Steve Clemons uses a strange example in his criticism of the administration’s response to the Palestinian statehood bid:

What if the US had said to Kosovo — no statehood, no recognition from the US until you resolve all of your ongoing issues with Russia?

Presumably, Clemons means Serbia if he wants to make a direct comparison between the two cases. Had the U.S. and other Western governments taken this line on Kosovo, it probably would have been more beneficial for all parties (and maybe better for Georgia, too), but the two cases aren’t all that similar. What happened in 2008 with recognition of Kosovo’s independence was the illegal partition of a sovereign state, which has since put Kosovo in a limbo of semi-sovereignty and created a flashpoint in the northern part of Kosovo where the Serb population refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the new state. Kosovo’s current status is quite a good argument for not creating a new state without the agreement of its relatively more powerful neighbor. PA leaders don’t expect other governments to support the partition of Israel.