UNITED NATIONS — The United States vetoed a widely backed U.N. resolution on Thursday that would have paved the way for full United Nations membership for the state of Palestine.
The vote in the 15-member Security Council was 12 in favor, the United States opposed and two abstentions.
The resolution would have recommended that the 193-member General Assembly, where there are no vetoes, approve Palestine becoming the 194th member of the United Nations. Some 140 countries have already recognized the state of Palestine, so its admission would have been approved.
This is the second Palestinian attempt to become a full member of the United Nations, and it comes as the war in Gaza, now in its seventh month, has put the more than 75-year-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict at center stage.
Before the vote, U.S. deputy State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said the United States has “been very clear consistently that premature actions in New York — even with the best intentions — will not achieve statehood for the Palestinian people.”
Palestinian membership “needs to be the outcome of the negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians,” U.S. Deputy Ambassador Robert Wood said. It “is something that would flow from the result of those negotiations.”
Anything that gets in the way “makes it more difficult to have those negotiations” and doesn’t help move toward a two-state solution in which Israel and Palestine live side by side in peace, which “we all want,” Wood told reporters.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas first delivered the Palestinian Authority’s application for U.N. membership to then-Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2011. That initial bid failed because the Palestinians didn’t get the required minimum support of nine of the Security Council’s 15 members.
The Palestinians then went to the General Assembly and, by more than a two-thirds majority, succeeded in having their status raised from a U.N. observer to a non-member observer state in November 2012. That opened the door for the Palestinian territories to join U.N. and other international organizations, including the International Criminal Court.
The Palestinians revived their bid for U.N. membership in early April, backed by the 140 countries that have recognized Palestine as an independent state.
Ziad Abu Amr, special representative of the Palestinian president, said adopting the resolution would grant the Palestinian people hope “for a decent life within an independent state.”
