Here’s an earth-shattering news flash: As his term in office was about to end, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon was attending this weekend a Shabbatarbut cultural event in a theater in Holon, when he declared: “Israel must recognize the Palestinian state as a member state of the United Nations. It must grant it sovereignty and independence. This must be the starting point for a permanent settlement''.

Now let’s go back a bit ... to Nov. 29. Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas stood at the podium of the United Nation’s General Assembly, calling on the member nations to recognize Palestine as an observer state. Just one year earlier, Abu Mazen had failed in his attempts to declare the establishment of Palestine as a member nation of the U.N. because of the threat of a U.S. veto in the Security Council. Now back at the same podium, with the same sense of mission, he declared, “We did not come here seeking to delegitimize a State established years ago, and that is Israel…We did not come here to add further complications to the peace process ... rather we came to launch a final serious attempt to achieve peace…''

Abu Mazen had some harsh words to say about Israel further on in his speech. He accused it of just about every possible sin, from restricting the movement of people to ethnic cleansing. This infuriated many in Israel, and not without good reason.

At the same time, it is reasonable to believe that the Palestinian Authority head would not have taken such a sharp tone if he knew that Israel would be one of the countries supporting his petition. One of the people to make sure that this did not happen was Danny Ayalon. Both before and after the U.N. vote, the [at the time] deputy foreign minister did everything in his power to defuse the Palestinian move. With chilling indifference, [then Foreign Minister] Avigdor Liberman later dropped the political guillotine on Ayalon and removed him from his party list. Then, however, he sent Ayalon rushing from one U.N. delegation to another in an effort to thwart the Palestinians’ efforts.