RAMALLAH: Palestinians will seek recognition as a UN member-state in September given the deadlock in US-brokered peacemaking with Israel, a senior Palestinian official said Saturday. Nabil Shaath urged President Barack Obama, who on Thursday criticized the planned move at the UN General Assembly, to join countries that have already endorsed a Palestinian state taking in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Another Palestinian official, Nabil Abu Rdainah, said the drive to win statehood status unilaterally could be forestalled should Israel accept the demand to extend a freeze on its settlement on occupied land so that negotiations can resume. But such rapprochement looked highly unlikely after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, hosted in Washington Friday, sparred with Obama over a new US call for the future Palestinian state to have a border approximating to the West Bank's boundary before Israel captured it in the 1967 war. “Of course we will go to the United Nations,” Shaath, an aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, told Reuters. “Especially after Netanyahu used the old pretext that he needs ‘defensible borders' to keep stealing our land, control the Jordan Valley and create demographic facts on the ground.” Diplomats see majority support for the Palestinians in the UN General Assembly. But the statehood vote would have first to be approved in the Security Council, where the United States – which insists on a negotiated peace accord – has a veto. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who had earlier warned his compatriots that a pro-Palestinian “diplomatic tsunami” was about to crest, welcomed Obama's remarks about the UN lobbying. “The president has erased the September issue. It's very important,” Barak told Israel's Channel Two television. In February, the United States struck down a Security Council motion that would have branded the West Bank settlements as illegal. Analysts, noting that the 14 other Council members voted in favor, said the Palestinians appeared to be signaling that Washington was out of step with an international consensus.
