Abbas again says the goal of the UN stunt is to establish borders

Once again, Mahmoud Abbas is stating, explicitly but in Arabic, that the drive for upgrading the status of "Palestine" at the UN from "non-member entity" to "non-member state" is really to pretend that the so-called "1967 borders" are legally "Palestinian" - even though the General Assembly does not have the right to establish borders.

Here are his words to an Arab League meeting:

We want to prove our territory is Palestinian and was occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, because Israel has another concept, and says that the occupied Palestinian territories in '67 territories are in dispute or contested in the sense that they are subject to negotiations...We want the world to understand that the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967 are occupied territory of a State, or a State under occupation...

Not a word about independence, or freedom, or statehood - the entire point of the stunt is to give the appearance of establishing borders, and afterwards Abbas can say that those borders are not negotiable because the UN has accepted them.

When he says he is willing to negotiate afterwards with Israel, he is saying that the idea of borders are off the table, including Jerusalem. The draft resolution's mention of "delineation of borders to be determined in final status negotiations" is meant to say that only minor border adjustments would be allowed but purely as his own choice - he would be voluntarily ceding some land to gain other land, but the land is inherently "Palestine" to begin with, and not disputed at all.

All he will negotiate is about prisoners and water and the other outstanding issues.

His "negotiation" on the day after would not be Oslo negotiations; they would be a new set of negotiations between two states, in his formulation.

The West seems clueless as to his plan to avoid negotiating the major issue that the Oslo process was meant to address, and indeed to abrogate the Oslo process altogether.