The Palestinian Authority's plan to seek membership as a state at the United Nations in September is setting up a showdown with Washington few of its leaders want, writes Graham Usher at the UN On 14 July the Arab League endorsed the West Bank Palestinian Authority's (PA) plan to seek full membership as a state "on the 1967 lines" at the United Nations in September, risking a near certain United States veto and despite dwindling enthusiasm from several key European Union states. Secretary-General Nabil El-Arabi said the League would "take all necessary measures and rally the needed support of all world countries, starting with the Security Council, to recognise the state of Palestine". The League would also press the UN Security Council and General Assembly to support "full membership of a Palestinian state". It's not clear when the bid will be submitted, or by whom. Initially it was thought the Arab group at the UN would submit a resolution on the PA's part. But on 16 July Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) negotiator Saeb Ereikat said PA President Mahmoud Abbas would "personally" present the resolution "to avoid undermining the PLO's position as sole representative of the Palestinian people". Abbas is president of the PLO's executive committee. This is not the only confusion. Some in the PA leadership -- like Ereikat -- believe the Palestinians should go for full UN membership at the Security Council, knowingly incur an American veto but then as a fallback request an upgrade of the PLO's status at the UN General Assembly from "observer" to "non-member observer state", a change that would change nothing except nomenclature. "Afterward, we will go back to the SC once, twice and three times to ask for full membership", he says. Others -- like PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and former UN ambassador Nasser Al-Kidwa -- think such a policy nihilist: it will outrage the Americans, may render the PA bankrupt, could trigger violence in the occupied territories and won't change by one iota the fact of the Israeli occupation. They believe the most the PA can achieve in September is another non-binding resolution at the UN General Assembly on the desirability of a Palestinian state, a symbolic victory at best. A clearer strategy between these poles may emerge after a meeting of PLO ambassadors in Istanbul on 23-24 July. Abbas will be there, as will Fayyad. Confusion was always possible with the PA's vaunted turn to the UN. This was because the turn was less a new Palestinian diplomatic strategy to escape the clutches of the Oslo process than a desperate attempt to retrieve them. Abbas has long made it known he would buck the road to the UN if only the US would compel Israel to return to negotiations on a two-state solution based on the 1967 armistice lines and accompanied by a settlement freeze. But American reluctance to press Israel to do anything it doesn't wish to increases with age. Washington abandoned the freeze last year. It has also made it clear it will veto any Palestinian bid for full UN membership, no matter the opprobrium such an act would receive in the region. On 7 July the US House of Representatives passed by 406 votes to six a symbolic resolution calling on President Barack Obama to veto any PLO attempt to seek state recognition at the UN not agreed in talks with Israel, warning that such a "unilateral" move would have "serious implications for US assistance programmes for the Palestinians and the PA". The House threatened like sanctions if Hamas were to become even sleeping partners in a new PA unity government. Even Obama's 19 May avowal that the "borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed [land] swaps" -- deemed a triumph for PA diplomacy -- has become so hedged with conditions as to be meaningless. At a meeting of the Middle East Quartet in Washington on 11 July Secretary of State Hillary Clinton paid lip service to Obama's "parameter". But she wanted the PA to accept it in the context of a George W Bush 2004 letter to Israel that any future border would have to accommodate "demographic changes" created since 1967: code for Israel incorporating vast Jewish settlement blocs built illegally in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. She also wanted recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, negating even the principle of a Palestinian right of return, let alone its implementation. These revisions were "so blatant and unbalanced" in favour of Israel (said a European source) that they were opposed by Quartet members Russia and the EU -- UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon kept his usual silence. The EU instead called for "two states for two peoples" based on 1947 UN Resolution 181 which partitioned Mandate Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state. Israel refused, and so did the US. Abbas is currently on a tour of EU capitals, where he hopes to drum up support for his appeal for UN membership. In many places he will be received sympathetically. Several European diplomats blame Israel's settlement policies -- and US capitulation to them -- as the real cause behind the death of Oslo. But they worry a US veto in September could damage Western states generally, especially in the ferment of the Arab Spring. They also fear that unmet Palestinian expectations in September could lead to a violence that the PA is neither able nor willing to contain. Some European diplomats are thus quietly urging Abbas to drop the membership bid in favour of a non-binding General Assembly resolution, which would call for two states based on the 1967 lines with "equivalent land swaps" and for Jerusalem as the "future capital of both states". It's not clear if this would be enough for Abbas or the Arabs to call off the UN bid for Palestinian statehood. Only one thing is clear: for many of the PLO ambassadors gathering in Istanbul this weekend September cannot come slowly enough.
