On ‘Israel’s Right to Exist’

Israel exists with or without the say so of Hamas or anyone else. How about Palestine’s right to exist or indeed Hamas’ right to exist?

Israel’s `right to exist` really means Israel’s right to do whatever the hell it wants.

I think that British facilitating the state of Israel was a complete tragedy. I think the treatment of the Palestinians and the Lebanese is totally attrocious.

But there is a little problem. The Israelis are already there and many have been born there. There is no undoing Israel. The idea of disbanding Israel is absurd as kicking all the protestant Scots out of Ulster.

The occupation must end, international law must be imposed, the siege of Gaza must end. Land must be given back. Reparations must be payed. But the idea that Israel can now be undone is for fantics and fantasists. Great rhetoric, great for venting anger and hatred, but not really feasible.

The question that is most important is surely about Palestine's right to exist and how that can be ensured. Because it's looking more and more like Palestine is in danger of being wiped from the map.

It's a shame you hid Mike's comment as there are some points that just beg to be answered. The comments may be biased but issues he raises are real even if he obviously seems to be a little blinkred to the bigger picture.

who opposed the negotiating stance of the PLO for a two-state solution and right of return of all refugees. Instead they sent suicide bombers to murder as many Jews inside the 1948 as possible and celebrate the pizza parlour bombing.

Now what does that say about their intentions?

Anyway England did not facilitate a Jewish state, they barred entry to Jews fleeing the Nazis so many perished. Not surprisingly Israelis say: never again.

Incidentally those with Scots ancestry in Northern Ireland are probably precedingly Irish since the Gaels spread from Ireland to found Scotland.

Also this is interesting:  http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/seth_freedman/2007/12/combatants_for_peace.html

"Incidentally those with Scots ancestry in Northern Ireland are probably precedingly Irish since the Gaels spread from Ireland to found Scotland."

I was wondering of anyone would spot that. Scotland as people regard it today is a rather new synthetic construct. The Irish Norse Celts you refer to never considered themselves to belong to what it is now called Scotland and would find the culture totally alien. They had their own kingdom(s). As did the more directly Viking communitites.

Calling people like Somerled a Gael has more to do with the modern geography of Ireland than it has to do with history. Many of these so called Irish ancestors were Norse who had assimilated into the Celtic communities.

Then we have the conumdrum that most of that Gaelic population has for various reasons disappeared and now the majority of the population is in the South which was Anglo-Saxon at the time of Norse Celts (the romantic image of Scotland) and is still linguistically Anglo-Saxon, in fact linguistically more Anglo-Saxon than England! 'Scots' culture like the people it msiappropriates is all but extinct.

That Scotland is long dead.

Where does it all stop? Do we all agree to return to Africa? And then have a purge on any percieved Neanderthal anscestors?

In other words, the relationship between ethnicity, race and geography are far from natural and most of what most people believe about their country, race, people is total fiction. Which you seem to agree with in your observation on Scots/Irish.

But as I said before, nobody can realistically expect Israel to disappear. No more than we can expect the final demise of Gaelic in Scotland.

So the question is really about securing the rights of the Palestinian people.

If the rumour mill is at all accurate Israel made a rod for its own back in Hamas. And even if they hadn't been as directly involved as the rumours suggest, the attrocities of the Israeli state against the Palestinians assured that extremism would flourish anyway.

You want to see Hamas go away? Then start seriously withdrawing from the occipied land, stop the siege, stop the attrocities. Give the Palestinians an Israel they can trust. It will take a long time for all support for terrorism to die of oxygen starvation, but it's going to exponentially harder the longer Israel behaves illegally with impunity.

Without trust any foe will never lay down arms.

"But as I said before, nobody can realistically expect Israel to disappear. No more than we can expect the final demise of Gaelic in Scotland."

But as I said before, nobody can realistically expect Israel to disappear. No more than we can expect the final demise of Gaelic in Scotland to be averted.

"You want to see Hamas go away? Then start seriously withdrawing from the occipied land, stop the siege, stop the attrocities."

If evacuating completely from Gaza with all settlements was not a serious withdrawal then what is? Still revisionists and conspiracists insist that Israel didn't want to disengage from Gaza at all and that Israel deliberately planted a munition on a Gaza beach killing Palestinians (one revision says they fired on the family) because they were afraid the conflict with Gaza would stop so they wanted to egg the Gazans on to fire Qassams at the Sderot area every day.

Israel also tried a negotiated withdrawal from West Bank municipalities, while negotiations were still continuing and being explored the second Intifada broke out and Fatah encouraged it.

Israel is damned if it evacuates from Palestinian majority areas and damned if it reinvades, no wonder much of the Israeli left has moved to the centre party and the political will that might see a halt to extra 1948 settlement activity isn't there.

I don't think the blame game is going to solve anyone's problems let alone out there. Stealing more land and slapping up a dirty big wall doesn't help. And neither does popping off rockets into residential areas. It's a vicious circle.

I just wonder sometimes if the UN SC should be mandated to step in and totally demilitarise both sides, "keep" the peace and enforce the resolutions. They may have to be there for half a century but it has to be better than the current deadlock.

It doesn't help that the yanks woiuld cut off their noses to spite the UN's face.

Appeasing Israel and standing idly by and watching this happen is no different than the world ignoring the plight of Jews during the 30's, and Hitler's own supremacist, fascist ideology and expansionism.

Since the Palestinians have signaled their readiness to compromise and negotiate for peace, and the Zionist Extremists refuse to reciprocate, towards the goal of annexing all oof Palestine, using Solomon's logic, the Palestinians are entitled to it all.

Are they not?

A "Jewish State": I Can't Define It, But You Have To Recognize It.

At one time, everyone knew that peace would break out all over the Middle East if the Palestinians would just recognize Israel. But then the PLO went and spoiled things by recognizing Israel, so there had to be a new excuse for not ending the Occupation. The new demand was that the Palestinians had to recognize Israel's "right to exist". And now, to ward off any danger that peace might raise its ugly head at Annapolis, here's a timely new one: the Palestinians have to recognize that Israel exists; that it has a right to exist; and that it has the right to exist as a "Jewish state".

The implications of Israel's demanding recognition as a state of the Jewish people rather than a state of all its citizens are complex, and I'm going to work on a separate post about that. But one really basic issue came to mind today when I read (via Desertpeace) this Ha'aretz editorial on the subject. To sum up the article: Ha'aretz thinks it's absurd for the Israeli government to demand that the PLO recognize Israel as a "Jewish state", when it is the settlement policies of successive Israeli governments in the Occupied Palestinian Territories that have been, and continue to be, the greatest danger to Israel's Jewishness. But what struck me most when I read the article wasn't the strength or otherwise of Ha'aretz's argument: it was the realisation that Israelis don't seem to have a common understanding of what they mean by a "Jewish state"; yet they insist the Palestinians must recognize nonetheless that Israel is one.

When Olmert and Livni talk about Israel as a "Jewish state", they mean essentially that it is a state that is for Jewish people, even if they don't reside or have citizenship there. It would be very handy for them if they could force the Palestinians to accept this definition, because then they could go into final status talks with some of the more intractable issues - like how to resolve the Right of Return - pre-emptively swept off the table. After all, how can Palestinians have a right to return to their homes in a "Jewish state" when they're not even Jewish, and non-Jews shouldn't expect to be allowed to live in a "Jewish state" in the first place...

Various Israeli commentators have been up in arms this week because the PLO has made it clear it will never give Israel this kind of recognition. The PLO says that Palestinians, like everyone else, give diplomatic recognition to countries, not to demographic balances, religious leanings or political affiliations. In recognizing Iran, for example, they give formal acceptance to Iran's sovereignty, its people and its borders, but not to its religious orientation. If Iran wants to call itself "The Islamic Republic of...", that is purely an internal Iranian affair. It's "Iran" that international diplomacy recognizes, not the Islamic-ness or Republic-ness of its political system. Similarly, if Israel wishes to call itself "The Jewish State of...", that is an internal Israeli affair, which does not need and cannot demand recognition from the PLO or anyone else in the world community.

So what does the PLO recognize in regard to Israel? The PLO recognizes the state of Israel in its 1967 borders - an area which happens to have an overwhelmingly Jewish population - and is offering through its acceptance of the Saudi peace initiative a Right of Return that is implemented in agreement with Israel, i.e. a nominal one that won't change the demographic balance there. So they offer recognition to a state that is de facto Jewish, and recognize the right of that state to peace and security within its recognized borders.

The one thing they won't say is that Israel is formally a "Jewish state", i.e. a state for Jews. Just as a Jewish American might recognize that the USA is a Christian country in terms of its dominant population and cultural traditions, but would never accept that it should be formally designated a "Christian state", because that immediately defines Jews and other non-Christians as lesser citizens. For some outrageous no-doubt Islamofascist Jew-hating reason, the Palestinians similarly refuse to declare that Israel is constitutionally a state where Israelis of Palestinian descent are inferior citizens.

Now, in this Ha'aretz editorial, Ha'aretz also talks about the "Jewish state", and says that the Israeli government is preventing it coming about because of the settlements, which make it impossible to separate the two peoples. So Ha'aretz is talking about a "Jewish State" in terms of an Israel that emerges from a final peace settlement as a country with a large Jewish majority.

But what Ha'aretz calls a Jewish state, i.e. a Jewish-majority state, is not what Olmert and Livni mean by the term, i.e a state that constitutionally favors people of one religion over another. Ha'aretz is saying that Israel will be a Jewish state because it will be a country that is made up overwhelmingly OF Jews - which the PLO could accept. Olmert and Livni say it is a Jewish state because it is a country not OF Jews, but FOR Jews - which Palestinians do not accept.

It seems absurd that Israelis will have hysterical fits when the PLO says it doesn't recognize Israel as a "Jewish state", when Israelis themselves don't agree in first place what exactly they mean by a "Jewish state".

Israelis need to decide what it is they mean by a "Jewish state", before they accuse the Palestinians of being unreasonable in rejecting it. Right now, I suspect that some of them are happy to conflate the two different understandings of what a "Jewish state" is; perhaps so that when the PLO rejects Olmert's demand for a "state for Jews", they can pretend the PLO is rejecting too the idea of Israel as a "state of Jews". I suppose if you understand that the price of a universally-recognized Jewish-majority state in the 1967 borders is finally getting out of the Occupied Territories, and you really don't want to do that, it's a lot easier to derail peace talks by whipping up fears of being driven into the sea than to simply acknowledge you're not willing to pay the price. It's a bit like having the President of Iran say that the Occupation regime over Jerusalem will disappear from the pages of time, and then pretending that he really said he would "wipe Israel off the map"; because it's always easier to invoke the Hitler bogeyman than to answer Ahmadinejad's questions about why exactly Muslim-majority Palestine should be dismantled to make way for a sectarian Zionist state....

Maybe Israelis could take a short break from insisting on what the Palestinians must give them, and make up their minds what exactly it is they want. Then perhaps if they could actually listen to what they're being offered, they might even be pleasantly surprised to find it's something they could live with after all.



The Origin of the Israel-Palestine Conflict
Published by Jews for Justice in the Middle East

As the periodic bloodshed continues in the Middle East, the search for an equitable solution must come to grips with the root cause of the conflict. The conventional wisdom is that, even if both sides are at fault, the Palestinians are irrational "terrorists" who have no point of view worth listening to. Our position, however, is that the Palestinians have a real grievance: their homeland for over a thousand years was taken, without their consent and mostly by force, during the creation of the state of Israel. And all subsequent crimes - on both sides - inevitably follow from this original injustice.

This paper outlines the history of Palestine to show how this process occurred and what a moral solution to the region's problems should consist of. If you care about the people of the Middle East, Jewish and Arab, you owe it to yourself to read this account of the other side of the historical record.

Introduction

The standard Zionist position is that they showed up in Palestine in the late 19th century to reclaim their ancestral homeland. Jews bought land and started building up the Jewish community there. They were met with increasingly violent opposition from the Palestinian Arabs, presumably stemming from the Arabs' inherent anti-Semitism. The Zionists were then forced to defend themselves and, in one form or another, this same situation continues up to today.

The problem with this explanation is that it is simply not true, as the documentary evidence in this booklet will show. What really happened was that the Zionist movement, from the beginning, looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the indigenous Arab population so that Israel could be a wholly Jewish state, or as much as was possible. Land bought by the Jewish National Fund was held in the name of the Jewish people and could never be sold or even leased back to Arabs (a situation which continues to the present).

The Arab community, as it became increasingly aware of the Zionists' intentions, strenuously opposed further Jewish immigration and land buying because it posed a real and imminent danger to the very existence of Arab society in Palestine. Because of this opposition, the entire Zionist project never could have been realized without the military backing of the British. The vast majority of the population of Palestine, by the way, had been Arabic since the seventh century A.D. (Over 1200 years)

In short, Zionism was based on a faulty, colonialist world view that the rights of the indigenous inhabitants didn't matter. The Arabs' opposition to Zionism wasn't based on anti-Semitism but rather on a totally reasonable fear of the dispossession of their people.

One further point: being Jewish ourselves, the position we present here is critical of Zionism but is in no way anti-Semitic. We do not believe that the Jews acted worse than any other group might have acted in their situation. The Zionists (who were a distinct minority of the Jewish people until after WWII) had an understandable desire to establish a place where Jews could be masters of their own fate, given the bleak history of Jewish oppression. Especially as the danger to European Jewry crystalized in the late 1930's and after, the actions of the Zionists were propelled by real desperation.

But so were the actions of the Arabs. The mythic "land without people for a people without land" was already home to 700,000 Palestinians in 1919. This is the root of the problem, as we shall see.


www.ifamericansknew.org/history/origins.html

This short film refutes everything the Plant will Spam here in order to disrupt IMC activities, and explains why it's here.

Please take some time to download this excellent documentary, as share (or screen) it with friends and family.

Then, act on what you've learned.

After all, this only succeeds because the people aren't informed, and don't do anything to demand change.

Also, Israel and Zionist organizations throughout the West engage in a well-oiled Propaganda campaign within our own media. In order to counteract this, supporters of the Palestinians have to begin speaking up, especially within the media and those who own and operate it.

Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land
www.freedocumentaries.org/film.php?id=169