THERE are 193 member states of the United Nations.

It is tricky, as a matter of fact, for any self-respecting little nation to avoid association with the club. The global family acknowledges all sorts.

What would you have? The UN has thugs, brutes, superpowers, superpower-thugs, comedy dictatorships, and precious few actual paid-up, functioning, recognised democracies.

This a matter of fact. Of those 193 proud nations, only a handful can manage the rule of the law, a free press, cops you can trust, or elections whose results were not counted yesterday. Israel, born of European socialism, is one of those.

It’s no small deal. Only South Sudan, Kosovo, and the Vatican fall beyond the UN’s official ambit. Within, there’s Russia, a couple of Chinas, Zimbabwe, a bunch of places dedicated to a deity, a few rulership franchises, a Korean loon, some capitalist crooks, a few pompous Europeans, and lots of people with over-developed defence budgets.

If the UN ever decided to impose a fit-and-proper persons rule on candidates, that windy tower in lower Manhattan would be even less plausible than before. Calling yourself a state has never been less complicated.

Israel did the deed on May 14, 1948. Its legitimacy in international law depended wholly on a reading of the weasel words in Britain’s Balfour Declaration. David ben Gurion and his comrades nevertheless said, in effect, “the hell with that”. The endorsement of the United States followed within hours.

A good thing, too. One of the permanent defences of Israel, for decades, has been the fact of its democracy. Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Iran have shown what the alternative could have been. In Israel, politicians get kicked out of office, or pursued for corruption, or have their shady deals otherwise exposed. It’s healthy. Most of the time, it works.

Of the UN 193, Israel achieves most of the quality controls. You can’t argue with free elections. You can’t fret too much, in fairness, over a disputatious polity. You can wonder, though.

Does Eretz-Israel have legitimacy in international law? Is it, by any proper definition, a state just because, in 1948, it said so? Who can’t play that game? What are the rules of that game?

Palestinians would like to try their hand. They can also find the weasel words in Balfour. They can talk the language of self-determination. They can adduce in evidence generations of suffering. They have a national will, a national culture, a national consciousness. They also have an argument.

Israel, with US backing, says that peace will only come in the Middle East thanks to a “two-state solution”. As a three-word principle, that’s fine. But how do you arrive at such a vaunted solution when one party feels able, at will, to deny statehood to the other?

Palestine’s application for recognition by the UN is complicated: what else is new? Do the West Bank and Gaza amount to a state? Does one “terrorist entity” at daggers drawn with its brothers and sisters speak on behalf of a nation, or of a mere political movement? Can you pluck a state out of the air?

Israel did. That part of history, two-thirds of a century ago, is too easily overlooked. The legal status of the state of Israel is, let’s say, problematic, at a text-book level. The British, villains of the piece, didn’t allow it. International law didn’t allow it. Thanks to the US, nevertheless, Israel happened.

Thanks to the same America, Palestinians can now go whistle. Barack Obama has decided to veto a people. They do not, on his watch, exist. They do not qualify to join the Stans, the beleaguered islands, the madcap dictatorships, the corrupt democracies, or the complacent superpowers. They can’t have a mere chair or a microphone. At best, they might be granted – for political power is patronage – the chance to “observe”.

Explain this to me. I thought I heard that we just dumped a tonnage of munitions on Libya in order to advance a local democracy. I thought that putting Palestine right – you must forgive the shorthand – would drain the Islamist pool, and free the rest of us from terror. So how did a US veto at the UN help?

At the heart of all this is a fascinating human puzzle. Israel, and its American patron, objects less to Palestinian statehood than to what statehood must imply. This: the non-existence of the children of Palestine would end. Their diaspora – and yes, I understand the word – would be over. Given a state, they would have the right of return, to go home.

Above all things, this terrifies Israel. There are a lot of Palestinians, and children of Palestine, on the planet. Many are these days superbly educated, cosmopolitan – another word whose resonance I grasp – and determined. They ask why it is that they, uniquely, should not exist among the comedy countries and the joke nations. And they ask how such decisions are accomplished.

On Wednesday, Mr Obama told the General Assembly: “Ultimately, it is Israelis and Palestinians – not us – who must reach agreement on the issues that divide them: on borders and security; on refugees and Jerusalem.” That was, in language the Chicago-boy President might recognise, a flat-out lie. The US has made it so.

What’s so awful about a Palestinian right of return? The political consequences would be huge, clearly. There would be an influx of westernised and educated Palestinians ready to dispense with the old Middle East games. That would be fun.

But there’s something else, something older. The state of Israel, plucked from thin air and the knowledge of Shoah on May 14, 1948, knows a darker truth. The land was stolen. Palestinians lived there, and do not live there now. Why? An answer might involve reparations.

It’s not unique. The children of Armenia, and of the lost city of Van, might even envy Palestinians. When you lack a superpower to fight for your children, or muster diplomats in that windy Manhattan tower, no one cares.

But there’s a paradox. Israel’s implacable resistance to Palestinian claims will only hurt Israel. If your unique regional virtue is democracy, the habit of oppression is a hard sell. You refuse Hamas because of terrorist violence and a refusal to recognise the rights of human beings? How does that square with empty ancestral pastures, and a people seated at the UN?

In New York, yesterday, Mahmoud Abbas handed over a letter. Was that a terrorist act? The US went to extraordinary lengths to extinguish the petition. “Diplomatic efforts” from countries that wouldn’t know democracy if it slit a president’s throat went on apace.

The only point seemed to be: get this dispossessed people to shut up. America wills it so, and quotes democracy, and will be obeyed. For that’s how democracy is done, in a United Nations.

The United States, like Israel, had no political legitimacy whatever when first it struck for freedom. The fact, a “true fact”, gets overlooked, these days. The US was born from a terrorist insurgency, because the cause was just. It then defined liberty, for the sake of the UN and common parlance, and forgot itself.

Deny statehood to Palestine and you will give terrorism any excuse it could ever need. In 1948, oddly, people said much the same thing.