Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas: No Recognition of Israel as a Jewish State

Illustrating the essential barrier to Middle East peace, Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas stated during a recent interview that he will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state, which is to say he will never recognize Israel as it exists.

The problem is that the entire raison d'être for Israel is as a homeland for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland. The vision for such a homeland began over a century ago with the growth of the Zionist movement in the late 19^th Century. The impetus for a Jewish state in the Middle East became unstoppable after the Nazi Holocaust consumed 6 million European Jews.

Despite over four major wars and constant terrorism, Israel has survived and even prospered, after a fashion. Israel has even made an uneasy peace with a number of its neighbors, Egypt and Jordan principally. The current peace talks, the latest of several between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which controls much of the West Bank of the Jordan River, controlled by Jordan before the 1967 Six Day War, by Israel afterward, is designed to arrange for two states, Jewish and Arab, living side by side.

It is therefore curious that Mahmoud Abbas would say, right out of the gate, that he would never recognize Israel as a Jewish state. That would seem to be a deal-killer for Israel, as if France were involved in negotiations with an enemy that insisted that France would never be recognized as French.

Israel has often been described as intransigent when it comes to negotiating with Arabs. But with negotiating partners like Abbas, is it any wonder?

Most likely the statement by Abbas will be dismissed as the usual kind of overheated, over-the-top rhetoric that Arab leaders have been known, from time to time, to use, usually for domestic consumption. But that raises another question.

Can Mamoud Abbas actually make a peace with Israel that allows Israel to remain as a Jewish state? The Palestinians have often seemed somewhat recalcitrant, insisting on an all-or-nothing settlement. The attitude goes against the American way of compromise and seeking common ground, a tradition that Israel shares to a great extent.

Abbas' attitude would also seem to be an inconvenience to the American government. A comprehensive peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians has been the holy grail of American diplomacy at least since the conclusion of the Camp David Accords. It has been conventional wisdom that much of the cause of turmoil in the Middle East has been caused by continued tensions between Israel and the Palestinians and, if such tensions could be alleviated as part of a peace agreement, the turmoil would also ease.

Unfortunately, so long as the Palestinians insist that Israel be annihilated, either as a Jewish state as Mahmoud Abbas suggested, or physically, root and branch, the Middle East becoming Judenrein,to quote a word from the Nazi era, as is the position of Hamas, then there can be no peace. Not all the wishful thinking from the American State Department or the mainstream media will change that fact.

Source: Abbas: We will not recognize Israel as a Jewish state, Jerusalem Post, September 7th, 2010