Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said, during his visit to the United States this past week, that the peace talks with the Palestinian Authority are going nowhere.

According to a report on Friday in the Maariv daily newspaper, Netanyahu made the comments in closed meetings with the heads of American Jewish organizations.

Netanyahu reportedly repeated his position and that he is ready for a historic compromise with the Palestinian Authority, but added that “the problem was, and still is, their refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.”

The Prime Minister, according to Maariv, also said that the Palestinian Authority’s ongoing incitement against Israel was another significant obstacle to the possibility of reaching an agreement.

The comments indicated that the parties have so far only discussed the possibility of reaching a permanent settlement to the conflict, while the possibility of an interim agreement is not on the agenda.

The peace talks between Israel and the PA resumed this past summer following U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s shuttle diplomacy.

Kerry asked both sides to keep the details of the negotiations secret in order to give the process a chance to work and, while Israeli officials have remain tight-lipped about the talks, PA officials have made several leaks to the press.

A recent leak involved a PA official saying that during the negotiations, Israel agreed to a wholesale deportation of thousands of Jews from Judea and Samaria and the transfer of their property to PA Arabs. However, the PA official who reported on that Israeli offer added that the PA side had rejected it as not going far enough.

In an earlier leak to the press, the PA’s chief negotiator , Saeb Erekat, told an Arabic radio station that the US has guaranteed the PA all of its key preconditions in advance of negotiations.

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, who has for years demanded a state based on the borders that existed before the 1967 Six Day War, recently stated that unless Israel meets all of his preconditions, there will be no peace.

Those preconditions include a Palestinian state whose capital is Jerusalem and a release of all PA Arab terrorists from Israeli jails.

Meanwhile, Abbas has continued to incite to terror and hatred of Israel, by honoring and glorifying terrorists who killed dozens of Israelis.

View original Arutz Sheva publication at: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/172521#.Uk__OxCPlgg