Israel expressed disappointment with France and the UK's stances on yesterday's Palestinian statehood vote at the UN Security Council. Photo: Twitter

Officials in Jerusalem have expressed disappointment over the UK and France’s role in Monday’s UN Security Council vote which rejected a Jordanian-sponsored bid to end Israeli control over the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, Israel’s NRG News reported on Wednesday.

While the US and Australia helped torpedo the 15-member council’s vote, in which only eight member states voted for the resolution, France voted in favor, while the United Kingdom abstained.

The decision was one vote short of the number needed to pass the resolution.

“The unfortunate fact that two of Israel’s allies – France and Britain – supported or abstained is a worrying sign,” Strategic Affairs and Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz said, adding, “this indicates an urgent need to increase the effectiveness of foreign policy and advocacy in the international arena.”

Officials in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office said that the Palestinian vote was quashed as a result of Benjamin Netanyahu’s talks with the leaders of African countries who abstained, preventing the need for an American veto.

“In an effort to prevent a majority voting for the Palestinian bid at the Security Council, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday spoke with the President of Nigeria and the President of Rwanda; the two countries finally abstained, thus preventing the required majority for the Palestinians,” an official said.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that “the failure of the Palestinian bid at the Security Council should teach the Palestinians that provocations and attempts to force Israel into unilateral action will not lead them to any achievement – but rather just the opposite.”

Israel’s Middle East Adviser at the UN, Israel Nitzan, said in a statement at the UNSC that, “The Palestinians have found every possible opportunity to avoid direct negotiations. They have engaged in a never-ending string of political games and now they are parading into this Council with preposterous unilateral proposals.”

Nitzan declared: “I have news for the Palestinians – you cannot agitate and provoke your way to a state. I urge the Council to stop indulging the Palestinians and put an end to their march of folly.”

Lieberman added that the vote was “the second time in three years” in which a Palestinian statehood proposal was frustrated, noting that “the concerted effort to develop Israel’s diplomatic relations with countries in Africa and Eastern and Central Europe,” aided the final outcome.

Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold, observed, “In substance, the draft resolution also sought to prejudge the outcome of any future negotiations. How can you have a Security Council resolution that decides Israel’s future borders on the basis of the 1967 lines and in the same breath assert that you are going to have a negotiation over borders? What is there left to negotiate? UN Security Council Resolution 242, adopted in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, did not require Israel to fully withdraw from the territories it captured in a war of self-defense.”

Noted French-Jewish activist and artist Ron Agam told The Algemeiner that “France cannot even guarantee the security of its own Jews, [and] now they want to get involved with the security of the state of Israel by pushing and voting in favor of a debilitating pro-Palestinian resolution at the UN that will guarantee the destruction of the state of Israel sooner or later.”

“My advice to President Francois Hollande,” Agam concluded, is to “exercise your influence on the Arab world – and in particular your Qatari friends – to stop financing radical Islamic terrorism against Israel and the rest of the world.”

Watch Israel Nitzan addressing the UN Security Council: