Mahmud Abbas - Abu Mazen - regularly described as the Moderate Palestinian President today gave a speech in which he rejected recognizing Israel as a Jewish State:
"A Jewish state, what is that supposed to mean?" Abbas asked in a speech in the West Bank's political capital of Ramallah. "You can call yourselves as you like, but I don't accept it and I say so publicly."...
Such a move [of recognition] would amount to an effective renunciation of the right of return of refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, when Israel was created, one of the most cherished and visceral principles to the Palestinians.
The peculiar thing about this is that it's not news. It has been the official Palestinian position ever since they began recognizing Israel's existence, somewhere between the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it effectively negates the recognition because it assumes large numbers of Palestinians will move into Israel, thus turning it into a bi-national state at best. No official Palestinian spokesman ever said otherwise, no matter how moderate he purports to be. This is the main reason why even Olmert and Livni never got close to a peace agreement with Abbas during the 18 months or so of their talks: the positions of the two sides are too far apart.
What is additionally peculiar is that while this is common knowledge in Israel - raising the question why Y-Net even gave it a headline today - it is effectivle never published in the Western media. So it's not news in Israel (everyone knows it), and it's likewise not news in Europe and America (no-one knows it).
taken from:Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations (http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/)
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