Unfortunately, Bibi is ill-served by his own formulation. Were I advising him, I would phrase the demand differently in order to clarify the issue. Instead of asking Abbas & Co. to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, I would demand they recognize the rightness of Jews having their own state in their ancient homeland.

For what the sneaky Arabs have done in “recognizing Israel’s right to exist” as Hanina sees things is more of what they have always done, which is play word-games. In fact, contrary to Hanania’s claim that the “Palestinians” have recognized Israel’s right to exist, they have never repealed the PLO Covenant’s clauses calling for the destruction of Israel, as Netanyahu and Clinton claimed in 1998. In fact, in December 1988, they did not do that either as Secretary of State George Schultz at the time claimed they did, which led to U.S. acceptance of the claim Arafat had finally spoken the “magic words,” and therefore the U.S. chose to open talks with those enemies of not only the Jewish people but Western civilization.

What happened at the time was this…