On Friday afternoon, Abbas said he was adamant about not recognizing Israel as the Jewish state. "They talk to us about the Jewish state, but I respond to them with a final answer: We shall not recognize a Jewish state," Abbas said in a meeting with some 200 senior representatives of the Palestinian community in the US, shortly before taking the podium and delivering a speech at the United Nations General Assembly. That having been made absolutely clear, there is no place to go -- certainly not to further concessions, nor to useless negotiations. There simply cannot be a "two-state solution" unless Israel is one of those two and recognized for what it is, a Jewish state. I think Israel better get its PR machine in gear and get the word out to the Western world (many of whom won't give a damn anyway); and I certainly wouldn't blame Israel for annexing all of the West Bank that it recaptured in the 1967 war and allowing the Arab residents to live there without Israeli citizenship or...(Read Full Post)