We didn’t need Mahmoud Abbas’s ghastly “genocide” speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Friday to make plain that this is a man with whom Israel cannot reach viable terms for co-existence and a two-state solution.

His unleashing of incendiary false accusations before the watching world was particularly despicable, but this was only the worst in a long series of vicious speeches calculated to exacerbate the hostility to the very fact of Israel’s existence among his own people, across the region, and indeed worldwide.

More substantively, while not personally fostering terrorism, Abbas has long since proved disinclined to counter the uncompromising narrative that his late and unlamented predecessor Yasser Arafat bequeathed the Palestinians — namely, that there was no Jewish temple in Jerusalem, and that the Jewish people thus have no sovereign legitimacy here. Under his rule, as under Arafat’s, most aspects of normalized relations with Israel and Israelis are discouraged, and Palestinian media routinely demonizes and delegitimizes Israel.

At the negotiating table, moreover, Abbas has proved himself a serial rejectionist.

Most tellingly, six years ago he opted not to seize upon prime minister Ehud Olmert’s bombshell offer of everything the Palestinians ostensibly seek: Israel was gone from Gaza and now offered a 100% withdrawal from the West Bank with one-for-one land swaps, the division of Jerusalem into Israeli and Palestinian sovereign sections, and shared authority for the Palestinians, alongside Israel, as part of an international, non-sovereign tribunal responsible for the Old City area. Abbas placed firm blame Friday on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for taking uncompromising and unworkable positions in peace talks over recent months. And Netanyahu’s settlement policies — including last month’s announcement of planned land expropriation in the Etzion Bloc — certainly haven’t helped build trust, bolster moderation, and discredit extremists. But it was Abbas who passed up compromising, workable positions in 2008.

Read the article in full at Times of Israel.