Earlier this year, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made the decision to cut off the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) negotiations with Israel and go to the UN in September to bid for state recognition. There, a US veto at the UN Security Council is expected, while at the UN General Assembly (GA), a large majority of its members are likely to endorse a motion recognizing a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. While such a resolution is not binding according to international law, its prospects have elicited negative reactions from Israel, the US and parts of the international community who deplore the Palestinian unilateral approach and fear the consequences of UN approval. Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, has even warned of an impending “diplomatic tsunami.”

We are waiting patiently, as the fuse burns down on another Middle Eastern powder keg. On Sept. 20, as the next United Nations session opens, Mahmoud Abbas will present a declaration of statehood to the General Assembly, on behalf of the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. Though unilateral, it will be welcomed by a voting majority which includes all the dictatorships of the Muslim world and Africa.

Full membership in the UN requires the sanction of the Security Council, where there is an American veto. That will almost certainly be exercised, even by the Obama administration. But for all practical purposes, the Palestinian Authority has been a member for a long time, and been behaving as a state. It has the ultimate hallmark of a state, for it conducts its own foreign policy, freely.

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Dear President Abbas,

You write in your New York Times op-ed column today that the Palestinians are ready for international recognition of a “long overdue Palestinian state.” You’re wrong.

You may well succeed in persuading the pro-Palestinian UN General Assembly to give you the vote of confidence you will be requesting this September, but you blew any chance to make a legitimate claim for international recognition of a Palestinian state by deciding to lie down with the Hamas terrorists.

During a meeting with the Egyptian press in Cairo at the beginning of August, Mahmud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, and the man on whom the United States and Europe have placed all of their hopes for peace, revealed what was at the back of his mind with regard to the Jews and the nature of the regime he plans to set up in the future State of Palestine. The official demands of the Palestinians for a settlement are known: Israel's agreement in advance to withdraw to the borders of 1967, a freeze of construction in the territories including Jerusalem, the division of this city, including the Old City, which must become part of the Palestinian Authority, the solution of the problem of the "refugees" in conformance with Arab demands and Resolution 194 of the General Assembly of the U.N.).

When considering the possibility that a third force, such as NATO, could be given the responsibility of overseeing the implementation of the planned agreement, Mahmud Abbas imposed a condition: that there should not be a single Jewish soldier and any Israeli. "I am ready to accept a third party which supervises the implementation of the agreement, NATO forces for example, but I will not accept the presence of Jews in these forces or a [single] Israeli on the Land of Palestine."

Is such a demand tainted with antisemitism? It should not come as a shock, if we remember that Mahmud Abbas defended his doctoral thesis which was based on Holocaust denial at a school for political indoctrination in the Soviet Union.