From the Jerusalem Post today:
Top Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat on Monday rejected Israel’s demand that the Palestinians acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state…
“There is no country in the world where religious and national identities are intertwined,” Erekat told Radio Palestine.
A senior official in the Prime Minister’s Office said in response that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert insists that the Palestinians recognize Israel’s Jewish identity, as a condition for Israeli recognition of a Palestinian state.
The astonishing chutzpah of the Palestinians should not astonish anyone. They think that they get to define what kind of state Israel should be, because they think it all belongs to them anyway.
With all due respect to my left-wing friends, there is not going to be peace with these creatures. It did not come from Oslo or Geneva, and it will not come from Annapolis. Not as a result of land or population swapping. Not by clever formulas that concede the right of return but ask that they do not ‘return’. Not from concerts and not by electronic voting. Not with Hamas and not with Fatah.
To the Ha’aretz editorial board, to Peace Now and Meretz in Israel and the US, to Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, to all the organizations with ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ in their names, to Rabbis Ascherman and Lerner: get over it. There is not going to be peace; decide if you want there to be a Jewish state of not.
The Arab world, especially including the Palestinians does not believe that a Jewish state belongs in the Middle East and they will do everything in their power to put an end to it. Erekat hasn’t said something new, they say it all the time, over and over. Why don’t we believe them?
Update [12 Nov 1956 PST]: Still not getting it, Ami Isseroff wrote
There can be no peace between the Palestinian people and the Jewish people, until the Palestinian people recognize and admit that there is a Jewish people, and that we have at least as much right to a state of our own as they do. It is simply incredible, that in all his years of contact with representatives of the Israel government, Saeeb Erekat never learned that there is such a thing as the Jewish people, never understood the basis of Zionism, and that Palestinians would never be able to make peace with Israel, and never get their own state, if they were unwilling to accept the right of the Jewish people to a state. [my emphasis]
Boker tov Ami, they do not want to make peace and they do not want their own state. They want ours.
Loud blustering demanding and threatening seem to be unfortunately a central characteristic of Middle Eastern political life.
What is truly troubling is that the whole present negotiation is a fake, and Israel really has no one to make peace with now.