The Palestinian Authority has submitted another one of its statehood bids to the United Nations, this time as a draft petition to the Security Council. These bids, like wars in Gaza, have become an almost biannual affair. Indeed, President Abbas expends far more energy on efforts to achieve statehood at the UN than he does with the Israelis through negotiations, despite the fact that all the governments of the world that really count have repeatedly told him that there is no alternative to a negotiated settlement. This time around Abbas’s UN stunt is a little different. The proposal put forward by the Palestinians today is asking the Security Council to enforce a framework on the negotiation process. In reality, however, what the Palestinians are asking for entirely invalidates the very idea of a negotiated peace.

The draft of the Palestinian proposal, submitted just as Prime Minister Netanyahu was about to step into the Oval Office for a meeting with President Obama, seeks to win UN Security Council backing for a deadline that would force Israel to cede the West Bank by November 2016. But that is not all. The petition also gives an extensive rundown of what the final settlement must look like. In addition to the total Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Jerusalem being turned into the Palestinian capital, the resolution also calls for a complete end to all Israeli military activity in the territories, an end to any Israeli settlement construction, an opening of all Gaza’s borders, and the deployment of an international force throughout the disputed territories–for the protection of Palestinian civilians, of course. Naturally the resolution draft also calls for a just settlement of Palestinian refugees, which is code for Israel being obliged to allow several million Arabs claiming Palestinian descent to relocate to the Jewish state.

Now, you can think these demands are reasonable or you can think that they are not. But what is undeniable is that it is ridiculous for Abbas to have essentially made meeting all his demands the precondition for his participation in any further peace talks. What kind of negotiation is it that can only begin once all of the outcomes have already been decided? In effect what the Palestinians have said is that there will now only be peace talks if the UN Security Council first obliges the Israelis to agree to grant to them everything they want in advance. And with the outcome of the talks predetermined, what exactly is supposed to be going on in that negotiating room? Abbas has it all worked out come November 2016, and in the meantime chief negotiators Saeb Erekat and Tzipi Livni will be in there whiling away the hours doing what? Parlor games perhaps?

The American, British, and Australian governments have all already said that they won’t be agreeing to the Palestinians’ non-negotiated statehood bid. Abbas and the PA know this. Yet apparently they are going to go ahead and lobby for a Security Council vote on their petition nonetheless. And when the bid gets knocked down by the inevitable U.S. veto, Abbas is threatening to submit an application for membership of the International Criminal Court. The Palestinians have been talking about doing this for years, but they still haven’t because they know that the PA—which now includes Hamas—is itself in full material breach of international law. Abbas is also threatening to end cooperation with Israel on security in the West Bank, an even more hollow threat given that, as we saw in the West Bank over the summer, the PA has been completely neglecting its commitments to keep down militants.

In an almost unreadable piece for Haaretz titled “Welcome to Post-Peace-Era Israel,” Carolina Landsman bemoans how both the Israeli right and left are gradually abandoning the notion of the two-state agreement. Landsman draws attention to an interesting reality and then, as if she hadn’t just read her own piece, promptly concludes by rehearsing the usual expressions about the need for a two-state arrangement anyway. But since Landsman is quite right about what she observes happening, she might at least stop to ask if there might not be a good reason that both sides of the political spectrum are finding themselves forced toward the same conclusion. Even if we leave Hamas out of the equation, the fact is that when Israelis look to Fatah they don’t see a negotiating partner there either. What they see is what they have: Abbas and his clique with their list of all-encompassing non-negotiable demands. Demands that they will not only not put up for discussion, but that they are now seeking to have imposed via the UN. And even with all the good will in the world, you still won’t get very far trying to negotiate with that.