right and we want our independent state.”

Mr Abbas will address the UN general assembly in New York later today and he will be followed soon afterwards by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu who opposes the move.

Mr Abbas’ appeal to the UN to recognise Palestinian independence in the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza Strip would not deliver any immediate changes on the ground: Israel would remain an occupying force in those first two territories and continue to severely restrict access to Gaza, ruled by Palestinian Hamas militants.

Beyond that, Security Council action on the membership request could take weeks or months.

The strategy also put the Palestinians in direct confrontation with the US, which has threatened to veto their membership bid in the UN Security Council, reasoning, like Israel, that statehood can only be achieved through direct negotiations between the parties to the long and bloody conflict.

Also hanging heavy in the air was the threat of renewed violence over frustrated Palestinian aspirations.

Yet by seeking approval at a world forum overwhelmingly sympathetic to their quest, Palestinians hope to make it harder for Israel to resist already heavy global pressure to negotiate the borders of a future Palestine based on lines Israel held before capturing the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza in 1967.

In recent weeks, international mediators have been furiously trying to piece together a formula that would let the Palestinians abandon their plan to ask the Security Council for full UN membership, and instead make do with the more modest goal of asking a sympathetic General Assembly to elevate their status from permanent observer to non-member observer state.

The other part of that formula would include the rapid resumption of negotiations.

The US and Israel have been pressuring council members to either vote against the plan or abstain when it comes up for a vote. The vote would require the support of nine of the council’s 15 members to pass, but even if the Palestinians could line up that backing, a US veto is assured.

The resumption of talks seems an elusive goal.

Israel insists that negotiations go ahead without any preconditions.

But Palestinians say they will not return to the bargaining table without assurances that Israel would halt settlement building and drop its opposition to basing negotiations on the borders it held before capturing the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza in 1967.

Israel has warned that the Palestinian appeal to the UN will have a disastrous effect on negotiations.

Mr Netanyahu opposes negotiations based on 1967 lines, saying a return to those frontiers would expose Israel’s heartland to rocket fire from the West Bank.