President Abbas says to seek UN recognition if no Mideast progress made by September

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Wednesday he would seek UN recognition of Palestinian statehood if there was no breakthrough in the peace process by September.

Addressing a meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Ramallah, he said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vision for peace, outlined in a speech on Tuesday, contained “nothing we can build on,” according to reuters.

“Our first choice is negotiations, but if there is no progress before September we will go to the United Nations,” Mr. Abbas said, criticizing a speech by Mr. Netanyahu to the US Congress on Tuesday.

In his address, Mr. Netanyahu repeated a litany of well-known Israeli demands of the Palestinians but broke no new political ground nor did he offer any incentives for breaking the deadlock in peace talks.

Netanyahu’s words were “a long way from the peace process” and contained “errors and distortions,” the Palestinian leader told reporters, according to Agence-France Presse.

The Israeli leader, who addressed Congress on the last day of a trip to Washington, said he was willing to make “painful compromises” for peace.

But he ruled out a division of Jerusalem, the return of Palestinian refugees, and the possibility of using the borders that existed before 1967 as a basis for peace negotiations.

In a key policy speech on Thursday, President Barack Obama of the United States called for new talks based on the armistice lines in place before the 1967 Six Day War.

But Mr. Netanyahu used the trip to reject the 1967 lines as “indefensible” and insist that Israel would never accept them as a basis for negotiations, according to AFP.

Palestinians said it was a familiar offer of “leftovers” that could not divert them from their new strategy of seeking majority United Nations recognition of Palestinian statehood at the General Assembly in September.

Earlier on Wednesday, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat told reporters that Netanyahu’s speech showed that “Israel’s government is not a partner ... in the peace process.”

“He has already decided the outcome of the negotiations on final status issued without talks and by laying down dictates,” Mr. Erakat added.

Mr. Abbas is due to consult Arab states at the weekend on how to respond to the initiative.

Israel's daily Maariv published a poll showing about 57 percent of voters believe Prime Minister Netanyahu should have supported President Obama’s initiative rather than opposing Mr. Obama, Reuters reported.

But the poll also showed Mr. Netanyahu was still Israel’s most popular political leader.

(Abeer Tayel, an editor at Al Arabiya, can be reached at: [email protected])