For the last two months, much of the international community as well as friends of Israel have been in an uproar over the prospect the United Nations would be asked to endorse a Palestinian state in the pre-1967 lines. A vote in the UN General Assembly on this proposition is considered to be such a calamity for Israel that the Obama administration has used this possibility as leverage in order to secure a new batch of concessions from the Jewish state to appease the Palestinians. The fact that a certain U.S. veto makes the entire business an exercise in futility has not altered the general opinion Israel must do something, anything really, in order to prevent a vote on the matter.
Yet despite this, the Jerusalem Post reported yesterday a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas said the PA would abandon its UN initiative if the diplomatic quartet (the U.S., the UN, the European Union and Russia) endorsed a two-state solution in which Israel would be called upon to unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank and Jerusalem and agree to a settlement freeze. In the PA’s plan, after the international community forced Israel to give up its only cards (territory) in advance of talks, then the Palestinians would consent to negotiate about Israel’s legitimacy and its threat to swamp the Jewish state with refugees.
Why is the PA being so generous as to give up on its UN ploy?
