The Palestinian UN resolution calling for the complete withdrawl of Israel from the Palestinian territories by 2017 was rejected Tuesday by the UN Security Council, Reuters reports.
The draft failed to receive the minimum nine votes needed for it to pass, but would have been turned down regardless as the United States had cast a vote against it and is one of the five permanent UN members with veto-power.
The resolution, which had been revised from its original version to present a more hardline stance on East Jerusalem, had eight votes in favor of its passing, two against and five absentees. The United States was joined by Australia in voting against the draft.
While several Arab nation representatives were displeased with it, the outcome was a predictable one, as representatives from Washington had made clear of their intentions to turn the revised text down. An earlier draft called for Jerusalem to be shared as the capital of both the Israeli and Palestinian states, while the text presented Tuesday called for east Jerusalem to be the capital of the Palestinian state, and pushed for settlements to cease in the West Bank territory.
Palestinians reportedly took Western diplomats by surprise last week when they pushed for a vote to go through before the end of the year. Washington, on the other hand, wanted to hold the vote until after Israeli elections took place in 2015. Once the decision was pushed though, American delegates had already said they did not intend to send the text though.
Following the crumbling of US-brokered peace talks in April of this year, Israeli diplomats have argued the Palestinian text as it was presented to the UN Council would only further degrade future negotiations' progress, while Palestinians hoped to refuel plans for east Jerusalem and the West Bank by bringing the prospect of statehood to international attention and establishing its own UN membership.
Israel has not had a presence in Gaza since pulling out troops and settlers entirely in 2005, but argue doing the same in the West Bank would leave their eastern border impossible to defend.
