UN Overwhelmingly Votes to Upgrade Palestine to ‘Non-Member Observer State,’ will Israel Retaliate?

• UN overwhelmingly votes to upgrade Palestine to ‘non-member observer state,’ will Israel retaliate? 
  by Madison Ruppert, Contributor, Activist Post 
  The United Nations General Assembly voted to upgrade Palestine to “non-member observer state” with an overwhelming 138 to 9 and 41 abstentions, giving Palestinians the right to join the International Criminal Court and other treaty bodies.
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  One must wonder, however, how much this will actually change on the ground in Palestine. Will it prevent neighboring countries from blocking access to Palestinian land as they have done multiple times?
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  Will it lead to less disproportionate killing in conflicts and more clarity regarding ceasefire agreements? Will it force Hamas and other militant groups to take a less aggressive stance? All this remains to be seen.
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  Indeed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the vote will actually do absolutely nothing to change the situation on the ground. “This is a meaningless resolution that won’t change anything on the ground,” said Netanyahu in a statement issued by his office shortly before the UN vote was actually held, according to Reuters.
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  “No Palestinian state will arise without an arrangement ensuring the security of Israeli citizens,” Netanyahu stated. This did nothing to temper the celebration in the streets of Palestine in the wake of the vote.
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  However, it displays a quite significant change from how Western nations have treated Palestine in the past, evidenced by Israeli news outlet Haaretz remarking that “officials in Jerusalem understood that Israel was left without any Western support except for the United States, Canada and the Czech Republic.”
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  “We lost Europe,” a senior official in the Israeli Foreign Ministry said, according to Haaretz. They cite the shift beginning in France just a few days ago. Regardless of where it started, European Union nations largely supported the Palestinian request for non-member observer state status.
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  “Spain, Cyprus, Portugal, Luxembourg, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Malta, Ireland, Italy, Slovenia, Belgium, Sweden, Germany and Greece all joined France in the past few days,” Haaretz reports. “Norway and Switzerland, which are not members of the European Union, also announced their support for the Palestinian request.” However, Germany actually abstained from the vote when it came down to it.
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  “Thursday’s vote exposed deep divisions within Europe over Palestinian statehood, with France, Italy and Spain supporting the Palestinians, and Germany and Britain casting abstentions,” reports The Washington Post.
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