“I call upon Mr. Secretary-General to expedite transmittal of our request to the Security Council and I call upon the distinguished members of the Security Council to vote in favor of our full membership,” he said to thunderous applause.
Abbas said the Palestinians remain committed to dialogue. But Israel sees the membership bid as an attempt to avoid difficult negotiations and win concessions from the international community without having to give much in return.
The request for Palestinian statehood on land occupied by Israel has become the dominant issue at this year’s General Assembly, refocusing global attention on one of the world’s most intractable conflicts.
Both men used the occasion to summarize the history of the conflict from their own perspectives. Mr. Netanyahu, in his early remarks, reviewed the many occasions when the United Nations had issued resolutions against Israel, saying the country had been unjustly singled out for condemnation “more often than all the other nations combined.”
Mr. Abbas, in his 40-minute speech, said every previous peace effort had been “shattered on the rock” of Israeli settlements and cited what he said was the historical responsibility of the United Nations to solve the problem.
He described the West Bank as “the last occupation” in the world, one that showed no sign of ending. “It is neither possible nor practical nor acceptable to return to conducting business as usual,” he said.
Drawing a line between his statehood request and the revolutions that swept through the Arab world this spring, he said, “The time has come also for the Palestinian spring, the time for independence.”
The Security Council is likely to take up the issue in earnest next week, diplomats said, when the question becomes whether the United States and its allies can stall it.
Washington is also working to prevent the Palestinians from gathering the nine votes needed for it to pass in the full council and thus avoid further wrecking the image of the United States in the Middle East by casting yet another veto against something Arabs dearly want.
The United States and the other members of the quartet that guides the negotiations — the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia — are all trying to restart direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians before any vote becomes necessary. The hope is that if negotiations begin in earnest, that the membership request can be postponed until the negotiations are over.
The diplomatic wrangling at the United Nations is expected to take several weeks before the question of a vote arises.
In theory, United Nations procedures demand that the special 15-member committee — one from each state — that studies the membership issue report back in 35 days, but nothing is more flexible than a deadline at the United Nations. Security Council members can stall things for weeks and weeks by requesting more information or by saying they are waiting for instructions from their capitals.
Behind them, though, looms the policy enunciated by President Nicholas Sarkozy of France, who said that the Palestinians should get enhanced membership in the General Assembly, moving from an observer entity to a non-member observer state.
Alain Juppe, the French foreign minister, said it would wait to see what happens in the Security Council before moving forward. By tradition, the General Assembly does not take up an issue when the Security Council is studying it and vice versa, but it is not impossible.
The historic day of speeches engendered a sense that the issue of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict had come full circle. The Palestinians call their membership application a desperate attempt to preserve the two-state solution despite encroaching Israeli settlements, as well as an attempt to shake up the negotiations that they feel have achieved little after 20 years of American oversight.
The question is whether trying to bring the intractable problem back to its international roots will somehow provide the needed jolt to get negotiations moving again.
The general point of view of the Israeli government and its supporters is that the Palestinians and their Arab allies gave up the right to the United Nations resolutions detailing a two state solution by rejecting that original plan and waging war against Israel for six decades.
But after every war, the United Nations resolutions and indeed the peace treaties with other Arab states have all reaffirmed the resolutions that outline the two-state compromise, starting with General Assembly resolution 181 in 1947. In the annex of their membership application submitted to Mr. Ban today, the Palestinians listed every United Nations resolution that envisioned a two-state solution that has not been implemented, they said.
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