Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

The Syrian exile lasted more than a decade. But as the country descends further into violent chaos and relations with Damascus grow strained, Hamas's time in the city is coming to an end.

Casting about for a new base, however, the Islamic Resistance Movement is finding that for now at least, there are few available options.

This is ironic, since Islamist parties are emerging in countries where popular uprisings have brushed ruling regimes aside.

Consequently, Hamas would appear to have been strengthened by the region's turmoil. Certainly, the number of potential allies for the movement has greatly expanded.

But for now, with their energies focused on domestic concerns, none are coming to its aid.

So, as reported in The National yesterday, it continues to reduce its presence in Damascus with no certainty about where it might relocate its headquarters. Any move out of Damascus would unquestionably be a blow to the movement. The Syrian capital has been a crucial bastion of support for Hamas over the years.

But the violent crackdown by Bashar Al Assad's regime has left Hamas in a difficult position.

On the one hand, Hamas has enjoyed protection, support and stability in Damascus, the self-styled capital of the Arab resistance, for more than a decade. It is partly for this reason that Hamas leaders are loath to distance themselves publicly from the government in Damascus. Reports its leadership-in-exile is upping sticks have therefore been officially denied.

On the other hand, Hamas has always presented itself to its domestic audience as the party of reform and justice, to set it apart from Fatah.

Cleaning up and democratising Palestinian politics was the platform that saw Hamas win parliamentary elections in 2006.

Mr Al Assad has rejected opposition calls for similar reforms in Syria and even, reportedly, a direct plea from Khaled Meshaal, the Hamas leader, which apparently precipitated a falling-out between the men.

Hamas, a Sunni Islamist movement that gained much of its political authority from democratic elections, cannot be seen to be condoning an Alawite minority's violent crackdown on a majority Sunni population demanding the same democratic rights.

A break with Damascus will also have repercussions for relations with Iran, even if the significance and closeness of that relationship has usually been exaggerated.

The risk for Hamas is that it now faces losing two sources of material and political support.

Other countries have already reportedly stepped in with offers to host Hamas, however.

Qatar has steadily improved its relations with the movement in the past few years, but is geographically far away from the Levant. There is a suggestion that Jordan may take some Hamas officials back, though Amman is unlikely to want to resume hosting the entire leadership as it did before 1999.

Intriguingly, Turkey has also emerged as a possible destination, a relationship both sides are likely to want to explore.

Ankara will be keen to deepen its growing influence with all players in the region, while Hamas will want to take advantage of any flourishing relationship with a Nato member and regional powerhouse.

In the long run, however, Cairo seems a more natural fit. Egypt controls access to and from Gaza and its peace treaty with Israel affords Cairo a unique mediating role.

Moreover, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is emerging as the main political force in the country and ties will inevitably grow closer. This, however, will take time while Egypt settles down. Indeed, while many pieces are falling broadly in a favourable direction for Hamas, the movement will have to ride out a period of uncertainty before new regional alignments solidify.

In the meantime, as it searches for a safe harbour in choppy seas, Hamas will seek to keep the situation with Israel calm while it devotes its energies to improving ties with Fatah and shoring up its political base in the Palestinian territories, as well as its membership in the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

Like all political movements, political parties and governments in the region, Hamas is struggling at the moment to see what is around the bend. Unlike others, however, it can perhaps feel a little less fearful about what lies ahead.

With no consensus in the UN's Security Council over a Palestinian statehood application, US efforts to avoid having to cast a veto on the issue appear to have paid off.

A draft report written by the membership committee looking into the Palestinian application said it had been unable to make a "unanimous recommendation" to the Security Council. It is now possible that a vote may not even go ahead.

The news comes a day after the Obama administration succeeded in persuading the US Congress, with a little help from Israel, to release US$200 million (Dh734.6m) in security aid to the Palestinian Authority.

It ends a series of setbacks for the administration over the Palestinian issue, including a private exchange about Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, overheard at the G20 summit, and Palestinian membership of Unesco, the UN's cultural agency.

But the Palestinian UN gambit has also thrown into sharp relief the extent to which years of lobbying by pro-Israel groups in the US has narrowed the room for manoeuvre a US administration has on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, a situation exacerbated as campaigning for the 2012 presidential elections start to grind into gear.

The four-page draft report from the membership committee was circulated to all 15-members of the Security Council on Tuesday and indicated that there was not enough support in the council to bring the Palestinian application for full membership to a vote on Friday, when the council meets to discuss the issue.

Riyad Malki, the Palestinian foreign minister, on Tuesday acknowledged that, due to "the US counter effort and intervention ... we are not going to have these nine votes."

Yesterday, Palestinian officials said they were resigned to defeat and would instead seek an upgraded observer status that would give them access to key international organisations. They spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Since the report is in draft form, State Department officials yesterday refused to comment. But the news will be met with relief in Washington, which has lobbied hard to avoid having to cast a veto.

The administration says it supports Palestinian statehood, but rejects any move by Palestinians to secure independence outside bilateral negotiations with Israel. More than a year after Barack Obama, the US president, launched a new round of negotiations with the assertion that a Palestinian state was possible in a year, however, diplomatic efforts remain frozen over the issue of Israeli settlement building.

Representatives of the Quartet of Middle East mediators - Russia, the EU, the US and the UN - are due to meet Israeli and Palestinian officials next week in a bid to restart negotiations, but it is not clear what they are bringing to the table that could convince the Palestinians that Israel is serious about the talks.

Palestinians have been frustrated by Israel's unwillingness to define the framework for talks, specifically on borders, as well as the Israeli refusal to entertain a full settlement construction freeze. For its part, Israel has rejected what it calls Palestinian preconditions.

But the administration will be buoyed by news that Congress will not have to follow through on threats to end US security assistance to the Palestinians.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, head of the Foreign Affairs' Committee in the House of Representatives, blocked US$189 million (Dh694m)in late August when it became clear Palestinians were serious about their UN application.

After pressure from the White House, which also asked the Israeli government to intervene, Ms Ros-Lehtinen relented in recent weeks, citing administration assurances and the non-objection of the Israeli government to the aid.

The Florida legislator, a hard-core Israel supporter, is still blocking US$190m that would have gone to infrastructure projects.

The release of the funds will also provide some relief to an administration that now has to deal with the fallout of an off-microphone exchange between Mr Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, about their mutual exasperation with Mr Netanyahu.

The White House has so far refused to comment, and the incident has not made as loud as splash as might have been expected. The media in America have been consumed with the travails of Herman Cain, a Republican presidential hopeful whose unexpected front-runner status has recently taken a hit as a number of allegations of past sexual harassment have come to light.

Nevertheless, that the US administration had to appeal to the Israeli government to help it convince Congress to release funds to the PA indicates how deeply the American legislature is in thrall to pro-Israel groups in the country.

Last week, the US had to withhold its funding of Unesco after the Palestinians were admitted as members. Under a law dating back to the 1990s, the US is barred from giving any funds to any UN agency that admits Palestinians as full members absent a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement.

State Department officials acknowledged at the time that ending the funding could adversely affect US interests. "If we don't pay into these organisations, we could lose our ability to influence their actions so we are making the case to members of Congress that at some point we need some flexibility," one official said last week on condition of anonymity.

Palestinians are next poised to seek membership of the World Health Organization. Should they be accepted there, the body that coordinates international measures against pandemics, among other health crises, would also lose US funding under the same law.

The law was originally passed by Congress due to the influence of pro-Israel lobbying groups, such as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, said Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard University and co-author of The Israel Lobby, a critical look at the influence of pro-Israel organisations on US foreign policy.

It is, he said, "a perfect illustration of how the lobby's influence leads to policies that are not in the overall national interest of the United States."

And while, Mr Walt added, it was "widely understood" that the special relationship with Israel was "increasingly harmful" to the US, few in Washington are prepared to say it out loud, not least in an election year when the administration "will bend over backwards to portray itself as bending over backwards" to defend Israel.

"It is, in a sense, a dirty little secret that nobody wants to admit."

After the sound and fury in New York last week when the Palestinian bid to become a full member of the United Nations held the world's attention, tawdry reality has returned with a vengeance on the ground.

Israel announced tenders for yet more settlement units in occupied territory. Palestinians protested that such actions render negotiations meaningless. The international community, led by the United States, insisted such negotiations remain the only path to peace.

The Palestinian application for full UN membership, meanwhile, has been passed into committee. There it may languish for weeks, depending on how Byzantine the UN's Security Council decides it wants to be.

Palestinian officials will spend those weeks trying to secure support for their bid from nine members of the Council - they say they have eight now - while Washington will throw around its diplomatic weight to ensure that it won't have to use a veto.

But a stalemate is threatening to still the diplomatic waves Palestinians caused in New York. Any gains the Palestinians made will remain cosmetic should Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, decide to be content with the spike in popularity his performance at the UN's General Assembly caused at home.

Now, it is about the follow-up and Palestinians have only a few options. The leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, the PLO, is understood to be closely debating three.

One depends on the ability of the Quartet of Middle East mediators - the US, the UN, the European Union and Russia - to find an acceptable framework to bring the two sides back to direct talks.

Immediately after Mr Abbas finished addressing the General Assembly on September 23, the Quartet rushed out a statement calling for new negotiations to begin in a month, sustained support for Palestinian development efforts and, perhaps most importantly, negotiations to conclude no later than the end of 2012.

While this will have sounded vaguely promising to the PLO leadership, there is nothing new there. It was, after all, the assertion by Barack Obama, the US president, in 2010 that a Palestinian state could be created in a year that helped propel the Palestinian UN bid.

What Mr Abbas would have been looking for was a statement affirming that the baseline for territorial negotiations was the 1967 borders, and a commitment that Israeli settlement building would cease during talks.

He got neither. And perhaps more importantly, the PLO delegation in New York last week got no indication in their meetings with US officials that any such framework was in the offing.

Even if PLO leaders agreed to let the UN's Security Council hold their bid up in committee for a month or two, as has been suggested, it is extremely hard to see how, without such an explicit framework for negotiations, Mr Abbas can agree to go back to the table. After all, without a total settlement construction freeze, it would be a continuation of the same process that has failed to yield result in 18 years.

But Israel shows no sign of budging, while the US administration, in an election year, is highly unlikely to want to push the issue, as Palestinian officials are only too aware.

Even with no negotiations, and regardless of the result of the vote in the Security Council, the Palestinians can still turn to the General Assembly. There, an application for an upgrade to the current observer status of the PLO will win overwhelming support. It may open up certain limited legal avenues to Palestinians, including membership of the International Criminal Court.

Such a move will yet again affirm the international consensus behind Palestinian statehood. Any new legal avenues are unlikely to make much of difference, however. Israel does not accept the jurisdiction of the ICC, and has shown time and again that it is perfectly willing to ignore international censure.

Most recently, Israel refused to cooperate with the UN's investigation into allegations of war crimes during its Gaza offensive in 2008-2009, and subsequently, with the support of the US, dismissed the findings of the Goldstone Report out of hand.

The General Assembly, in other words, may offer Palestinians a small moral victory, but will do nothing alone to change the dynamics on the ground.

PLO leaders further say they are now seriously debating a third option: dismantling the PA. This is the most dramatic option on the table. The PA employs 150,000 people and such a move would bring very uncertain political results.

Nevertheless, it is a choice the PLO might have to make. As it is, the PA functions as a municipal authority ultimately acting under the suzerainty of the Israeli government. Eventually, that role will prove unsustainable. The PA will either dismantle itself or be dismantled.

For now, Palestinian leaders are trying to manage widespread discontent by urging non-violent popular demonstrations against the Israeli occupation. Somewhat disingenuously, however, Mr Abbas has vowed to contain such discontent to Palestinian city centres, tantamount to prisoners protesting against their treatment in jail by scowling angrily from their cells.

His greatest achievement at the UN may well be that he forced the Palestinian issue on to the front pages for a week, with a focus on statehood rather than violence or conflict. For any more substantial achievement it is what the PLO is or is not prepared to do next that will really signal whether a change is in the offering.

In an impassioned speech before the UN General Assembly, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, said yesterday a "moment of truth" had arrived, shortly after submitting an application to admit Palestine as a full UN member.

"Our people are waiting to hear the answer of the world. Will the world allow Israel to occupy us forever? … Are we an unwanted people? Or are we a missing state?" Mr Abbas, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and president of the Palestinian Authority, told a packed UN General Assembly.

He said the Palestinians were seeking recognition of a state on 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital, or 22 per cent of historic Palestine - what Palestinians call the "great compromise".

His speech was cheered by thousands of Palestinians who rallied in the West Bank, many waving Palestinian flags and some carrying Mr Abbas's photograph.

"I've been waiting to hear something like this since I was a child," said Anwar Hamam, 41, as he watched the speech on a giant screen in Ramallah with tears running down his face. "Now the view in front of me is the beginning of a Palestinian state."

Mr Abbas handed Ban Ki-moon, the UN's secretary general, the application before he made his speech.

At the same podium a little more than 30 minutes later, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, rebutted Mr Abbas's speech, saying Israel was prepared to have a Palestinian state in the West bank but that it would only happen with the right security guarantees and could not happen with a full return to 1967 borders.

"Israel must maintain a long-term military presence in critical strategic areas in the West Bank," he said.

Mr Abbas held up a copy of the UN membership application during his 40-minute speech, which was punctuated by applause and several standing ovations, and urged Mr Ban to "expedite" the process at the Security Council. Mr Ban gave the application to the Security Council late last night.

On Palestinian refugees, Mr Abbas invoked UN General Assembly Resolution 194 and the Arab Peace Initiative, which he said embodied the Arab and Muslim world's "clear position" to end the conflict.

He warned, however, that Israel's insistence on continuing building settlements in occupied territory had scuttled efforts to secure peace for 18 years since the Oslo Accords were signed and remained the "rock" against which all efforts would continue to founder.

He also rejected accusations that the application to the UN was an attempt to isolate Israel. It is rather, he said, an attempt to "delegitimise settlements and the occupation".

"Enough, enough, enough," he said to another round of applause. "It is time for Palestinians to get independence … It is time for a Palestinian Spring."

Notably less enthusiastic was the Israeli UN delegation, whose members sat stony-faced and quiet throughout Mr Abbas speech. They grew more animated three speakers later, when Mr Netanyahu spoke, albeit in front of a much more muted Assembly.

In a twist of scheduling, the speaker immediately preceding Mr Abbas on the podium was at the last minute switched from South Sudan to Armenia.

It would have been cruel irony if the Palestinian leader had addressed world leaders immediately after the head of the UN's newest state.

Two months ago, it took precisely five days for South Sudan to be admitted as the UN's 193rd member.

It will take Palestine much longer to become number 194. For all the attention the Palestinian statehood issue has enjoyed this week in New York, it will probably take longer than five days before the request is even voted on by the 15-member Security Council.

Palestinian officials say they will press Mr Ban to bring a vote as soon as possible. But there have been suggestions, angrily denied by those officials, that the Palestinians have accepted to wait for as long as two months, to give the Quartet of Middle East mediators - the US, European Union, United Nations and Russia - time to push for a resumption of direct negotiations with Israel.

Even in that time frame, however, negotiations seem only a distant possibility. Mr Netanyahu has successfully rebuffed US pressure to freeze settlement expansion in the occupied territories, a key Palestinian demand for a resumption of talks and one reasserted yesterday by Mr Abbas, and the US has since dropped the request.

Indeed, according to sources familiar with the Wednesday meeting between Mr Obama and Mr Abbas, the US president brought nothing new to the table, suggesting he has been unable to deliver Mr Netanyahu on any key compromises.

And whether it is weeks or days, Palestinians - early enthusiasm apart - may also find that a vote in the Security Council might not force a US veto as they had initially hoped. Palestinian officials still maintain that their statehood bid has the support of the nine members of the Security Council needed to pass, thus necessitating a US veto.

On Thursday, however, after meeting Mr Netanyahu, Pedro Passos Coelho, the Portuguese prime minister, announced that Portugal, one of the 10 non-permanent members of the council - would not take a position until after the Quartet finds a formula to jumpstart talks.

The US and Israel have been pressuring council members to either vote against the plan or abstain when it comes up for a vote. At a press conference on Wednesday, Nabil Shaath, a senior PLO official, named the nine countries he said had voiced their support for Palestine's statehood bid, which included permanent members China and Russia, but conceded that this did not mean they would necessarily support the measure when it came to the crunch.

The question that will inevitably be faced down the road, whether in days or weeks, is what comes next. The answer is far from clear. Absent renewed negotiations under a framework the Palestinians can agree to, the PLO could go directly to the General Assembly and seek membership as a non-state member, as the French have suggested.

Without something, as Mr Abbas hinted darkly at in his speech yesterday, the very survival of the PA might be at stake.