UPDATED: By allowing an anti-Israel Security Council resolution, Obama will hurt the U.N., and not help peace

Update: Israel accuses Obama administration of helping craft, push UN censure  "We have rather ironclad information from sources in both the Arab world and internationally that this was a deliberate push by the United States and in fact they helped create the resolution in the first place,” David Keyes, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Fox News’ “America’s News HQ.”  

Obama 2015: Our commitment to Israel is ‘unshakable’ — Obama 2016: Time to shake things up a bit

"With Republican control of Congress and the White House, the avenues for pushback would be many. Trump could make an anti-settlements resolution a dead letter by moving the U.S. Embassy not just to Jerusalem, but to eastern Jerusalem."

Volokh Conspiracy  . . . "Obama’s goal with such a resolution would be to punish Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he personally dislikes, and to create diplomatic facts on the ground to box in President-elect Donald Trump’s foreign policy. The folly of a such resolution has been underscored by both Hillary Clinton and Trump, as well as near-unanimous majorities in both houses of Congress and an array of Democratic foreign policy experts, including former Senate majority leader and Obama administration peace negotiator George Mitchell.

"Such a resolution would not cement any positive legacy for Obama. To the contrary, it would vastly magnify the actual obstacles to resolving the Palestinian issue. Moreover, by setting the U.N. against Israel, Obama may provoke a sharp conflict between Washington and the U.N. — one that would harm the latter much more than the former.

"The proposed resolution denounces any Jewish presence in eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank as illegal and demands that Israel immediately choke off such communities. These areas had been entirely cleansed of their ancient Jewish populations during the Jordanian invasion and occupation in 1949. The standard diplomatic position of the U.N. is that Israel, upon retaking these areas in 1967, was obligated to indefinitely forbid Jews from living in these areas (but the U.N. has amazingly avoided applying these supposed rules anywhere else).

"The legal effects of such a resolution would be murky — the Security Council is neither a court nor a legislature and cannot create rules of international law. Nor do the resolutions invoke the council’s power under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter to call for mandatory measures, such as sanctions. What is clear is that a Security Council resolution will reinforce all the dynamics that have made a solution more remote despite eight years of pressure on Israel by Obama." . . .
. . . 
Trump has consistently opposed Obama’s turning to the U.N. to create facts on the ground for U.S. policymakers or to avoid Congress — fromclimate change to the Iran deal to control of the Internet. If the Security Council becomes a forum for exonerating Iran and slamming Israel, President Trump could even embrace the idea, already popular among congressional Republicans, of cutting U.N. funding." . . .

Eugene Kontorovich is a professor at Northwestern University School of Law, and an expert on constitutional and international law. He also writes and lectures frequently about the Arab-Israel conflict.