…and now I will properly use the Reply button (I don’t normally participate in debates on LGF).

Sorry, but where does Abbas say that he won’t recognize Israel as a Jewish state because of a fear of losing leverage? If he doesn’t use that argument, then you’re just speculating.

I don’t think it is just leverage. You don’t make people define the land they were forced to leave according to an adjective that excludes them as a prelude to negotiations that hopes to end the conflict.

America is not an ethnos-based state, so I don’t see the relevance.

I would argue that there is as much ethnic cohesion to America as there is Israel, given the scattered nature of the Jewish diaspora who returned there. It is very much a “religious” glue that holds them together, and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous.

Clearly, a definition that excludes Palestinians from “Jewishness” is not one that the Palestinian diaspora is going to accept. That’s why the insistence is clearly designed to prevent negotiations. It is a starting point that no Palestinian negotiator would ever accept. Netanyahu and his government knows this.