Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has apparently had enough of the Trump administration’s efforts at moving the peace process forward. This obviously isn’t the first time that the respective parties have grown impatient with an American administration (Israel wasn’t exactly wild about Barack Obama’s approach), but now Abbas is apparently ready to scrap the traditional effort entirely and hand off the responsibility to someone else. And who might that be? Why, the United Nations, of course. (Boston Globe)

Breaking with years of courting the United States, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called Wednesday for the UN to replace Washington as a Mideast mediator and suggested he might not cooperate with the Trump administration’s much-anticipated effort to reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.

At a summit in Turkey, Arab and Muslim leaders ‘‘rejected and condemned’’ President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — the trigger for Abbas’s sharp policy pivot — but stopped short of backing his more combative approach toward Washington.

As you can imagine, this idea should be a complete non-starter. If there’s a worse intermediary to pick as a peace negotiator (at least from Israel’s perspective) you’d probably have to tap Iran to do the honors. The United States has been the only force standing in the way of the UN decimating Israel’s rights for decades. At the Jewish Virtual Library, you can read a list of all of the UN Security Council resolutions aimed at Israel over the years which the United States has had to veto. You may want to get a fresh cup of coffee before sitting down to read them because there are more than forty.

See if you remember some of these classics:

• Condemning Israeli settlements Established Since 1967 as Illegal
• Condemning Israel for Killing Hamas Leader Ahmed Yassin
• Seeking to Bar Israel from Extending Security Fence
• Calling Israeli authorities to Refrain from All Settlement Activity
• Deploring Israeli Policies and Practices in the Occupied Territories

And those only date back to 1989.

The United Nations has been a hotbed of antisemitism for as long as I can remember (and I was born barely a decade after Harry S. Truman recognized the nation). This isn’t to say that everything Israel has ever done has been completely beyond reproach or that the more peaceful Palestinians (when you can separate them from their heavily embedded terror network) might not be interested in an equitable arrangement, but the United Nations is hardly the place to go if you’re looking for a fair deal.

While some international conditions have been at least a bit more promising in recent years for Israel, the United States remains essentially the only force standing between the current, admittedly tenuous situation and the Israelis being literally driven into the sea by a coalition of her enemies. Abbas needs to realize that he’s never going to get everything he wants and come back to the table with an open mind. And he should forget about inviting the United Nations in as any sort of impartial arbiter. It’s simply not going to happen.