According to reports on Feb. 23, the demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people is one of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of US Secretary of State John Kerry in formulating an agreement in principle. At the end of the meeting between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and French President Francois Hollande at the Elysee Palace on Feb. 21, a senior official in the Palestinian leader’s party told the French news agency that the Palestinians rejected Kerry’s proposal regarding mutual recognition of two states for two people.

If a solution is not eventually found for the unequivocal demand of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regarding Palestinian recognition of Israel’s national identity, the negotiations will be recorded as an unusual phenomenon in the history of international conflict resolution. According to Netanyahu himself, in his Bar-Ilan speech of 2009 and on other occasions, the two-state solution is a prerequisite for preserving Israel’s Jewish and democratic character. This means that if negotiations aimed at promoting this solution hit a dead end due to Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, Israel will merge with Palestine and will thus lose its Jewish identity (or its democratic character). It appears that leaders who declare their willingness to make painful compromises, preserve national identity and maintain the demographic balance are handing over these essential interests to their rivals.

Official Israeli spokesmen and pundits such as Ari Shavit are asking whether it is possible that Israel is willing to recognize a Palestinian state as the nation-state of the Palestinian people, while the Palestinians refuse to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Actually, these Israeli Jews are proposing that in return for the Palestinian national movement’s denial of its national affinity for what it considers parts of its homeland, Israel will deny the Jewish people’s affinity for what they consider their homeland.

Well, yours truly is willing to give up Israeli sovereignty in Hebron, Nablus and perhaps even in the Holy Basin of Jerusalem, but hereby declares that he will under no circumstances deny the Jewish legacy and his people’s affinity for Hebron, the city of the patriarch Abraham; for Nablus, where Joseph herded his sheep in the fields; and for Absalom’s Tomb at the foot of the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. By the same token, he does not expect a Palestinian to declare that Jaffa, Nazareth and the Talbiye neighborhood in Jerusalem are the sole domain of the Jewish people, and thus deny his legacy and/or his history.