Nice try

Neil MacFarquhar and Steven Myers have an article in The New York Times about Palestine:

President Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, formally requested full United Nations membership for his as-yet-undefined country. But before the thunderous applause greeting his announcement in the General Assembly had faded, international powers laid out a new plan to resume direct Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that was designed to delay a contentious vote on the Palestinian request as long as possible.
In a day full of diplomatic theater, Abbas and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel each laid out the tangled history of their bloody conflict in passionate, lengthy speeches less than an hour apart, while the United States, Russia, and European powers haggled in a back room for a formula to bring the parties back to the negotiating table and prevent the Palestinian bid for membership from becoming a spur for violence.
Continents away, thousands of Palestinians celebrated around the West Bank, with cheers erupting from the rapt crowds watching live when Abbas held aloft the four pages of the United Nations application letter, a symbolic step toward international recognition of statehood that many Palestinians also saw as a form of peaceful defiance against Israel.
The submission to the Security Council of the bid for membership  was the culmination of a months-long tangle involving Palestine, Israel, and the United States. But the flurry of diplomatic activity underscored the reality that the request is just the beginning of an even more complicated diplomatic process at the United Nations.
Whether the possibility of a vote of the Security Council will prompt a new round of peace talks after a long stalemate, whether the Palestinians have enough support to force a vote on their bid for membership, and whether the United States ultimately will be forced to use its threatened veto of that bid, were all open questions, likely to be addressed over the next several weeks of jockeying and horse-trading.
But, for the Palestinians, it was a day of reckoning clearly relished by Abbas, who had long been considered to be a low-profile leader who has sought to avoid confrontation with Israel and the United States. “It is a moment of truth, and my people are waiting to hear the answer of the world,” Abbas said in his speech. “Will it allow Israel to continue its occupation, the only occupation in the world?”
Netanyahu dismissed the Palestinian application as premature. “The Palestinians want a state without peace, and the truth is you should not let that happen,” he said, challenging a comment by Abbas that the Palestinians were armed “only with their hopes and dreams". “Hopes, dreams, and ten thousand missiles and Grad rockets supplied by Iran,” Netanyahu said. He repeatedly stressed Israel’s small size, saying it could not return to its 1967 borders because it needed strategic depth to defend itself, particularly from the threat of militant Islam.
Much is riding on how international powers handle the Palestinian request, with expectations soaring in the West Bank and the Arab world that the step Abbas took will result in genuine change.
“The status quo is completely unacceptable,” the French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, said in an interview. “If there is a veto or a ‘no’ vote in the Security Council, what will happen on the ground? What will happen in the Arab street, in the Palestinian street? There is a very high risk of violence and demonstrations,” he said. “I think that Israel will be completely isolated in the region. The situation has changed to the extreme around Israel: in Egypt, in Syria, with Turkey and so on. It’s unreasonable to say, ‘We don’t move; we wait.’”
Senior officials involved in hammering out the statement on negotiations said they hoped it would inspire the two sides to return to the bargaining table within a month, but left open the question of how they would be prodded into their seats.
Both leaders said in their General Assembly speeches that they wanted peace talks, but there was no immediate reaction from either after the statement came out from the Quartet, the grouping of the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations formed in 2002 to raise international involvement in the peace process.
The Quartet’s statement was heavily diluted, avoiding any of the difficult issues that have divided the Israelis and Palestinians. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and diplomats from all sides had spent weeks trying to work out compromises, but failed to achieve a consensus within the quartet itself, let alone between the Palestinians and Israelis.
The statement did reaffirm “strong support for the vision of Israeli-Palestinian peace” outlined by President Obama in May. That included two states separated by the borders that existed in 1967 with “land swaps” to account for Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
It called on the Israelis and Palestinians to meet and agree on an agenda and schedule for resuming direct negotiations within a month and to come forward with “comprehensive proposals” on territory and security within three months. The two sides should make “substantial progress” within six months and complete a final agreement before the end of 2012.
“We urge both parties to take advantage of this opportunity to get back to talks,” Clinton said at the United Nations. The administration is caught between not wanting to inflame Arab public opinion by exercising yet another veto in support of Israel and the domestic political perils of pressuring Israel, which can alienate some Jewish voters and campaign donors.
The proposal does not preclude Security Council action on the Palestinian bid. But administration officials hope it will keep a majority of the Council’s fifteen members from forcing an immediate vote by shifting the focus to the talks rather than the membership bid.
It remains unclear what happens if negotiations do not resume within a month. Analysts dismissed the quartet’s statement as lacking the teeth needed to push the two sides back to bargaining
James Zogby, an American pollster long involved in the peace negotiations, noted that virtually every attempt to forge a treaty since 1993 had included a deadline that expired without progress. “What we have done now for the last twenty-plus years is engage people in an endless process,” he said. “As long as they were riding the bicycle it didn’t matter if it wasn’t going anywhere as long as it didn’t fall down.”
At the annual United Nations gathering of world leaders, Abbas was greeted with numerous standing ovations. “I do not believe anyone with a shred of conscience can reject our application for full admission in the United Nations,” Abbas said, calling eventual statehood “the realization of the inalienable national rights of the Palestinian people.” The most sustained applause, punctuated with cheers, came as he held up a copy of the letter requesting membership. Connecting his statehood request with the Arab uprisings, he said, “The time has come also for the Palestinian spring, the time for independence.”
Both leaders spoke for about forty minutes, adopting professorial tones as they explained the conflict.
Netanyahu scolded the United Nations, describing it as a “theater of the absurd” for what he called its unfair fixation on condemning Israel.
The Security Council is expected to form a committee next week with one representative from each of its fifteen members to study the proposal, which can take several weeks. It is unclear whether the Palestinians have the nine votes needed to move it to the General Assembly for final approval, with the United States actively courting “no” votes to avoid having to use its veto.

Rico says he's always amazed that people just don't get why we're friends with Israel (even ignoring the millions of Jewish voters in the US), who is a staunch ally in the region, and not with the Palestinians, who support people (like al-Qaeda) who're trying to kill us...