The Palestinian Authority will push ahead with its bid to get United Nations statehood recognition though it won’t press for an immediate vote as support in the Security Council appeared to be below the needed threshold. 
 
 The Palestinians have said at least eight of the council’s members -- Russia, China, Gabon, Nigeria, South Africa, Brazil, Lebanon and India -- will back them. The U.S. veto pledge notwithstanding, that still leaves the Palestinians one vote short of the nine needed for membership. 
 
 The U.S. and Israel have leaned on council members favoring the statehood initiative to abstain from voting, leaving the Palestinians fighting to retain support. Allowing the UN’s administrative process to delay the consideration in the 15- member body will permit the Palestinians to save face and buy diplomats time to look for an alternative that restarts peace talks. 
 
 “We will give some time to the Security Council to consider first our full membership request before heading to the General Assembly,” Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath told reporters yesterday. “If we fail, we will keep knocking on the door. We do not have a time limit.” 
 
 Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will address the UN General Assembly tomorrow and formally submit his letter of application for statehood recognition to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, who will then pass it on to Lebanon, which presides this month over the Security Council. It’s the only Arab country in the decision-making body and supports the bid. 
 
 ‘Going Forward’ 
 
 “We are going forward with our application for a full state,” Mohammad Shtayyeh, a senior member of Abbas’ Fatah party who is on the special committee that prepared the UN bid, told Bloomberg Television. 
 
 About 500 people waved Palestinian flags and chanted slogans in support of statehood today, parading past the grave of Palestine Liberation Organization founder Yasser Arafat in Ramallah. 
 
 “We will not surrender,” said 26-year-old Niveen Abuez. “We will continue our path to achieve our basic rights.” 
 
 Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, said that Abbas has “worked hard to manage expectations and I think people will give him another two months, maybe longer.” 
 
 “They weren’t really expecting him to come back home tomorrow with a state,” he said. 
 
 In what U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to as “extremely intense” diplomacy, Israel and the U.S. made headway in eroding support for the membership initiative even among countries the Palestinians had been counting on. 
 
 Nigerian Vote 
 
 Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak met in New York with Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan and convinced him to stay neutral in a possible vote on Palestinian statehood, according to a statement released by his office. 
 
 Nigeria is among the nine nations on the Security Council that have recognized a Palestinian state. The others are Brazil, Russia, China, India, Lebanon, South Africa, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Gabon. 
 
 Some countries have seldom received so much attention. Bosnia and Herzegovina is the smallest country on the council. Its UN envoy is a 36-year-old Croat, who says he’s been contacted by Israel, the Palestinians and the U.S. 
 
 Delay Process 
 
 Once a membership application has been lodged, the Security Council can delay the process. For South Sudan, it took three days to make the African country the UN’s 193rd member while Jordan had to wait five years. In the case of the Palestinians, an admissions committee representing all 15 council members might be set up to deliberate on the matter for days, weeks or even months. 
 
 U.S. President Barack Obama underlined yesterday that his position had not budged when he told the gathering of world leaders that “peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the UN.” There was little in his words to encourage Palestinians or sway Abbas to change course. 
 
 “It didn’t really take us forward to anywhere,” said Shtayyeh in a telephone interview. “The negotiations themselves are in a crisis. We took this initiative to change the status quo.” 
 
 Another option open to the Palestinians would be to pursue an upgraded status at the General Assembly, from “entity” to “non-member state,” such as the Holy See, the government of the Roman Catholic Church, based in the Vatican. That could enable them to sign international treaties and have cases heard in the International Criminal Court. 
 
 Win Endorsement 
 
 Such a course could win the endorsement of some Europeans in the council, such as France and Britain, which are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, yet want to see greater recognition accompanied with a return to the negotiating table. 
 
 French President Nicolas Sarkozy, addressing the General Assembly yesterday, supported the “intermediate step” of observer-state status. He also proposed a one-year timetable for resumed Israeli-Palestinian negotiations to lead to a full peace accord. Talks should begin within a month without preconditions, he said. 
 
 Peace negotiations collapsed last year following Netanyahu’s decision not to extend a 10-month partial freeze on construction in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Abbas has said he won’t resume talks while building continues. Netanyahu, who hasn’t offered to resume the freeze in settlement building, has repeatedly said that Abbas should restart direct talks. 
 
 To contact the reporters on this story: Flavia Krause-Jackson in United Nations at fjackson@bloomberg.net; Bill Varner in United Nations at wvarner@bloomberg.net 
 
 To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net ||||| UNITED NATIONS — A last-ditch American effort to head off a Palestinian bid for membership in the United Nations faltered. President Obama tried to qualify his own call, just a year ago, for a Palestinian state. And President Nicolas Sarkozy of France stepped forcefully into the void, with a proposal that pointedly repudiated Mr. Obama’s approach. 
 
 The extraordinary tableau Wednesday at the United Nations underscored a stark new reality: the United States is facing the prospect of having to share, or even cede, its decades-long role as the architect of Middle East peacemaking. 
 
 Even before Mr. Obama walked up to the General Assembly podium to make his difficult address, where he declared that “Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the U.N.,” American officials acknowledged that their various last-minute attempts to jump-start Israeli-Palestinian negotiations with help from European allies and Russia had collapsed. 
 
 American diplomats turned their attention to how to navigate a new era in which questions of Palestinian statehood are squarely on the global diplomatic agenda. There used to be three relevant players in any Middle East peace effort: the Palestinians, Israel and the United States. But expansions of settlements in the West Bank and a hardening of Israeli attitudes have isolated Israel and its main backer, the United States. Dissension among Palestinian factions has undermined the prospect for a new accord as well. 
 
 Finally, Washington politics has limited Mr. Obama’s ability to try to break the logjam if that means appearing to distance himself from Israel. Republicans have mounted a challenge to lure away Jewish voters who supported Democrats in the past, after some Jewish leaders sharply criticized Mr. Obama for trying to push Israel too hard. 
 
 The result has been two and a half years of stagnation on the Middle East peace front that has left Arabs — and many world leaders — frustrated, and ready to try an alternative to the American-centric approach that has prevailed since the 1970s. 
 
 “The U.S. cannot lead on an issue that it is so boxed in on by its domestic politics,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator in the government of Ehud Barak. “And therefore, with the region in such rapid upheaval and the two-state solution dying, as long as the U.S. is paralyzed, others are going to have to step up.” 
 
 Mr. Obama himself seemed to forecast this back in May when, speaking to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, he warned that events in the Middle East could lead to a challenge to the status quo if the Israelis and Palestinians did not move quickly toward a peace deal. 
 
 “There’s a reason why the Palestinians are pursuing their interests at the United Nations,” Mr. Obama said then. “They recognize that there is an impatience with the peace process, or the absence of one, not just in the Arab world, in Latin America, in Asia, and in Europe. And that impatience is growing, and it’s already manifesting itself in capitals around the world.” 
 
 The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, delivered on the threat. He announced last Friday his plans to go to the Security Council in a quest for Palestinian membership in the United Nations and international legal recognition of statehood, putting Mr. Obama in the position of having to stand in the way. Israel and its allies in Congress, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel enjoys broad influence, were sharply opposed. 
 
 So on Wednesday, Mr. Obama “did exactly what he had to do,” said David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official and a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He made a clear statement for what is a clear U.S. position and put himself squarely as a champion of the status quo.” 
 
 Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Rothkopf said, “has managed to read the U.S. political situation perfectly, making Obama acutely aware that he could be losing part of his base, and that, I think, in turn is what has locked Obama in.” 
 
 The Palestinians have never fully trusted the United States to serve as an honest broker with Israel. But its credibility with the Palestinians has crumbled with the recognition that Mr. Obama may not have the clout to press the Israelis into a peace deal that requires significant compromises. 
 
 “The president in his speech at the U.N. today admitted that the U.S. somehow failed in bridging the gap between the two sides,” the Palestinian representative in Washington, Maen Rashid Areikat, said in an interview on Wednesday. “He said that he feels frustration and he understands the frustration of everybody. That’s good, but I think it goes much deeper. I think what the U.S. administration needs to say is why it failed.”
– Palestine won’t push for an immediate Security Council vote on its push for full UN membership, because it doesn’t appear to have the requisite nine votes—even if the US weren’t promising to veto the move. “We will give some time to the Security Council,” a Palestinian negotiator told reporters, according to Bloomberg. “If we fail, we will keep knocking on the door. We do not have a time limit." The US and Israel are asking council members to abstain from voting in order to spare Palestine a definitive defeat. Israel, for example, has convinced Nigeria to stay neutral, even though it recognizes Palestinian statehood bilaterally. But US opposition to the move has come at a cost: the US may have to give up its role as sole arbiter of peace in the Middle East, the New York Times observes, because it’s seen as too close to an increasingly isolated Israel.