A tragic haunted sense of deja vu surrounds the negotiations at Annapolis between Israelis and Palestinians.  Today is Partition Day; sixty years ago, on the Gregorian Calendar, on November 29, 1947 the UN agreed to partitioning the land into two states: Israel and Palestine.  Israel accepted, the Arabs did not.

You have in this generation achieved freedom and independence, but a great many of you are not ready equally to concede to others the right to live and to be free. Yet the same forces and the same necessities as gave you your freedom are also behind our effort to secure our freedom. And in preparing yourselves to thwart our effort of national liberation by brute force you are placing yourselves in exactly the same position in which were those who opposed your effort of liberation. I have too much respect for the political intelligence of the Arab people among whom I have grown up and lived all my life to pretend to offer them political advice, but no man of imagination can fail to see that these leaders are dragging you to an abyss and are placing your people into a position which is the reverse of all ideas from which your movement of liberation drew its strength and to which it owed its success. (snip)

Hamas on Thursday called on the UN to rescind the 1947 decision to partition Palestine into two states, one for Jews and one for Arabs.

The group said in a statement, released on the 60th anniversary of the UN vote, that "Palestine is Arab Islamic land, from the river to the sea, including Jerusalem... there is no room in it for the Jews."