April 27, 2009
A central snag in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations has historically been Palestinian leadership’s refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. After newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called earlier in April for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, setting it as a precondition for peace negotiations, Abbas responds in a speech in Ramallah by saying: “I do not accept it. … It is not my job to give a description of the state. Name yourself the Hebrew Socialist Republic — it is none of my business.”
Two months later, in a speech at Bar-Ilan University on June 14, 2009, Netanyahu reiterates his precondition that Palestinians not only accept Israel’s sovereignty, but also its right to exist as a Jewish state. The prime minister says: “Achieving peace will require courage and candor from both sides and not only from the Israeli side. The Palestinian leadership must arise and say, ‘Enough of this conflict. We recognize the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own in this land, and we are prepared to live beside you in true peace.’”
Despite the efforts of President Barack Obama in 2010 and Secretary of State John Kerry in 2013-14 to restart a direct-negotiation peace process between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Netanyahu and Abbas cannot get past the basic issue of the nature of Israel. Abbas has never publicly changed his refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
His predecessor also avoided recognizing Israel as a Jewish state in public.
In 1988, after meeting in Sweden with American Jews representing the Tel Aviv-based International Center for Peace in the Middle East, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat offered to recognize Israel as a sovereign state on the condition that an independent Palestinian state be formed. He also said he would accept U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338 and renounce terrorism. But, just as happened when he declared Palestinian independence Nov. 15, 1988, using the 1947 U.N. partition resolution as a basis for doing so, Arafat did not acknowledge the Jewish nature of the State of Israel.