Morton A. Klein, National President of the Zionist Organization of America, has a letter in today’s Wall Street Journal that succinctly summarizes where things stand with the “peace process”:
Fouad Ajami, in his perceptive piece on the Palestinian drive to seek a unilateral declaration of statehood from the United Nations, observes that in contrast to the democratic, compromising Jewish leadership, the Palestinians are "unique" in their "mix of maximalism and sense of entitlement" ("The U.N. Can't Deliver a Palestinian State," op-ed, June 1).
My only qualm with this formulation is that it might imply only that the Palestinians inflexibly seek a state within the limits of the 1949 armistice lines (often wrongly termed "the 1967 borders") and that this defines their maximalism. Sadly, this is not the case. The Palestinians rejected statehood alongside a Jewish state, not only in 1937 and 1947, but in 2000 and 2008 as well.
This is also clear from on-going Palestinian incitement against Jews, Judaism and Israel; Palestinian maps and textbooks that refuse to acknowledge Israel; the honoring of terrorists who murder Jews; insisting on a "right of return" that has never solved any other refugee problem but which would destroy Israel if implemented, and so on.
In recent days, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas wrote that "Palestine's admission to the United Nations would pave the way for the internationalization of the conflict as a legal matter, not only a political one. It would also pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel."
In short, Palestinian statehood would not be satisfied by the "maximum" of the 1949 lines. It would be merely a new installment in the Palestinians' war on Israel's existence.
I would only add that the Arabs also rejected a two-state solution in 1919, 1978, and 2001, so that the total number of times is seven:
We are now in the 92nd year of a peace process in which the Palestinians are the first people in history to be offered a state seven times, reject it seven times, and set preconditions for discussing an eighth offer.