“I sent the club a wire stating, ‘Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.'” – Groucho Marx

Groucho’s form of comedy can best be described as calculated anarchy. He and his brothers struck fiercely at governments (the fictitious Fredonia in “Duck Soup”), academia (Huxley College in “Monkey Business”) and social decorum in virtually every film.

It might come as a surprise to some that Palestinian leaders share the Marxes penchant for anarchy, but that is exactly the path down which they are leading millions of followers.

The difference from the Marxes? Nothing about their course is in the slightest way amusing.

Both in tone and in tactic, the rhetoric coming out of both the Fatah and Hamas camps suggests a rather sad and cynical conclusion – Palestinian leaders would much rather continue to breed hatred toward Israel and operate in a climate of nonstructure and dysfunction than don the mantle of responsibility implicit in either negotiation or true statehood.

It has been widely assumed that when the request for Palestinian statehood is rejected via a United States veto in the Security Council, the Palestinian Authority would utilize its broad support among General Assembly nations to seek recognition as a non-member “observer state,” the status currently occupied by the Vatican. This status would allow the PA to occupy membership in UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Health Organization, no small step for a group with zero official global status at the present.

But PA President Mahmoud Abbas’ words in recent days suggest that its leadership may be content with the application at the Security Council and the practically ensured veto. (There is a procedural possibility, wisely raised by Larry Carp in his two-part series on the matter in the Light, that the Security Council could defer consideration and request additional information or steps prior to a vote.)

The question is, why would Abbas not then proceed to solicit the imprimateur of the General Assembly? To us, the reason seems apparent. If the PA receives official endorsement by the GA, then it will be much more likely to receive pressure to sit at the table and negotiate in good faith, something that Abbas and his partners at Hamas have been utterly unwilling to do.

Not that Israel or the U.S. relish a so-called Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). Indeed, America has been engaged in shuttle diplomacy round the clock in an effort to persuade the Palestinians to come back to the negotiating table. That seems hardly likely to happen in the near term, and particularly so if the veto occurs.

Abbas made his bed by choosing an alliance with Hamas, which controls Gaza, and that terror-loving organization neither favors the United Nations route nor negotiations with Israel (read as: more rocket fire, more bombing, more terrorism, more efforts at delegitimizing Israel). Yet he would have us feel sorry for his plight. claiming in the Jerusalem Post this week that “all hell has broken out against us” regarding the UN ploy.

Hardly: A sister article in the same publication addresses how Palestinians in vast majorities desire the declaration of statehood, albeit unilateral, and how the nations throughout the Middle East are lining up in support. In other words, we’re not getting our violin out quite yet.

We don’t have to be in favor of UDI (we’re not) to see how skirting it is a way for Abbas to win politically without sticking his diplomatic neck out. Get a veto, blame the United States, inflame tensions in the region, refuse to negotiate, keep Hamas in your camp, call it a day.

That’s not the stuff of statesmen; rather, it’s the essence of cowardice.

The shortcomings of Israel’s own weak efforts at diplomacy pale in comparison to this newest concoction before the U.N. The veto-only approach will lead to continued instability, mudslinging and violence. Sure, the General Assembly gambit could create a little push toward the negotiating table, but the risk of heightened hostility against Israel among the world’s nations is hardly worth it.

As in the past, negotiation, arduous as it is, is the only way. So when Fatah and Hamas are willing to sit down without preconditions, and Israel is there to meet them and hash things out, we’ll shed our pessimism and hope for the best. Until then, everything else is just a path away from a peaceful order and toward an anarchy that only bodes poorly for Israel.