On Monday, October 17, 2011, Partners for Progressive Israel (Meretz USA) President Dina B. Charnin, Chair Theodore Bikel, and Executive Director Ron Skolnik issued the following statement on behalf of the organization:
On September 23, 2011, Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, submitted an application for full membership in the United Nations for the State of Palestine. After reviewing its text, Partners for Progressive Israel (Meretz USA) is encouraged to find that the Palestinian application contains four positive elements, which, if embraced by the government of Israel, could provide new momentum for the negotiating process. In our statement of September 18, we urged President Abbas to incorporate these elements in the Palestinian application to the UN, and we are pleased by their inclusion in the documents submitted.
We wish to highlight these positive elements, particularly in light of the unfortunate decision of many American Jewish organizations to characterize the Palestinian application as an attack on Israel and an effort to avoid a two-state resolution of the conflict:
Depending on how charitable one wants to be, this PPI statement is either deliberately distorting or unreasonably optimistic.
So the PA application mentioned General Assembly resolution 181, which in turn mentioned a Jewish state; ergo, so PPI, the PA recognizes Israel as the national home of the Jewish people.
Whatever the logic of this reasoning, it omits to mention that Mr. Mahmoud Abbas, more or less simultaneous with his application to the UN, declared to the press that he would never, ever, recognize a Jewish homeland in Israel. (Google it !)
The PPI statement here is reminiscent of the position taken by a certain Mr. Max Naumann, head of a splinter grouplet of German Jews, who declared in 1933 that the new Hitler government is quite a positive development for German Jews. (Google Naumann in German !)