Six little words. That’s all it will take to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. So said Benjamin Netanyahu last week, on the eve of yet another Quartet meeting to kickstart the Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic process.

Those words are:  “I will accept the Jewish state.”

We’ve been hearing these six little words lately – but never from the lips of a Palestinian leader. In early June Nabil Sha’ath told an Arabic newspaper that the Palestinians will never recognise a Jewish state – only a state of Jews, Muslims and Christians in Israel.

Until Netanyahu decided to make a stand on Israel ‘s acceptance ‘as a Jewish state’,  Israeli negotiators assumed that if Arabs accepted the ‘two-state solution’ they automatically accept Israel as a Jewish state. They do not. Having obtained UN approval in September to achieve their independent state of Palestine on the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians will move on to their next target : achieving their ‘right of return’ to Israel proper - a surefire euphemism for turning Israel into an Arab-majority state.

The refusal to utter those six little words points to the Arab rejectionism  at the heart of the conflict. As Netanyahu states, ‘The issue is not over what Israel calls itself, but rather over what it is’.

Netanyahu’s appeal echoes that of Abraham Foxman, national director of the influential Anti-Defamation League. Foxman has also called for Arab leaders to utter those six little words. But Foxman goes further. He puts his finger on the nub of the conflict between Muslims and the Jews of Israel. The root of Arab/Muslim rejectionism lies in Dhimmitude.

For most of last week, the Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland was cast as the erstwhile Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat in a role-play exercise, while Palestinians played Israelis .

Apparently, every time such exercises take place, it is the ‘Palestinians’ who seethe with righteous indignation as the underdog. The  ‘Israelis’ suffered too, the negotiators recognise, but that was ‘in the past’.

How has the peace agenda come to be so seriously skewed? The victims of a genocidal project to destroy the Jews in the Middle East have been turned into aggressors, and Jewish suffering downplayed. Who around the negotiating table remembers that it was the Arabs were rejected the UN Partition Plan for Palestine, and launched a war of annihilation against Israel in 1948? Who remembers the Arab League secretary-general Azzam Pasha’s spine-chilling promise in 1947: ‘This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades’?  

 It was a good week, writes Freedland. He negotiated Israel back to the 1967 borders.That was the easy bit, Jonathan. Did the ‘Israeli ‘negotiators’ get the ‘Palestinians’ renounce  their ‘right of return’ to Israel proper?