If you want to understand what’s really going on in the alleged Israel-Palestinian peace process-beyond the babble that progress is being made, it’s all Israel’s fault, and everyone is working hard on it-here’s what you need to know.

For the present, the Palestinian leadership isn’t interested in pursuing negotiations with Israel because it has a different strategy: get everything it wants from others without making any concessions.

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How much should Palestinian children know about Nazi war crimes? According to Hamas, only enough to know the Holocaust is a lie.

A row erupted last week when Palestinian refugee camp committees complained to John Ging, the Gaza director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), that a proposed change to the Gaza school curriculum “confirms the Holocaust and raises sympathy for Jews.” The camp committees said they “categorically refuse to let our children be taught this lie created by the Jews and intensified by their media.” They offered two rationales: the Holocaust is not a fact, and the U.N. is trying to “mess with our children’s emotions.”

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Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad released a government plan Tuesday calling for the establishment of a de facto Palestinian state by the end of 2011 regardless of the outcome of negotiations with Israel.

The plan faces significant practical hurdles and raised worries that Fayyad was advocating the sort of unilateral actions toward statehood long opposed by the U.S. and Israel. Implementing it would mean overcoming likely Israeli opposition to key elements and Fayyad’s own weak domestic political standing, and would also require hefty financial-aid commitments from foreign donors, such as the U.S., European Union and Arab states.

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AMALLAH — For half a century, the fortunes of the Palestinians have been inextricably linked to the fate of Fatah, the once-dominant political movement founded by Yasser Arafat. Five years after Arafat’s death, the movement is divided, and hopes of establishing even a weak Palestinian state alongside Israel appear as elusive as ever.

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JERUSALEM – Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party never officially recognized Israel’s right to exist, boasted a top Fatah official.

“Not only did we not recognize Israel, we will not recognize Israel,” said Rafiq al-Nache, a member of Fatah’s central committee and head of the party’s internal court.

“We know that we should be committed to international agreements, therefore it is demanded that we recognize Israel. But we as Fatah didn’t (recognize) and we will not ask anyone else to recognize Israel,” said al-Nache, speaking to Palestinian reporters yesterday.

Al-Nache added his Fatah party is expected to affirm its right to “resistance” against Israel at an upcoming Fatah congress scheduled for next month.

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Jordanian authorities have started revoking the citizenship of thousands of Palestinians living in Jordan to avoid a situation in which they would be “resettled” permanently in the kingdom, Jordanian and Palestinian officials revealed on Monday.

The new measure has increased tensions between Jordanians and Palestinians, who make up around 70 percent of the kingdom’s population.

The tensions reached their peak over the weekend when tens of thousands of fans of Jordan’s Al-Faisali soccer team chanted slogans condemning Palestinians as traitors and collaborators with Israel. Al-Faisali was playing the rival Wihdat soccer team, made up of Jordanian-Palestinians, in the Jordanian town of Zarqa.

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(Netanyahu’s weekend speech)

Honored guests, citizens of Israel.

Peace has always been our people’s most ardent desire. Our prophets gave the world the vision of peace, we greet one another with wishes of peace, and our prayers conclude with the word peace.

We are gathered this evening in an institution named for two pioneers of peace, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, and we share in their vision.

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If President Obama is serious about tackling the ever-elusive goal of achieving peace in the Middle East, he should start his efforts not by focusing on Israel or the Palestinians, but rather a little closer to home: Foggy Bottom.

Either through deliberate neglect or simple ineptitude, the State Department has made U.S. taxpayers complicit in perpetuating the single greatest impediment to Middle East peace: an increasingly radical Palestinian society that despises Israel and embraces terrorism.

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It would be absurd for President Obama to think that Benjamin Netanyahu – who went into politics inspired by the heroic death of his brother, Yonatan, in freeing terrorist hostages in the 1976 Entebbe rescue mission – would ever reward an Iranian-funded terrorist regime by again dividing Jerusalem. He would never shrink Israel as a goodwill gesture to help restart the so-called peace process, not in the absence of a genuine goodwill gesture by the Palestinians and Muslim world of recognizing Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

I was so moved by the Netanyahu family and Benjamin Netanyahu’s moral clarity at the anniversary of the death of his brother in 1981 that I asked then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin to give him a government job. I said, “I believe this man will be prime minister some day.” Begin hired him the following evening.

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The New York Times reaches a new low.

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