There was a palpable sense of occasion for the "Status of Palestine at the United Nations" debate, with every seat taken in the normally half-empty public gallery, and junior diplomats being turned away. Men in keffiyeh and women in headscarves took photos of each other with their iPhones and iPads. There was one young man in a yarmulke (skull cap), looking suitably gloomy. When I asked a young diplomat from the    Israeli mission to predict the result, his sole response was "dire". To make the situation even worse for the Israelis, the result of a lottery at the start of the GA's 67th session to organise the seating meant that the Israeli delegation had to sit next to the Palestinians. There were 188 possible permutations for placement, yet somehow the lottery produced a result whereby the three Jewish diplomats were forced to sit next to their tormentors.

Daffa-Alla Elhag Ali Osman, the Sudanese ambassador, began the debate by saying "We welcome the children of Palestine, who have shown patience and good faith," before entering into a predictable diatribe against Israel and denouncing "the unacceptability of taking territory by force". Considering that that was precisely what his country had done to its southern non-Muslim neighbour from 1983 to 2011, the hypocrisy was breathtaking, but then hypocrisy is the small change of GA debates. North Korea lectures other countries on food production, Iran will solemnly intone on the benefits of disarmament, Zimbabwe will preach about democracy, and they all without exception talk ceaselessly about human rights, as they blithely torture and murder their own citizens back home. 

Due either to the height of the dome above the speaker's podium, or possibly the positioning of the loudspeakers farther back in the very long chamber, there is an echo in the General Assembly that afflicts all the speeches there. In the Palestinian debate this echo-chamber effect was doubly amplified because the Sudanese, Indonesian and Turkish all made precisely the same speech. They had interchangeable phrases about how "the eyes of all the children of Palestine are directed towards us", and references to "Israeli aggression", "the courage of Yasser Arafat", and so on. Not a word about Hamas or Hezbollah rocket attacks, and in all the talk about "ethnic cleansing" there was no mention of the Jewish communities that existed throughout the Middle East before 1948. They also all spoke of the historic nature of the debate, but the first time it was mentioned, the English interpreter translated it as "hysteric", by far the better adjective. 

When Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, walked to the podium, the normally somnambulant chamber erupted into applause, including wolf-whistles. Presented with an opportunity to show statesmanship, he instead launched into a violent tirade against the "incessant flood of Israeli threats" and Israel's "racist colonialist occupation", describing the two-state solution as "a very difficult choice if not impossible". He stated that: "Israeli occupation is . . . an apartheid system . . . which institutionalises the plague of racism." By harking back constantly to the "catastrophe" of 1948-which he described in terms of genocide-and never accepting the right of Israel to exist, Abbas was clearly trying to shore up support back home, yet he was also given a standing ovation by about two-fifths of the chamber and very many in the public gallery. Here was the old Palestinian snarl in all its old fury and resentment, turning down the olive branch yet again. Abbas did not actually wear a uniform and gun-holster in the GA chamber, as Yasser Arafat once did, but he might as well have done.