He's probably making up the Right of Return stuff - that's just pre-negotiation jockeying, like Assad saying that Rabin offered all of the Golan - but aren't the implications worse if he's actually telling the truth? If Abbas got offered almost all of the West Bank and the right to overrun Israel demographically, and then turned around and refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Jewish State - doesn't that bode less than well for peace talks?

Turns out, the post-Bush era of elevated anti-Israel expectations is indeed filled with Change:

Abbas also told The Washington Post that former prime minister Ehud Olmert accepted the principle of a "right of return" to Israel for Palestinian refugees and offered to resettle thousands of Palestinians in Israel. And he said Olmert proposed a Palestinian state on 97 percent of the West Bank, and showed him its contours on a map. Abbas said he turned down Olmert's peace offer because "the gaps were too wide."

"What's interesting about Abbas's hardline position," wrote The Washington Post's Jackson Diehl, who conducted the interview along with a colleague, "is what it says about the message that Obama's first Middle East steps have sent to Palestinians and Arab governments... in the Obama administration, so far, it's easy being Palestinian."... Obama, with his repeated demands for a settlement freeze, "has revived a long-dormant Palestinian fantasy: that the United States will simply force Israel to make critical concessions, whether or not its democratic government agrees, while Arabs passively watch and applaud."

The Arab and Muslim attitude toward the Jewish State has always been schizophrenic. On the one hand, Arab media peddle outright hallucinations about an all-powerful global Jewish conspiracy. If that doesn't make the Israelis impossible to resist - and debilitation is always a psychological risk when wallowing in the fever swamp of conspiracy - then certainly it makes the scheming Jews worthy of emulation. Par for the course here is Malaysian PM's Mahathir Mohamad's rant.

On the other hand, Islamic anti-Semitism denies that a few million Jews - biologically inferior and divinely cursed as they are - could establish a beachhead in the Muslim world on their own. According to this line of reasoning, only Western assistance keeps the Arab world from overrunning Israel. Take it away and Arab victory becomes a foregone conclusion. On the eve of the Six Day War, Egytian PM Nasser screamed to his troops that "Israel is not supported today by any European power... We are face-to-face with Israel... "ahlan wasahlan," welcome. We are ready for war: this water is ours." After the war he was caught on an open line with Jordan's King Hussein, plotting to lie about how the US Air Force fought side-by-side with the IAF. Rumors of US troops disguised as IDF soldiers pop up regularly among excitable anti-Semites.

So the "long-dormant fantasy" of a Western sellout plays on some pretty deep and some pretty old eliminationist pathologies. Making it seem like a credible expectation - which is what Obama's surrogates have been doing for months in private talks with the Palestinians and the Syrians - seems to be the opposite of helpful. The opposite of helpful - but not false: