If there were a credible offer for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the Palestinians would accept right? The Palestinians want to make a deal with Israel so those living on the West Bank could have their own independent state and the refugees living in UN-run refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon would have a place to go, right?

Wrong.

The Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas has made his opposition to a peace deal clear, repeatedly and to more than one foreign source. But no one is listening and when confronted with his own words, Abbas denies and lies.

As reported by the Times of Israel , Abbas was confronted with questions about conversations he had in 2008 with then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Washington Times reporter Jackson Diehl regarding peace negotiations with Israel. In his conversation with Rice, when asked to respond to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's impossibly generous proposal to give away the West Bank and half of Jerusalem for an agreement with the Palestinians Authority, Abbas refused to consider it, especially as regarded the fate of Palestinian refugees. They couldn't be absorbed into the new Palestinian state, because Abbas said according to Rice’s account: “I can’t tell four million Palestinians that only five thousand of them can go home (into Israel proper, as Olmert had proposed").

And to Diehl, Abbas had said that Palestinians couldn't accept Olmert's offer because "the gaps were wide" between the two sides.

When confronted with both quotations, Abbas denied having said either, when the sources for these quotes both resolutely stand by their accounts. Does anyone really believe that Rice and Diehl both have a reason to lie about what Abbas said? On the other hand, Abbas has good reason to lie. He said things that if believed would prove beyond a reasonable doubt that rather than the "intrasigent Israeli" narrative we continue to hear about, the truth is more the reverse.