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 voting rights and that includes their descendants. If they don't like it, they can always go back to Jordan, where they really belong, or to any brother Arab country that will have them (none will, of course).

The charade of pretending that any solution is possible without acceptance of Israel as Jewish has gone on long enough, and policy should no longer make even a pretense of a "negotiated" solution in these circumstances. The peacenik Jews who need their heads examined should be ignored entirely.

When in history does the loser of a war (especially one it started in the first place) get to dictate the terms of peace?