I haven’t seen this anywhere else, but the Guardian is reporting that a UN vote on Palestinian statehood might get delayed after all:
The Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, is said to have told Barack Obama at a meeting on Wednesday evening that he would agree to delaying a security council vote by several weeks, although the Palestinians are maintaining the line in public that any delays will be “procedural not political”.
….The Palestinians appeared to be pulling back from an immediate confrontation, having come under intense pressure from the Europeans as well as the Americans. Although [Nicolas] Sarkozy staked out a position sympathetic to the Palestinian cause in his UN speech, he has advised Abbas to hold off from the security council move.
Sarkozy wants to use the threat of a UN vote as a way of jumpstarting the peace process “without preconditions.” But of course, there are always preconditions. After all, if there weren’t there’s a chance that negotiations might actually make some progress. And we can’t have that, can we?
