Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said he would be willing to speak to the Knesset, but only on the issues he chooses.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a public statement last week called on Abbas to address the Knesset and said he would travel to Ramallah to speak to the P.A. leadership.

“Netanyahu comes up with an offer and then immediately puts forward his own terms – that this and that should be said and so on. No, if those terms are put forward, I do not accept that,” Abbas told the Voice of Russia in remarks broadcast Friday. “But if he wants me to come and say the things I want to say, then I am ready to do it — but only in order to say what I want to say and not what he wants to hear. ”

Abbas said there would be a “full-fledged” Palestinian state.

“When Israel realizes the need to establish peace in the Middle East, then there will emerge a Palestinian state with the capital in holy Jerusalem,” the P.A. leader said.

He said the Palestinian Authority currently is not discussing efforts to push forward a bid for full membership in the United Nations.

Abbas said Russia has a “significant part to play” in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said he would be willing to speak to the Knesset, but only on the issues he chooses.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on Abbas last week to address the Knesset and said he would be willing to travel to Ramallah to speak to the PA leadership.

“Netanyahu comes up with an offer and then immediately puts forward his own terms – that this and that should be said and so on. No, if those terms are put forward, I do not accept that,” Abbas told the Voice of Russia in remarks broadcast Friday. “But if he wants me to come and say the things I want to say, then I am ready to do it — but only in order to say what I want to say and not what he wants to hear. ”

Abbas did not mention whether the Israeli Prime Minister would be welcome to speak in Ramallah.

Netanyahu had said that Abbas would be welcome to speak to the legislators if here prepared to recognize that Israel is a Jewish state.

On the bustling bourgeois avenue of Tel Aviv’s Ibn Givrol Street, beneath a portico and next to a high-end hair salon, it smells like college.

Aside from a small green sign, the clinic is unidentifiable, its one window blocked with a sheet and covered with chains. A single metal door is guarded by a man with a large knit kippa, fringes from his tzitzis and a holster hanging below his belt.

Behind the door is the main distribution center of Tikun Olam, Israel’s principal supplier of medical cannabis. Some 11,000 Israelis take the drug legally to treat ailments ranging from cancer to post-traumatic stress disorder. But activists say the approval process for marijuana prescriptions is cumbersome, requiring patients to appear before a committee on cannabis use to determine their eligibility.

“We believe that you need to expand access to it,” said Ma’ayan Weisberg, Tikun Olam’s public relations director. “The government is taking a long time. Not everyone who needs it gets it.”

Leading the charge to change is an unlikely figure, the Likud party’s Moshe Feiglin, a resident of the Ginot Shomron community in Samaria and best known for his solid advocacy of a Jewish presence in all of Judea and Samaria.

His political views kept him of the Likud’s list of Knesset candidates for years and also caused Britain to ban him from entering.

Feiglin finally won a a relatively top spot on the Likud list and was elected to the Knesset in this year’s elections and promptly proposed to broaden access to medical marijuana by allowing any family physician to prescribe it. Eventually he hopes to push for full legalization.

“I support freedom, especially when we’re talking about something less dangerous than cigarettes or alcohol,” Feiglin told JTA. “People can be healed, and [current laws] are denying that.”

He considers himself a libertarian, albeit one with a religious bent. His opposition to a plan to issue biometric identification cards to Israelis and his longtime support for unfettered Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria  are, Feiglin says, of the same cloth as his support for marijuana use.

“The root of freedom is the belief in one God,” he said. “We worship him and therefore we can’t be enslaved to anyone else. An eternal nation doesn’t work against natural history, and our return to our land, to national sovereignty, means we’re connected forever.”

Feiglin’s push for legalization has landed him with some strange bedfellows. He considers Tamar Zandberg, another first-time lawmaker from the far-left Meretz party, one of his strongest allies on the issue. Labor Party Chairwoman Shelly Yachimovich also supports loosening restrictions on medical cannabis, though she opposes outright legalization.

“Feiglin and I don’t agree on almost anything,” Zandberg told JTA. “But on this we have a shared goal.”

Feiglin’s support for liberalizing the marijuana laws in Israel derives, in part, from personal considerations. His wife suffers from Parkinson’s disease and uses cannabis to alleviate her symptoms.

Not everyone who supports increased marijuana access backs full legalization. Hebrew University professor Raphael Mechoulam, a leading cannabis researcher, believes the drug should be decriminalized to prevent excessive arrests, but draws a line at full legalization.

“I wouldn’t want to be in a taxi or a plane where the driver is high,” Mechoulam said. “There’s a certain limit. You need the backing of the people. I’m not sure the people in Israel are ready and in favor of legalization.”

Feiglin also harbors reservations about full legalization, noting that he doesn’t want to turn Tel Aviv into Amsterdam on the Mediterranean.

“I don’t see Amsterdam as a bad thing,” he adds quickly. “There’s no chaos, there’s more freedom for citizens. [Legalization] didn’t upend the way of life.”

And though cannabis is consumed in his house due to his wife’s illness, Feiglin says that at least for now, he chooses not to inhale.

“I don’t take aspirin,” he said. “I don’t like putting things in my body. I like leaving the vessel of God as it is. But I would be happy to know that I could use it if I wanted to.”

This article was written by Ben Sales for JTA

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu challenged Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas Monday to address the Knesset and recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

“I call on him from here today: let’s break the deadlock,” said Prime Minister Netanyahu in the Knesset and in the presence of visiting French President Francois Hollande.

Netanyahu then invited himself to Ramallah, saying he would go there after Abbas answers his call to speak to the Knesset. That is likely to happen about the same time the Republican party approves Obamacare.

Abbas two months ago, Abbas said he was willing to go to Jerusalem and sit down with Netanyahu, but neither man has to worry too much about the threat that they will meet. There really is not much for them to talk about except how much they distrust the Obama administration.

Netanyahu, in his speech to the Knesset, returned to his favorite taunt of Abbas. “Get up on this platform and recognize the historical truth: the Jews have a nearly 4,000-year-old link to the land of Israel,” he said. “ The Jews are a people with a right to self-determination. In real peace, all Palestinian claims regarding the State of Israel will end, including national claims on its territory and sovereignty.”

Abbas has said that Israel does not need his seal of approval for its being Jewish.

The entire “Jewish State of Israel” gambit is a code word for Israel’s blocking the Arab world’s demand of the so-called “right of return,” meaning the right of several million Arabs to turn Israel into a non-Jewish state, based on the claim of lineage from former Arab residents of the country.

Both Abbas and Netanyahu know it is not going to happen, and both men are playing gamesmanship to avoid the wrath of President Barack Obama, who in turn would be happy if Abbas and Netanyahu were to hang themselves and let the United States off the hook and go back to worrying about its own affairs.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu publicly stated on Wednesday that he ordered Housing Ministry Uri Ariel to retract his plans for development of the controversial E-1 area of Maaleh Adumim because of expected reaction of the international community at the same time he is campaigning against letting  up the pressure on the Islamic Republic.

He said Ariel’s decision to advance the project by hiring an architect was “an unnecessary confrontation with the international community at a time when we are making an effort to persuade elements in the international community to reach a better deal with Iran.”

Ariel, a member of the government coalition partner Jewish Home party, has not commented and is licking his wounds. Prime Minister Netanyahu took a deep breath and two weeks ago when he tolerated Ariel’s leading an unsuccessful battle against freeing more Palestinian Authority terrorists in order to continue the struggling discussion between the Palestinian Authority and Israel.

Stopping a “bad deal” with Iran is paramount in Netanyahu’s policy, and he immediately snuffed out Ariel’s once he heard about them. Ariel’s plans for homes in the E-1 area, although it is part of the city of Maaleh Adumim, set off alarm bells in Washington and Ramallah and triggered a short crisis that Netanyahu quickly defused at the cost of building an image of following orders from the Obama administration.

“At this time, the attention of the international community must not be diverted from the main effort – preventing Iran from receiving an agreement that will allow it to continue its military nuclear program.,” Netanyahu told the Knesset.

The Knesset will be lacking one of its more colorful Knesset Members for two weeks following an Ethics Committee decision to punish Haredi MK Meir Porush for handcuffing himself to the Knesset podium last July in an outstanding theatrical appearance..

MK Porush was enraged over the bill, now law, that almost all Haredi youth must serve in the IDF. Porush, a member of the United Torah Judaism party, stole the show with his handcuffing act, which lasted for several minutes until guards were able to unlock the handcuffs and separate Porush from the podium.

Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein filed a complaint with the Ethics Committee, which now has decided that the honorable MK insulted the honor of the legislature.

Arab Members of Knesset furiously protested the standardization of Jewish visitation rights to the Temple Mount at a session of the Israeli Knesset Committee for the Interior on Monday.

Deputy Minister for Religious Services Eli Ben-Dahan said during the meeting that he is seeking an agreement on the visitation rights with Israel’s chief rabbinate. But MKs Ahmad Tibi, Jamal Zahalka, and other Arab MKs who attended the meeting threatened dire consequences, including a new intifada, if any proposals on the issue would be agreed upon.

“There is no Temple Mount. There is only the Al-Aqsa Mosque,” shouted Zahalka, according to the Jerusalem Post. “You’re playing with fire and you’re starting an inferno,” he added. Tibi said that “because of you [another intifada] will break out again, also because of Al-Aqsa.”

The new law that the Knesset passed Monday night to allow couples to register for marriages wherever they want will help prevent civil marriages abroad and stop a wave of assimilation, according to the Tzohar Rabbinical Organization

“Local rabbinates functioned as mini-monopolies, causing widespread resentment among both religious and secular couples,” the Tzohar group said. “In addition to severe bureaucratic obstacles, many ultra-orthodox local rabbis prohibit Zionist rabbis from performing weddings and do not recognize the rabbinic authority of most North American community rabbis.”

It added that the result of the system has been that secular couples traveled to Cyprus and Prague for civil marriages, creating a situation in which “their children will find it almost impossible to prove their Jewish roots in the future.”

Rabbi David Stav, founder and president of the Tzohar Rabbinical Organization, said, “Many people are unaware that Israel is suffering from a wave of mass assimilation and intermarriage. This is mostly due to bureaucratic factors rather than halachic challenges.”