Recognize Israel to Achieve Peace. By Steve Huntley.

Recognize Israel to achieve peace. By Steve Huntley. Chicago Sun-Times, January 6, 2014.

Huntley:

The Palestinians, no doubt with the support of their Arab allies, are refusing in peace negotiations to recognize Israel as the Jewish state. Hmm. They never seem to have an issue with the Jewish nature of Israel when denouncing it. The term “Zionist entity” comes to mind.

 

During the current round of American-sponsored peace talks, Secretary of State John Kerry, to his credit, has pressed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to recognize Israel as the Jewish homeland. In an interview with a London-based Arabic newspaper, the chief Palestinian negotiator revealed that Abbas had written President Barack Obama declaring that “we will not be able to accept Israel as a Jewish state.”

 

In an interview last year with a Jordanian newspaper reported by a Hezbollah news service, Abbas referred to Israel as “the Zionist entity.” It certainly wasn’t the first time Abbas or other Palestinian leaders had used the word Zionist, an expression of Jewish nationalism. His ambassador to Egypt repeated the term in a lecture a few months ago in which he also called Israel “the real and clear enemy.”

 

The phrase “Zionist entity” is a staple of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim media and propaganda. And this is when they are being, by their standards, diplomatic. Most Palestinian propaganda is abhorrent. For example, on the November anniversary of Yasser Arafat’s death, a Palestinian TV children’s program had a young girl saying, “The Jews poisoned him and I hate them very much.” Out of the mouths of babes comes lying Palestinian sewage.

 

Nor do Palestinians have any trouble acknowledging the Jewish heart of Israel in their terrorism. Rockets are aimed at Jewish towns like Sderot. You don’t hear about Hamas and other terrorist groups picking Arab villages in Israel as targets for their crude missiles.

 

The murderers and thugs who waged Arafat’s terror war during the last decade against Israeli civilians, including women, children and the elderly, made sure their victims were Jewish. They exploded a bomb at a disco frequented by Jewish teenagers. No known hangout for Arab Israeli youth was attacked. A Jewish religious feast, not a Muslim one, was the occasion for one notable bloodbath. Bombs were detonated on buses on routes carrying Jewish commuters.

 

No, it’s only when it comes to making peace that Abbas and the Palestinians have a problem admitting that Israel is the Jewish state. The reason is simple: Abbas hasn’t given up the Arab dream of wiping “the Zionist entity” off the map.

 

In his letter to Obama, Abbas repeats the Palestinian demand for a “right of return” to Israel of Palestinians who left the country during the 1948 war and of their descendants. That would be a deluge of millions of Palestinians that would indeed mean Israel would not be a Jewish state. This demographic bomb would be Abbas’ way of waging war by other means.

 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will end only when the Arab and Muslim world truly wants it to end and recognizes the permanence of the Jewish homeland.