Those who ignore the Palestinian determination to never make peace with a Jewish state aren’t helping anyone - by Jonathan S. Tobin..

...It’s not really important what names Abbas calls Friedman, Trump or Netanyahu. He is an elderly, sick man who thinks protecting his legacy depends on ensuring that he will not be the one who signs a document that concedes defeat in his people’s century-old war against Zionism.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
20 March '18..

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas keeps telling the world what he thinks. The curious thing is not that he makes statements in which he delegitimizes Israel’s existence as a “colonial project,” as he did in January, or that he called the U.S. ambassador to Israel a “son of a dog,” as he did on Monday. It’s why those whose vision of peace requires Abbas to be interested in that concept simply refuse to believe their lying eyes and ears when it comes to what he and his colleagues do and say.

The last contretemps involving Abbas stems from his reaction to a comment on Twitter from U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, in which he noted that the P.A. had not condemned terror attacks on Israelis carried out by Palestinians over the weekend. Rather than take the opportunity to make it clear that he and his government opposed terror, he instead vented his spleen on Friedman, calling him a “son of a dog” and a “settler.”

That Friedman is a longtime supporter of the settlement movement is a sore point with the Palestinians and Jewish left-wingers, but Abbas is clearly not interested in meeting the Trump administration halfway as it prepares to issue a peace plan that’s probably not going to please the Jewish right. To the contrary, Abbas’s goal seems to be to burn his bridges with the United States, and with moderate Arab nations like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which are sick and tired of his rejectionist attitude.

It’s easy to focus on the way Trump has reversed President Obama’s effort to create more “daylight” between Israel and the United States, and how he has cheered friends of the Jewish state by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. But it’s important to remember that Abbas didn’t meet Obama halfway either, even as he pushed policies that were clearly aimed at pressuring Israel to make concessions and tilting the diplomatic playing field in the direction of the Palestinians.

Like his predecessor Yasser Arafat, Abbas has said no to peace so many times that we’ve lost count.

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