MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

No word on how long ‘some time’ might be.  A few days?  Weeks?  A month? … or maybe just a few minutes …

By KHALED ABU TOAMEH AND REUTERS – “The Palestinians will give the UN Security Council ‘some time’ to study their application for full membership in the United Nations, a senior Palestinian official said on Wednesday.

‘We will give some time to the Security Council to consider first our full membership request before heading to the General Assembly,’ Nabil Shaath, a senior official in Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party, told reporters on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

At the same time, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Wednesday evening before a meeting with US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in New York that negotiations with the Palestinians are needed in order to reach a peace agreement.

When asked about the settlements in a joint press conference, Netanyahu said ‘I did something that no previous Israeli government did. I actually froze any construction for ten months, waited nine months and one week.’ He went on to say that ‘the Palestinians finally came and said, well, keep on freezing.’

The prime minister said that Israel concluded with the United States that the real issues must be addressed in order to get peace. ‘We have to negotiate the issues to resolve them. We can’t just negotiate about the negotiations,’ he added.

Earlier on Wednesday, Obama told the UN General Assembly that there could be ‘no shortcuts’ to peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, and that negotiations between the two parties would be the only means to achieving a true and lasting peace.

In his 20-minute speech before the international body, Obama devoted significant time to discussing the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.

Obama alluded to his remarks before the General Assembly in 2010. In that speech, he had expressed his hope that there would be a Palestinian state requesting membership in 2011 – remarks that could be seen as prescient in light of Abbas’s plans to petition the Security Council to recognize Palestine as a state.

However, Obama distinguished between what he had said last year and the situation before the international body today.” Read more.

In UN, PA Maps Erase All of Israel – “Palestinian Authority representatives in the United Nations are handing out maps of ‘Palestine’ that show it in place of all of Israel, including Tel Aviv, reports David Bedein of the Israel Resource Review. Bedein, who is currently in the United States, told Arutz Sheva: ‘They do not want a Palestinian state, but all of Palestine. The maps they hand out in their offices include all of ‘Palestine.’ They erase Israel completely in their maps.'” Read more.