Four days ago, just before the UN voted on admitting Palestine to non-member observer status Britain's Foreign Secretary, William Hague, explained that Britain would be abstaining unless the Palestinians agreed to return to peace negotiations without preconditions. It was an extraordinary requirement: the Palestinians (Abbas/Hamas?) may/should/almost certainly will have protested that the ending of settlement building on occupied lands ought to be a given before there could be further talks.

The day after most UN members voted Palestine that one step closer to statehood (the US, Canada, the Czech Republic and a few small Pacific states voted against), Israel announced that it was to go ahead with the building of 3000 houses in a settlement plan that had been kept in reserve for a long time. Britain and France have now called in the Israeli ambassadors to their respective countries to express restrained outage. Nobody doubts (or if they do, I can't quite understand what else they think it is) that Israel's announcement was an act of vengeful retaliation – petulance, even, that the world body should have taken Palestine one step closer to the two state solution that supposedly, in some form, Israel supports. But does it?

It makes me think of the Rambouillet Agreement of 1999, drafted by NATO, and meant to be signed by delegates of the then-Yugoslavia and Kosovo (at the time a province of Serbia), in order to end the conflict between them. Although to begin with it was the Kosovars who didn't want to sign and the Serbs who said they would, as time went on that position was reversed. Not only because the Serbs couldn’t tolerate the possibility that the agreement envisaged an independent Kosovo (which in fact later became the case), but also because NATO had tagged an appendix onto the end of the main body of the agreement which was quite extraordinary. It required Serbia to accept on its territory NATO forces, rather than UN ones, and what was more, Serbia would have to pay for them – board and lodging, as it were. Not surprisingly the Serbs refused, rejecting the agreement, which allowed NATO to declare war on them using that rejection as the pretext. Serbia lost the war; Kosovo became independent eventually; Serb resentment and sense of victimhood were duly increased.

I remember asking a man by the name of Gwyn Prins, a sort of floating consultant who at the time was barnacled to NATO, when was the last occasion that any state was required to accept conditions like those envisioned in that annex to the Rambouillet text? Cheerfully he said, "Not since Germany after it had lost the Second World War." The point was that these conditions were inserted into the annex precisely because Serbia couldn't possibly accept them.

Is this not what we're seeing now with settlement building in the occupied territories? On paper (and only on paper) Israel is prepared to accept, or has been, a two-state solution to the conflict between it and Palestine. But the placing of settlements to date has made it increasingly impossible for any form of Palestine to function. This latest building scheme is guaranteed to stymie any possible further talks. The Israelis of course will blame Palestinian intransigence for this, but it will have been part of their calculations from the start.

Apologies for the length of this post but like Mark Twain(?)I didn't have time to write a shorter one.