Palestine, 194th Member?

At last night’s Intelligence Squared U.S. / Open to Debate held at NYU’s Skirball Center, the motion was: The U.N. Should Admit Palestine as a Full Member State? In the Oxford style of the contest one side defends the platform, the other side opposes it, and they are judged purely on their respective success at doing what they are supposed to do, not what is right or how the motion fits into a larger context made for an evening that at once obscured the larger difficulties of the Middle East conflict and highlighted that conflict’s intractability.