By Daily Star Editorial

Mahmoud Abbas took to the podium at the United Nations Friday and asked the international community to honor commitments it had made by recognizing the right for Palestinian statehood.
It was a moment of great significance, when a leader put in plain and honest terms the choice facing the world, but its effect was far from unprecedented.

Rewind 37 years, when PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat took to the lectern to the shock and chagrin of the U.S., who considered the man to be a terrorist. Arafat succeeded in awakening the world to the plight of his countryfolk, who had their land snatched and their dignity ruined.
The leader told the U.N. that he came to New York holding a freedom fighter’s gun in one hand and an olive branch in the other. He begged them not to let him drop the latter.

Abbas came only wielding the olive branch. The fact that after nearly four decades of frustration – of being continually overlooked by the world, of repeatedly asking for no more than equality and humanity in the face of continued Israeli obstinacy and the ignorance of its powerful allies – Palestine chooses to come to New York with peace in mind is a miracle of human endurance. That it has taken so long for Palestine to ask the U.N. to recognize it is testament to the commitment its negotiators had – excessively so, it appears in retrospect – in persisting with blatantly uneven peace talks with Israel.

What Abbas delivered, to a standing ovation, was notable not in its boldness, but in its fairness. He asked for his country to become an officially recognized state in order to work toward lasting peace predicated on what the international community has already deemed righteous. What Israel slams as unfeasible Palestinian preconditions are nothing more than the application of international law.
The U.S.’s inevitable veto of a statehood bid at the Security Council reneges on its word and demonstrates the ugly truth that it, like Israel, picks and chooses the resolutions it abides by.

Whereas Arafat offered countries the choice between peace and armed resistance, the dichotomy facing the U.N. was put in far starker terms by Abbas: You either honor your decisions and international law or you don’t.
With two-thirds General Assembly support already secured, it is clear on which side of the moral fence most of the world sits. On the other, increasingly distant and maligned, sit Israel and the U.S.

For although those two would like to paint the bid for statehood as unilaterally out of the blue, it is in fact the logical – and lawful – progeny of 60 years of one side refusing to acknowledge the rights of the other.
It was Abbas’ job Friday to point this out. He did so. Now is the turn of the rest of the world to finish the work.