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.

The Palestinian Authority negotiating team has found its way down from a weak limb on a tall tree by saying that they resignations are final but that they will continue “temporarily” until replacements are found.

Presumably, that will happen in around five months, when the nine-month period  U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s Grand Plan for Middle East Peace expires.

However, Nabil Sha’ath, a senior member of Fatah’s central committee, denied reports that senior negotiator Saeb Erekat and his associate Mohammed Shteyyah would hang on until the bitter end.

Erekat announced last week they are quitting because of lack of progress in the talks with Israel as well as the Netanyahu government’s insistence on building for Jews in areas that the Palestinian Authority and the Obama administration consider to be part of a future PA state.

Middle East experts are experts by virtue of their positions of power.

Some of them, like former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, even have learned a thing or two about international affairs. Rice actually has a Ph.D., which as comedian-pianist Victor Borge once said, should be read as “phttttttttttt.”

The experts, and that includes John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Catherine Ashton and the Oslo Accords crowd, may have learned about prophets, kings, oil and sheikhs in International Relations 101, but they missed out on the basics, like selling non-kosher turkeys to the Arabs.

I learned more about Arab-Jewish relations by working in kibbutz turkey barns than Kerry and Ashton could ever learn in their worldwide visits to official residents of presidents and prime ministers in Ramallah, Jerusalem and Amman.

Turkeys, like people, are cute when they are babies, but after a few weeks, they are not like most people. Their feet are scratchy and they begin to stink. When they get to be three months old, some of them pick up a cold, a little bronchitis, or start to hobble on weak knees, probably from too many carbohydrates.

Then they start acting like grown teenagers. The stronger turkeys pick on the weaker ones, just like fifth-graders playing king of the hill. They peck at the skin until the poor gobbler cannot stand on his feet.

When I was in charge of the birds on a kibbutz farm, the sick and injured had their own quarters, a fenced-off intensive care ward where the bullies couldn’t bother them. But sometimes it was too late. Their broken legs and their bronchitis often are more than modern medicine can cure on a cost-efficient basis.

What can you do with a sick and lame turkey? You sell it cheaply. After all, the reason to raise turkeys is turn them into fat candidates for the slaughterhouse and convert them into cold cash. The Humane Society really does not have much demand for them.

That’s where a revised International Relations 101 course could have taught the experts, sitting in their sterilized offices, something besides making roadmaps to nowhere. Even Professor Yossi Beilin, the darling of the Israeli Left, doesn’t know a kibbutz from Damascus.

Peace is a business, like anything else these days. But you have to know the rules of the game. A good Western businessman knows that a handshake is a handshake, a word is a word, and a deal is a deal.

For instance, Tom wants to sell his two-year-old Chevy for $5,000. Clyde wants to buy it for $4,000. One of them budges or there’s no deal. Jim tries to cut a deal at $4,400. If Tom and Clyde compromise at $4,500, Tom gets his money and Clyde gets his wheels. As for Jim, that’s his problem.

But that’s not the way it works in the Middle East. Here, Abe writes out a check and Ahmed gives him the key. The next day, Abe discovers the key doesn’t fit. “Of course it does not fit,” Ahmed retorts. “The price of the car was according to the real value of the dollar. The inflation rate went up 0.2 percent yesterday. You owe me $10!”

Abe protests, “Where’s the cell phone antenna that was on the roof? I am stopping payment on the check. You owe me $25 for the bank charge.”

“I’m not finished stripping the car,” retaliates Ahmed. The DVD is mine, but I’ll put back the original radio. It works most of the time, especially the Al Jazeera channel.”

“Look, here,” snarls Abe. “I paid you $4,500, but that was based on the price of gold. It went up two cents yesterday. The real price is $4,498.09.”

“You can add another $120 for the deluxe hub caps, or I’ll take them with me,” Ahmed shouts.

They agree to talk again tomorrow. That was 10 years ago. They still are talking.

It doesn’t matter that Abe still has to thumb a ride to work and that Ahmed does the same because he doesn’t have enough money for gas. The principles are that the other guy didn’t get what he wanted so they can continue arguing.

In Western societies, negotiations are a means to an end. The objective is to make a deal so both sides get what they want.

Israel employs more than 100,000 Palestinian Authority residents, including 20,000 who work for Jews in Judea and Samaria, according to new statistic released Thursday by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

The number includes nearly 35,000 who work without permits.

Using Palestinian Authority census data, which many sources say is exaggerated on the upside,  30 percent of the nearly 2 million Arabs in eastern ad northern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria are males ages 15 to 64, Assuming that is the approximate working population, Thursday’s figures mean that one in every eight work in Israel.

The Bethlehem-based Ma’an News Agency, which reported the census figures, complained that the workers in Israel often have to wait hours at checkpoints.

That generally is not true, but even if it were, the editors apparently think that if the Palestinian Authority ever becomes a country with its borders drawn along the current security fence, Israel would stop checking to see if any terrorists want to blow up people.

An Israeli lawyer who has won billions of dollars for relatives of terror victims has asked Obama administration officials why they are discussing letting Iran off the hook on sanctions while it owes American relatives colossal sums of money.

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, who heads the Israel Law Center, has won billions of dollars for relatives of terror victims in lawsuits against the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist organization as well as banks and other agencies that aid terrorists or act as a pipeline for funds for them.

She wrote Under Secretary Wendy Sherman last month, “Iran must not be allowed under any circumstances to avoid making payment of reparations and due compensations to the families of those whose lives they have destroyed through terrorism…and through the terror organizations it supports: Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah.”

In a blog posted this past week on The Hill website based in Washington, Darshan-Leitner noted that Sherman did not respond, and she added, “As a result of lawsuits taken by American victims of terror in U.S. courts, the Iranian regime currently owes billions of dollars from decades of terrorist activity resulting in dozens of victims and severed families. This debt has yet to be recognized or paid by the Iranian government with no sign of an intention to do so.”

She called on Congress to ensure that the U.S. government is working to keep the interests of the terror victims’ families on the table.

Darshan-Leitner pointed out that when George W. Bush was President, he conditioned repealing of any sanctions against Libya on payment of reparations to the victims of Libyan terror. “This move resulted in the payment of $1.5 billion dollars to the victims’ families,” she wrote.

On the other hand, Bush also removed North Korea from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism in 2008, without compensation being paid to American families, she added.

“We fear this lack of response not only portends a potential Iranian exemption from paying reparations and giving due compensation to families affected by terror in return for normalization of relations, but that it also signals a softening of Sherman’s position on the proliferation of terrorist activity and most significantly, creates difficult implications for the United States’ reputation as a pillar of justice in the war on terror,” according to Darshan-Leitner.

Her blog continued, “As lawyers for American, Canadian and Israeli victims of Iranian terror, we call on Congress to take action and place a check on Under Secretary Sherman in this current round of negotiations… We call on all members of Congress to ensure that victims of terror are not forgotten and to help make the Iranian regime provide the proper reparations and due compensation for the innocent lives taken at the hands of terrorist activities and not to gain a free pass in the name of diplomatic maneuverings.”

Palestinian Authority terrorists threw rocks and a firebomb at Jewish motorists in at least two locations in Judea and Samaria Tuesday, but they also widened their activities to include a PA official, whose empty car was riddled with bullets.

Abu Zaida, a senior official for Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement, said that shortly after he parked his car and left it, gunmen shot sprayed it with gunfire, leaving approximately 20 holes in the car.

Attacks on Jews continued unabated and unreported by most media. Cars driven by Jews were damaged by rocks in the Binyamin region of Samaria, while a firebomb was hurled at a Jewish vehicle on Highway 60 between Gush Etzion and Jerusalem.

Palestinian Authority Arabs on popular service committees in U.N.-run villages, commonly known as refugee camps, are shutting down UNRWA offices and programs  in northern Samaria Wednesday and Thursday in protest of “systematic reductions” in services for residents, the Bethlehem-based Ma’an News Agency reported.

Similar protests have occurred in Gaza where UNRWA is the dominant influence outside of the Hamas terrorist organization.

The public editor of The New York Times said she received hundreds of complaints last week after the newspaper used a large and sympathetic photograph of a distraught Palestinian Authority mother to illustrate a story about her son’s stabbing to death of a sleeping Israeli soldier sitting next to him on a public bus.

The JTA  spoke on Monday afternoon to two senior editors at The Times, which prints all the news that fits its agenda. Both editors agreed that the photo was a regrettable choice because the dominant image with an article should reflect the overall point of the article and the reason for its newsworthiness.

“This did not represent the essence of the story, which was clearly the moment of the Israeli soldier being stabbed,” said Michele McNally, the assistant managing editor in charge of photography.