Oh Frabjous Day! Calloo! Callay!

As you will all know from today's Google doodle, it's St Andrew's Day, national day of Scotland.

But it's a far more significant day for Palestine, which has overwhelmingly won the vote in the UN General Assembly to become a "Non-member State". This means it can participate in debates, and has a much better chance of obtaining representation on bodies such as the International Criminal Court.

Imagine: progress in the Middle East that neither Israel nor the USA was able to block. that in itself makes this an historic occasion.

From the Jerusalem Post (which as a good little government propaganda organ puts "Palestine" in quotation marks in the hope that it will go away):

Abbas said that the Palestinians will accept no less than “the independence of the state of Palestine, with east Jerusalem as its capital, on all the Palestinian territory occupied in 1967, to live in peace and security alongside the State of Israel, and a solution for the refugee issue on the basis of Resolution 194.”

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu condemned Abbas’s strong critique of Israel as “hostile and poisonous,” and full of “false propaganda.”

“These are not the words of a man who wants peace,” he said in a statement.

Because obviously expecting Israel to abide by international law and the treaties its own governmane has signed is "poisonous", while threats to unleash a second Holocaust on the people of Gaza are "the words of a man wo wants peace". What universe does Netanyahu live in?

For thos of us living in the real world, I strongly suspect that today may be like that day just over forty-nine years ago when President Kennedy was murdered: people will all remember where they were and what they were doing when we heard the news (I was in my living-room, checking my Facebook wall). (As for Kennedy, I was most likely in bed when the news brok in the mid-evening here, but then I was only eight. So I would have heard it next morning.)

Congratulations to the goverments (both the Fatah and Hamas ones) and people of Palestine. You need some good news once in a while.