The Palestinians are by no means saints, yet this week one can certainly cite the famous saying “the work of the righteous is done by others” (Midrash Talmudi, Brachot 35). The work of the Palestinians was done by someone else, i.e., Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In fact, surely unintentionally, Netanyahu extracted Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas from a trap Netanyahu himself laid for the Palestinian leadership. The new Nationality Law, anchoring the Jewish character of the State of Israel, was championed by Netanyahu to please his right-wing camp. But looking into it closely, one can realize that it opens an escape hatch for the Palestinians from Netanyahu’s incessant demand for them to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people as a precondition for any Israeli-Palestinian agreement ending their conflict. All that is left for Abbas to do now is to reiterate what he already said in 2009. At a public April 2009 speech in Ramallah, Abbas said it was not his job to supply the definition of the State of Israel. “Call yourselves the Hebrew Socialist Republic,” he said at the time, “it’s none of my business.”

In private conferences, such as the one held in June 2010 by the Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, Abbas has clearly recognized the linkage between the Jews and the State of Israel. He said, “Nobody denies the Jewish history in the Middle East." Tal Becker, a senior adviser to Tzipi Livni when she was foreign minister and a member of an Israeli delegation involved in negotiations with the Palestinians, recorded Abbas’ words then, and the Palestinian leader's statement, “Nobody from our side at least denies that the Jews were in Palestine, were in the Middle East.”

In an interview with PLO founder Yasser Arafat that I conducted in June 2004 along with Haaretz Editor-in-Chief David Landau (who died in 2015), we asked Arafat specifically whether he understood that “Israel must continue to be a Jewish state.”