Public Relations Blitzing The UN

A lot of feverish diplomacy taking place at the United Nations as Palestinians launch yet another attempt at achieving a majority for a vote they have engineered to give them non-member statehood at the United Nations.  And it looks like a slam-dunk.  Sympathy, unsurprisingly, given the heft of the Arab League and the Muslim World League gear up to support one of their own, against a detested Zionist entity.

Non-aligned states which have long denied entry to Israel as an outsider and a 'colonizer' will also support the Palestinian bid.  West Bank diplomats are going at it full tilt courting European countries to support them, wagering on a substantive majority.  "From the EU we will have a minimum of 12 votes and maybe up to 15, as some are not yet decided", declared a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Ah, the PLO, Yasser Arafat's historical invention and alma mater.  The PLO is of course a brutally militant organization.  How many people think back to all those airplane high-jackings and others on the high seas?  Of people held hostage and murdered.  Of the deadly attack on Israeli Olympians at the Munich Games.  Of the explosions at European synagogues and the deaths of countless Jews and non-Jews.  Now they have diplomatic cachet.

Palestinian officials, representing a nascent nation which cannot exist financially without being propped up substantially by the United Nations and the European Union and other compassionate First-World nations, feel they can count on roughly 115 "yes" votes.  Those votes emanating for the most part from Arab, African, Latin American and Asian states, not necessarily those states that provide the economic means for the Palestinian state to survive.

They anticipate around 22 "no" votes.  Above all from the United States, Canada and other close supporters against the vote.  With 56 abstentions rounding out the 193-member United Nations.  The Palestinian bid for UN presence is now as an "observer" state, a status similar to that granted the Vatican.  They're working on France, hoping to dissuade it from abstention to a "yes".  Sitting on the fence is for the faint of heart.

It is thought that the Netherlands, Czech Republic and Georgia represent several of the five nations in Europe that appear set to vote "no", according to Palestinian officials.  President Mahmoud Abbas has made a pledge that if they succeed, from a new position of strength in UN recognition, he will be prepared to restart peace talks with Israel "straightaway".  Possibly dropping settlement preconditions.

These Palestinian moves to UN recognition and its success at UNESCO led its largest financial benefactor, the United States, to withhold economic assistance to the aid-dependent Palestinian Authority.  The U.S. extended its financial withdrawal to UNESCO as well, in the wake of admitting Palestine as a member.

Canada too has done its part in that department.