Futile PA posturing (on the PA statehood drive) http://www.qodsna.com/NewsContent-id_39973.aspx

Khalid Amayreh: Conflicting signals continued to come out of the Palestinian Authority (PA) as to its purported plans to seek United Nations recognition of a putative Palestinian state in September. PA officials have been making nearly daily statements insisting that their quest for UN recognition and membership is final and irreversible.PLO representative to the UN Riyadh Mansour has been quoted as saying that he would formally ask the UN Secretary General Ban-Ki-Moon for recognition of a Palestinian state on the 20th of September.

However, PA president Mahmoud Abbas has on several occasions, especially when meeting with visiting Western officials and diplomats, emphasized that PA plans to that effect were not irreversible and that if the Palestinians were given certain assurances, he would reconsider these plans. Abbas was quoted recently as telling some foreign diplomats in Ramallah that going to the UN in September was not really a pressing Palestinian desire and that the PA was seeking other choices and alternatives."It is a choice of the last resort. It is not our number-1 choice."

Meanwhile, Abbas has been secretly meeting with Israeli president Shimon Peres in an effort to explore ways and means to bypass the so-called "September entitlement."A Palestinian official was quoted by AFP on Saturday, 13 August, as saying that Peres, a certified war criminal for his role in the 1996 Kana massacre in Southern Lebanon , met with Abbas four times in recent months in a bid to resume stalled "peace" talks.The meetings, which are likely to further embolden the Israeli stance and increase the Zionist entity's intransigence and insolence, took place as Israel continued to expand Jewish settlements and steal more land in the West Bank.