Tomorrow is one year since President Mahmoud Abbas told the United Nations he was heading to the Security Council to ask for Palestine to be admitted as a member state. The bid never got off the ground, blocked largely by pressure from the US which threatened to use its veto power in the Security Council if necessary. It never got that far and dreams of an official state and in fact the entire peace process have been frozen since. But there is no denying the heady days of the bid. For the first time, Palestinians were openly bypassing negotiations with Israel and defying the US administration on a fundamental issue. The Palestinians were doing something about their future with their own hands and putting the American colossus and its strongest regional ally Israel in a corner. Abbas' surge of popularity following his bid for UN recognition for a Palestinian state was supposed to give him a stronger hand against Hamas in any power-sharing deal. Though Hamas dismissed Abbas' recognition quest as futile, it appeared unnerved by his new image as a tough leader standing up to the Americans. But fresh elections, long overdue, were never held and despite many attempts the two rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas failed to patch up their differences and are still bitterly divided. In the larger picture, the Palestinian issue was squeezed out of the news by bigger global headlines. The Arab Spring, the world financial crisis, and the US presidential elections put Palestine on hold. US-led Middle East peace talks which collapsed in 2010 over the issue of Israeli settlement expansion remain totally grounded. More and more Palestinians are saying the two-state solution is finished. Things are so bad that Abbas is considering canceling the historic 1993 Oslo accords, and related economic agreements, amid rising frustration over the lack of progress towards a Palestinian state and growing dissent and protest on the streets. Abbas' initial bid for full UN membership was bound to fail because the US said it would veto the request, even if the Palestinians won the necessary nine of 15 votes in the Security Council. But for many Palestinians who had become utterly disillusioned with peace talks, and with Abbas, who had been part of the process for decades, the UN bid was a refreshing political change, a never before used pressure card that brought Palestinians newfound respect abroad and among themselves. The Palestinians will at some point go to the UN General Assembly where the US does not have veto power, and take the less ambitious step of seeking to become a non-member observer state. But the GA is not like the much bigger prize of the Security Council Abbas's move at the UN last year was the product of Palestinian frustration after decades of negotiations with Israel failed to achieve a Palestinian state. Although the move was unlikely to change the facts on the ground, or end Israel's occupation, it was an untried and untested way of exerting diplomatic pressure. For a time this major policy shift worked; Palestinians had Tel Aviv and Washington on the ropes. Unfortunately, the Palestinians could not hold on.
