Led by France, a significant European vote in favour included Spain, Switzerland and Ireland. The single discernible advantage in this new standing for the Palestinians, which appears to be at the root of Israeli anger, is access to the International Criminal Court where they might mount cases against Israel for its conduct of the occupation and its treatment of Palestinians. Precisely how else it might change the dynamic of the conflict remains to be seen. The US and Britain pleaded with PA President Mahmoud Abbas to include a clause in his draft resolution before the General Assembly, undertaking not to go to the ICC - he refused. Just 24 hours before the vote, senior Washington officials went to Abbas' New York hotel, in a last, failed bid to turn him. British Prime Minister David Cameron joined the effort too, going so far as to offer a ''yes'' vote had Abbas agreed. In the face of Abbas' persistence, Israel backed away from a recent salvo of retaliatory threats - abandonment of the Oslo Accords, ousting Abbas as head of the PA and a clamp on the delivery of Palestinian tax revenue collected by Israel - to a more subdued wait-and-see stance.

Israel's response would be ''proportionate'' to how the Palestinians acted after the vote, Israel's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Yigal Palmor, said - ''if they use it to continue confronting Israel and other UN bodies, there will be a firm response. If not, then there won't.'' Struggling for relevance and respect amid the seeming failure of a so-called peace process that was launched on the back of the 1993 Oslo Accords and being eclipsed by his factional foes in the Hamas Islamist movement, the other half of the Palestinian political equation, Abbas concluded that traipsing to the UN bunker, on the banks of the East River in Manhattan, was possibly his last best option - particularly given the near adulation bestowed on his Hamas rivals in the wake of the Arab Spring and the latest fighting in Gaza. This is the new regional dynamic that may be superseding the Oslo Accords, which had managed to keep the likes of Egypt and Jordan as players in an aimless process and many other Arab states as passive observers, as Washington, Israel and the Palestinians went through the motions of stalling or failed negotiations, during which Israeli settlement of Palestinian land continued unchecked. France and Spain, in particular, justified their ''yes'' votes on Thursday as efforts to bolster Abbas, as he is overshadowed by the ascendant Hamas, which, in the eyes of many Palestinians, has proved that violent resistance gets better results than recognition of the state of Israel, the renouncement of violence, participation in almost 20 years of peace talks and co-operation with the US. Whereas Abbas' Fatah movement and the foreign-sponsored PA, which they control, is reminiscent of the ousted regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, Hamas is a product of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood movement that is emerging as the dominant political force in the region in the wake of the Arab uprisings - democratically elected and prepared to work with Washington, but not as slavish enforcers of US policy.

Pleading for the US and Israel to indulge Abbas, one of the Israeli architects of the Oslo Accords, Yossi Beilin, warned in the lead-up to Thursday's vote: ''If opposition … continues, it could serve as a mortal blow to Abbas and end up being a prize that enhances the power and legitimacy of Hamas.'' Branding Israel's threat to abandon the Oslo Accords in the face of a ''yes'' vote as ''preposterous'', Beilin accused Benjamin Netanyahu's government of bluffing. ''The accords have allowed Israel's right-wing governments to hide behind an interim agreement that, for almost 20 years, has permitted Israel to continue the expansion of settlements in the West Bank; to rid itself of the responsibility of day-to-day management of the occupied territories; to save itself the cost of occupation [as donor countries are financing the Palestinian budget]; and to benefit from co-operation with Palestinian security forces,'' he wrote in The New York Times. ''There is no chance that Israel will nullify the accords.'' Abbas has indicated that, with Thursday's vote under his belt, he would be willing to return to talks with Israel - which have stalled for two years because of the Palestinian objection to continued expansion of Israeli settlements that, in the eyes of much of the world, are illegal.

And in that willingness to get back to negotiations, the Palestinian leader anticipates a changed dynamic. Writing of the bid in The New York Times as far back as May 2011, he explained: ''Palestine would be negotiating from the position of one UN member whose territory is militarily occupied by another, and not as a vanquished people.'' Washington argues, as Hillary Clinton did this week, that ''the path to a two-state solution … is through Jerusalem and Ramallah, not New York''. But in all the kerfuffle, there has been little effort to explain why Abbas' UN bid and a resumption of negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis are perceived as mutually exclusive. When the naysayings about his UN venture are stacked up, they seemingly can be reduced to three essential, circular elements that have been hallmarks of this crisis down the decades. First, Israel does not like it; second, Israel likely will act on its threats to punish the Palestinians; and third, it creates a problem for the White House with Congress, where a good number of representatives feel obliged to act on the fact that Israel does not like it, either by challenging the White House or by cutting US funding to the Palestinian Authority. In attempting to flesh out the American argument, the Woodrow Wilson Centre's Aaron David Miller struggles to put meaningful flesh on a more substantive iteration of the argument against the UN membership bid.

''First, what matters is negotiations, not moves at the UN,'' he writes in a CNN blog. ''Second, [this changed status for Palestine at the UN] will only deepen the adversarial relationship between Abbas and Netanyahu, give the Israelis another reason not to negotiate and get [President Barack Obama] into a fight with Congress. ''Three, if [Obama is going to move] on the big Israeli-Palestinian issues during his second term, he needs to build up credibility with the Israelis … so he can be in a better position to push and persuade them later.'' Boil it all down, and it still seems to amount to a single issue - that Israel does not like it. On the other hand, Palestinians do not like the status quo and a presumption that for negotiations to succeed, it is they who must make further concessions.

Their frustration with ''the world's politicians [who] continue to dance around the problem, rather than confront it'' is apparent in the writing of Palestinian writer Daoud Kuttab, who harks back to their disappointment with that UN decision 65 years ago. ''Palestinians were unhappy with the partition plan which awarded them 46 per cent of mandatory Palestine. Today Palestinians are seeking statehood on a mere 22 per cent of the territory that had been … Palestine until Israel was unilaterally established on areas much larger than those awarded by UN General Assembly resolution 181 in 1947,'' he wrote this week. As diplomats drifted away from the UN on Thursday, their limousines disappearing into the New York gridlock, a question left hanging was: what is all the fuss about? If all sides want to persist with the two-state solution, does it matter that a significant majority in the General Assembly voted to give implicit recognition to a sovereign state of Palestine, which readily acknowledges that there can be no resolution to the conflict without its further participation in talks with Israel. This is the context in which some analysts caution that Washington's insistence on a ''no'' vote is self-defeating - they fear it will hasten the demise of Abbas and the Palestine Authority as viable partners in the Oslo process, which Washington insists must be kept on life support, even if the patient is unable to get off the gurney.

It would have been better, says Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group, for the Americans to have shrugged their shoulders in acknowledgment of an act that is more a desperate bid for political legitimacy than it is a threat to Israel or the peace process. In a panel discussion at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Malley argued: ''[Abbas] really, politically, has no choice - this is less an act of confrontation than an act of survival … the most moderate expression of a general Palestinian frustration.''