Palestinian Authority officials have stated that Israel is trying to “exert pressure” in peace talks by not agreeing to accept a document from Gaza with the letterhead of “State of Palestine.”

The document was a request from officials in Gaza to allow 190 residents to leave Gaza for medical care in Israel, including Arab hospitals in Judea and Samaria. Israeli military officials objected to the letterhead, and the patients were allowed to cross into Israel after “State of Palestine” was blurred out.

That would seem to the end of the matter, with an “all’s well that ends well” conclusion.

But the Palestinian Authority regime in Ramallah, along with its Hamas colleagues in Gaza, as usual tried to turn the issue against Israel, blaming it not only for blocking medical care but also for supposedly exploiting sick people for political purposes.

“This is a political decision from the Israelis to exert pressure in the negotiations,” a senior Palestinian official at the Gaza district coordination office told the Bethlehem-based Ma’an News Agency.

If that isn’t “calling the kettle black,” what is?

Besides all of the “core issues” on Jerusalem, so-called refugees and borders, the heart of the Palestinian Authority-Israeli dispute is PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s refusal to agree to a “State of Palestine” unless all arguments and issues are settled without any further demands.

The letter from Gaza was no more and no less than cynical exploitation of ailing men, women and children to “exert pressure in the negotiations,” to borrow the quote from the PA official.

Once Israel accepts a document from Hamas as being from the “State of Palestine,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry can put it on a silver platter and present it to President Barack Obama. Once the “State of Palestine” is a fait accompli, the “core issues” fall like a house of dominoes because as head of an official state.”

Abbas can declare that the sun rises in the west and sets in the east and so it will be, at least on paper. He can divide Jerusalem, define Israel’s borders and go the United Nations to pass a resolution that UNRWA should send to Israel several million Arabs living under U.N. occupation foreign countries.

International wire services, of course, were not content to let their readers draw conclusions without biased information. Maher Abukhater is an “a Palestinian journalist based in Ramallah” and is The Los Angeles Times’ source for information for everything they know about Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

His “objectivity” can be understood by his former position as managing editor of Al-Fajr English weekly and The Palestine Times. There is not one former managing editor of any Israeli newspaper who reports for any major foreign news organization, or even a minor one. Let’s see The New York Times hire me to cover Israel.

Abukhater made sure that his readers in the United States know that “the PLO declared independence unilaterally in 1988 and was recognized as a ‘non-member observer state’ by the United Nations in 2012.”

What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

The PLO declared itself an independent state, so that makes it one?

When Israel, declared by the United Nations as a full member and independent country, passes a law that  it is the sovereign authority over and in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, used by foreign armies to wage war in 1967, that is not acceptable.

Abukhater then hit his readers over the head with the hammer and wrote, “More than 130 countries today recognize Palestine’s existence as a state, but Israel refuses to do so.”

On November 7, 1962 President Richard M. Nixon said at his so-called “last press conference” after he lost the race for governor of California to to Democratic incumbent Pat Brown, “I leave you gentleman now. You will now write it; you will interpret it; that’s your right. But as I leave you I want you to know…. just think how much you’re going to be missing. You don’t have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

On February Super Bowl Sunday, February 2, 2014, President Barack Obama told Fox News in interviewer’s Bill O’Reilly’s taped session, “What you guys are gonna have to figure out is … what are you gonna do when I’m gone?”

There is no comparison of the man Nixon, known as Tricky Dick, with Obama. Nixon was uncouth. Obama is sophisticated, or at least pseudo-sophisticated.

But there is a common thread in their laments to the media, a common denominator of feeling sorry for themselves.

Nixon’s speech was that of a total crybaby who painted himself as an innocent victim of the media, and Jews, to nail him to the political cross.

He said, “I believe in reading what my opponents say and I hope that what I have said today will at least make television, radio, the press, first recognize the great responsibility they have to report all the news and, second, recognize that they have a right and a responsibility, if they’re against a candidate, give him the shaft, but also recognize if they give him the shaft, put one lonely reporter on the campaign who will report what the candidate says now and then.”

Fox News is known as having no love for President Obama, who granted the network’s Bill O’Reilly an interview before the Super Bowl game, just as he did last year to CBS when it carried the football game.

“Do you think I’m being unfair to you?” O’Reilly asked.

“Absolutely,” Obama said. “Of course you are, Bill — but, I like you anyway.”

After leading questions about “health care not working” and a”wholly corrupt IRS,” the president continued, “This is okay. If you want to be president of the United States, then you know that you’re going to be subject to criticism. I think regardless of whether it’s fair or not … it has made Fox News very successful.”

And: “What you guys are gonna have to figure out is … what are you gonna do when I’m gone?”

Nixon wasn’t smart smug enough to take the credit for helping reporters to sell their newspapers.

Obama has the chutzpa and the conceit to do so, but the bottom line is that both Obama, like Nixon, feels sorry for himself.

In three years Fox News won’t have Obama to kick around anymore.

But unlike Nixon, Obama always will have The New York Times to kiss him where he has been kicked.

Another “Let’s get Bibi” case has bit the dust.

Attorney General Yehudah Weinstein has accepted the recommendations of the police and state prosecutors and will close the “Bibi Tours” case that raised suspicions that Netanyahu illegally pocketed money for trips when he a Knesset Member,

The case arose after a Channel 10 reporter claimed that an organization and a businessman each paid Netanyahu for the same trip made by him and his wife Sara, amounting to “double-billing” and with some of the money going into Netanyahu’s pocket.

He and wife also allegedly flew to London in 2006 on a trip that was paid for twice, once by the Knesset and once by Israel Bonds.

The exposé sparked a lengthy and costly investigation by the Comptroller, who acts as Israel’s ombudsman, of hundreds of requests for travel by Cabinet ministers and their deputies.

Netanyahu denied there was any double-billing and accused the media, most of which simply hate the man no matter what, of trying to harm him and his wife.

The investigators received satisfactory answers from Netanyahu concerning one of the trips, Globes reported.” They also concluded that if there were any questions of improper conduct in the second case, they did not justify opening a criminal probe.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s reported “Let some Jewish settlers remain in Palestine” statement has made Mahmoud Abbas look like fool, Naftali Bennett look like a right-wing nut, and the media look almost as ignorant as they are – and all of this with one sentence.

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will insist that Jewish settlers in the West Bank have a right to remain under Palestinian rule in any future peace deal, a government official was quoted as saying on Sunday,” Reuters told millions of readers around the world.

The very thought of the Palestinian Authority as an independent country inside Israel’s current borders, let alone hinting that Jews living in Judea and Samaria can fulfill their Zionist dream by living in a Palestinian state, was TNT for Naftali Bennett, chairman of the Jewish Home party and arguably one of the most positive images in Israeli politics.

Part of Bennett’s success is that while he is gung-ho on Jews in Judea and Samaria, he is a resident of Ra’anana, part of metropolitan Tel Aviv. Moreover, he is not from the “think in the box” folks of Yesha, otherwise known as the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria, which once upon a time included the word “Gaza” in its moniker.

Yesha miserably failed nationalists during the years of Oslo, when it raised the Israeli flag over Beit El as the capital of the country, with Tel Aviv, Haifa and Be’er Sheva being considered settlements that deserve a few crumbs to keep them in Greater Israel, the term nationalists try to use to counter the dreaded “Occupied Territories.”

Bennett blew it Sunday night.

He sounded like one of the Yesha blowhards from years ago when he angrily responded, “”Whoever imagines that Jews in the land of Israel can live under Palestinian rule undermines our living in Tel Aviv.”

Saeb Erekat, the senior Palestinian Authority negotiator who has quit or has threatened to quit the position more times than U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has visited Israel, also rejected Netanyahu’s idea. “Anyone who says he wants to keep settlers in the Palestinian state is actually saying that he doesn’t want a Palestinian state,” Erekat said.

“No settler will be allowed to stay in the Palestinian state, not even a single one, because settlements are illegal and the presence of the settlers on the occupied lands is illegal,” he added.

And the Associated Press, in its continuing ineptly objective ignorance of trying to explain the Middle East to the world, declared for history, “Some Israeli political commentators suggested the leak [Netanyahu’s reported statement] was aimed at heading off settler opposition to a framework deal, or as guidelines for a final peace agreement that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has been trying to formulate.”

Boy, are they ever off the track!

Netanyahu should take off for a well-deserved vacation and enjoy his political checkmate. During one election campaign, Netanyahu once played chess with Natan Sharansky, an accomplished chess master. Former Soviet Union dissidents have to be great at chess. That is one of the ways they survived Siberia and came out sane.

Netanyahu won a stalemate, an amazing achievement.

For all of Mahmoud Abba’s brilliant political maneuvering around the world to win universal support to screw the Jews, he is no match for Netanyahu.

The Prime Minister already has cornered Abbas pitifully by goading him to recognize Israel as a Jewish State. The theory is that once the Palestinian Authority does so, it has no chance of flooding Israel with 5 million foreign Arabs under the lie of the “right of return,” a bastardization of the Israeli term that should go down as one of the greatest Double Speaks since George Orwell’s” 1984.”

A new satirical new site called “PreOccupied Territory” features a Jewish and Israeli perspective on news around the world as seen by journalist David Swidler, who also is behind the blog “Mightier than the Pen.”

His objective is to make the news more understandable through humor, something The Jewish Press does on a regular basis and especially on Purim.

Some of the initial articles are headlined, “After Rocket Fire, Israel Retaliates Harshly against Trees, Rocks,” “Tragedy Strikes as Gaza Strip Fails to Sink into Mediterranean,” “Despite 7-Hour Talk, Kerry Fails to Convince Netanyahu His Chin Is Real,” and “Book Accuses Jews of Controlling Israeli Government.”

Visiting Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper exposed anti-Israel media bias Tuesday by noting that no reporter asked him in Ramallah about human rights in the Palestinian Authority but peppered him with questions on Jewish settlements when he was in Jerusalem.

At a joint press conference with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu Tuesday, Harper was asked several times to make a statement on settlements. He kept repeating what he has said he arrived on Sunday – that the purpose of his visit is not to “single out Israel” for criticism.

When a reported pressed him again on the issue, Harper replied, “Once again, let me emphasize it: I am not here to single out Israel for criticism. I find it, you know, interesting – let me just make it as an observation – that, you know, yesterday in the Palestinian Authority, no one asked me there, no one asked me there to single out the Palestinian Authority for any criticism in terms of governance or human rights or anything else.

“I’m asked to single out Israel. When I’m in Israel,  I’m asked to single out Israel; when I’m in the Palestinian Authority, I’m asked to single out Israel; and in half the other places around the world you ask me to single out Israel.”

Harper in a single swipe described the international mindset against Israel more clearly than any Israeli official has ever done.

Netanyahu picked up the beat and stated, “Now, there are two things that I want to puncture, two prevailing myths. Well, one is no longer with us. The first one, which was repeated ad nauseum – you can check if you are a repeater – but until recently, everybody who knew anything about the Middle East explained that the core of the conflict, always in the singular, conflict; the core of the conflict in the Middle East was the Palestinian problem. You remember that?

“Now, today you’d be laughed out of most places…, including the leading campuses in the West – even there – if you argued this, what was accepted as a common, obvious truth…

“The core of the many conflicts of the Middle East is not the Palestinian conflict. But what is the core of the Palestinian conflict itself? And here you have another great myth, and the myth is that the core is basically the settlements. Okay, now mind you the settlements issue, on which Canada has a different position from Israel – I guarantee you, that’s the case, okay? But the core, the settlement issue has to be resolved and will be resolved in a context of peace negotiations. But it is not the core of the conflict. We know that because this conflict raged for half a century before there was a single Israeli settlement, before there was a single Israeli soldier in Judea, Samaria or Gaza.

“This conflict began in 1920, 1921, with the attack on the Jewish immigration depot – murderous attack – in Jaffa. In Jaffa! And it raged on in the attack on the ancient Jewish community of Hebron; it’s been there since, practically unbroken since the time of Abraham – almost 4,000 years.

“And continued in the great attacks by the Palestinians on the Jews here in 1936 to 1939; there were no settlements there. It continued in the rejection of the partition resolution in 1947 that called for a Palestinian state next to – an Arab state actually – next to the Jewish state. There were no settlements. And it continued right up to 1967 when the West Bank, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza were firmly in Arab hands and it was meant to… to do what? To liberate the lands that were already in their hands?…

Palestinian Authority journalists accused bodyguards of visiting Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper of assaulting them during coverage of his trip the Church of the nativity in Bethlehem on Monday.

An agreement had been made that the media would follow Harper into the church, according to  the Bethlehem-based Ma’an News Agency.

A cameraman said that the after Harper went inside, the bodyguards blocked the Palestinian Authority journalists, punching one journalists in the face and hitting another with a metal object.

The Palestinian Union of Journalists urged its members to boycott the rest of Harper’s visit.

No confirmation of the alleged assault was reported by any other news outlet.