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Shameful vote

Dec 31,2014 - Last updated at Dec 31,2014

The defeat yesterday at the UN Security Council of the draft Arab resolution calling for a one-year timeframe for concluding peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians and an end to the Israeli occupation by 2017 is clearly a defeat of the efforts to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict peacefully.

Stripped of all the issues that the resolution aimed to address, it was essentially a benign, constructive and peaceful proposal advanced by the Palestinian side supported by the Arab countries.

There is nothing belligerent and nothing irrational in the proposed resolution. Still, it was defeated due to US machinations.

It failed to garner the nine votes necessary for adoption so the US did not even need to veto it.

The Arab side has erred in its calculations about those in favour of their proposed resolution.

The Palestinians should have done their homework more diligently and accurately before going ahead with a call for an early vote on their draft.

This error of judgement is a sign of faulty statesmanship. Sadly, it affects an entire nation that has endured a cruel occupation for close to half a century.

The Palestinian Authority has called for an emergency meeting to assess the damage, but its options now are rather limited.

The best that can be done, after taking stock of the situation, is to sign the Rome statute of the International Criminal Court and take Israel to it for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Palestinians have waited patiently for their leaders to take them onto the right path and for the world community to see the injustice of their situation and put things right with the same amount of enthusiasm with which it created Israel.

Now they are faced with another setback and will have to start anew.

A bleak start of a new year.

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