Never The Twain ...

"The Palestinians won't recognize the Jewishness of the State of Israel and won't accept it. The Israelis say that if we don't recognize the Jewishness of Israel there would be no solution. And we say that we won't recognize or accept the Jewishness of Israel and we have many reasons for this rejection. No one can force us to recognize Israel as Jewish state. If they [Israel] want, they can go to the UN and ask to change their name to whatever they want -- even if they want to be called The Jewish Zionist State."                                              President Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority

(Image source: Palestinian Media Watch)

Mahmoud Abbas knows very well that to recognize Israel as a Jewish state is to acknowledge that it is not feasible to expect that Jewish state to agree to Palestinian Authority demands of the 'right of return' of Palestinian refugees who fled Israel in 1948, along with their descendants. The original estimated 750,000 Palestinians who fled, expecting to return in triumph after the combined Arab armies moved in to crush the new state, has now swelled to an estimated four million Palestinians.

And while the Palestinian Authority has made it quite clear that no Jews will be permitted to live among the Palestinian Arabs in the new Palestinian state, about one and a half million Palestinian Arabs live within Israel with full citizenship. The 800,000 Jews who were exiled from their Arab/Muslim countries of birth in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East have never been invited to return, and their confiscated goods and homes surrendered back to them; they remain absorbed in Israel.

The greater question is why the president of the Palestinian Authority is not prepared -- in the advent of his own Palestinian state becoming a reality with the full authorization of the United Nations and presumably after reaching an agreement with Israel -- to commit to welcoming the refugee Palestinian population so eager to return to the geography, into the new Palestinian state? Any other intention is clearly meant to destabilize Israel, and the demand is there for that very purpose. And to fend off accommodating a peace process.

Obviously, with a total population of eight million, including Christians, Druze, Arabs and Jews, to agree to a return of four million Arabs would dilute the Jewish presence of Israel whose reason for existence is to give diaspora Jews security in a homeland in their ancestral territory from the Biblical era onward. Palestinian political scientist Dr. Saniyeh Al-Husseini whose article Why Palestinians Refuse to Accept the Jewishness of the State of Israel, was approved by the Palestinian Authority's WAFA news agency, explores the issue.

Her article warns: "accepting the Jewishness of Israel means relinquishing all the Palestinian rights to the Palestinian lands, including the lands that were occupied in 1967." The two major reasons that Palestinians oppose formal recognition of Israel as a Jewish state relate to the "right of return" for Palestinian refugees, to occupy their former villages and homes within Israel, and the second relates to Israel's Arab citizens' status: According to Al-Husseini:

"Palestinian acceptance of the Israeli narrative would deny any Palestinian right on the land of Palestine and give justification to Israel's wars against the Palestinians. Palestinian recognition of the Jewishness of Israel means accepting the Israeli narrative regarding the Jews' right to the land of Palestine and exempts Israel from bearing responsibility for the moral and legal consequences of all its crimes against the Palestinians."

The Palestinian position is clear as mud: it insists on its right to a Palestinian state specifically for Palestinian Arabs, while on the other hand, its other insistence is that Israel agree to accepting a flood of refugees and their generational offspring numbering in the millions. Palestinians hew to the PA line that Jews have never had a presence in a land that was once theirs. There is only Palestinian Arab history in the geography, never a Jewish one. Jesus Christ himself, according to the PA and Mahmoud Abbas, was a Palestinian Arab.

Again, according to Al-Husseini, Israel's goal is ultimately to divest itself of the entire Arab presence within its borders. This also is a frayed theory given that many Palestinian Arabs have been well integrated into Israel and are an integral part of the common and plural society. Apart from those who are politically motivated to ally themselves with the PA, who become elected members of the Israeli Knesset and even in their parliamentary role, actively agitate against the best interests of the Jewish state.

But even they have no real wish to become part of a Palestinian state, preferring to live under a democracy that grants them the freedom to take part in the official and daily life of Israel even as they denigrate it and agitate on behalf of the Palestinian Authority.