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On ‘Israel’s Right to Exist’

John Whitbeck | 25.12.2007 15:31 | Anti-militarism | Palestine | Repression | World

There is an enormous difference between "recognizing Israel's existence" and "recognizing Israel's right to exist".

Almost two years after the most democratic elections ever held in the Arab world, as Palestinians struggle to survive in two disconnected and hostile fragments of historical Palestine, a besieged Gaza Strip and a coopted West Bank, with the enemies of the Palestinian people sending arms and funds to the side perceived as responsive to Israeli and Western wishes for use against the side perceived as representing Palestinian interests, the justification put forward by Israel, the United States and the European Union for their refusal to accept the result of the January 2006 elections, their determined efforts to overturn that result and their brutal collective punishment of the Palestinian people -- the refusal of Hamas to "recognize Israel" or to "recognize Israel's existence" or to "recognize Israel's right to exist" -- merits serious examination.

These three verbal formulations have been used by media, politicians and even diplomats interchangeably, as though they mean the same thing. They do not.

"Recognizing Israel" or any other state is a formal legal and diplomatic act by a state with respect to another state. It is inappropriate -- indeed, nonsensical -- to talk about a political party or movement extending diplomatic recognition to a state. To talk of Hamas "recognizing Israel" is simply to use sloppy, confusing and deceptive shorthand for the real demand being made.

"Recognizing Israel's existence" appears on first impression to involve a relatively straightforward acknowledgement of a fact of life. Yet there are serious practical problems with this formulation. What Israel, within what borders, is involved? Is it the 55% of historical Palestine recommended for a Jewish state by the UN General Assembly in 1947? The 78% of historical Palestine occupied by the Zionist movement in 1948 and now viewed by most of the world as "Israel" or "Israel proper"? The 100% of historical Palestine occupied by Israel since June 1967 and shown as "Israel" (without any "Green Line") on maps in Israeli schoolbooks? Israel has never defined its own borders, since doing so would necessarily place limits on them. Still, if this were all that was being demanded of Hamas, it might be possible for it to acknowledge, as a fact of life, that a State of Israel exists today within some specified borders.

"Recognizing Israel's right to exist", the actual demand, is in an entirely different league. This formulation does not address diplomatic formalities or a simple acceptance of present realities. It calls for a moral judgment.

There is an enormous difference between "recognizing Israel's existence" and "recognizing Israel's right to exist". From a Palestinian perspective, the difference is in the same league as the difference between asking a Jew to acknowledge that the Holocaust happened and asking him to concede that the Holocaust was morally justified. For Palestinians to acknowledge the occurrence of the Nakba -- the expulsion of the great majority of Palestinians from their homeland between 1947 and 1949 -- is one thing. For them to publicly concede that it was "right" for the Nakba to have happened is something else entirely. For the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, the Holocaust and the Nakba, respectively, represent catastrophes and injustices on an unimaginable scale that can neither be forgotten nor forgiven.

To demand that Palestinians recognize "Israel's right to exist" is to demand that a people who have for almost 60 years been treated, and continue to be treated, as subhumans unworthy of basic human rights publicly proclaim that they are subhumans -- and, at least implicitly, that they deserve what has been done, and continues to be done, to them. Even 19th century U.S. governments did not require the surviving Native Americans to publicly proclaim the "rightness" of their ethnic cleansing by the European colonists as a condition precedent to even discussing what sort of reservation might be set aside for them -- under economic blockade and threat of starvation until they shed whatever pride they had left and conceded the point.

Some believe that Yasser Arafat did concede the point in order to buy his ticket out of the wilderness of demonization and earn the right to be lectured directly by the Americans. In fact, in his famous statement in Stockholm in late 1988, he accepted "Israel's right to exist in peace and security". This formulation, significantly, addresses the conditions of existence of a state which, as a matter of fact, exists. It does not address the existential question of the "rightness" of the dispossession and dispersal of the Palestinian people from their homeland to make way for another people coming from abroad.

The original conception of the formulation "Israel's right to exist" and of its utility as an excuse for not talking with any Palestinian leadership which still stood up for the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people are attributed to Henry Kissinger, the grand master of diplomatic cynicism. There can be little doubt that those states which still employ this formulation do so in full consciousness of what it entails, morally and psychologically, for the Palestinian people and for the same cynical purpose -- as a roadblock against any progress toward peace and justice in Israel/Palestine and as a way of helping to buy more time for Israel to create more "facts on the ground" while blaming the Palestinians for their own suffering.

However, many private citizens of good will and decent values may well be taken in by the surface simplicity of the words "Israel's right to exist" (and even more easily by the other two shorthand formulations) into believing that they constitute a self-evidently reasonable demand and that refusing such a reasonable demand must represent perversity (or a "terrorist ideology") rather than a need to cling to their self-respect and dignity as full-fledged human beings which is deeply felt and thoroughly understandable in the hearts and minds of a long-abused people who have been stripped of almost everything else that makes life worth living.

That this is so is evidenced by polls showing that the percentage of the Palestinian population which approves of Hamas' steadfastness in refusing to bow to this humiliating demand by the enemies of the Palestinian people, notwithstanding the intensity of the economic pain and suffering inflicted on them, substantially exceeds the percentage of the population which voted for Hamas in January 2006.

Those who recognize the critical importance of Israeli-Palestinian peace and truly seek a decent future for both peoples must recognize that the demand that Hamas recognize "Israel's right to exist" is unreasonable, immoral and impossible to meet. Then they must insist that this roadblock to peace be removed, that the siege of the Gaza Strip be lifted and that justice -- not simply "peace", which can be a euphemism for the successful repression of resistance to injustice -- be pursued, with the urgency it deserves, with all legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people.



* John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer, is author of "The World According to Whitbeck".

John Whitbeck
- Homepage: http://palestinechronicle.com/story-12220742026.htm

Comments

Hide the following 8 comments

How about Palestine's right to exist?

25.12.2007 17:44

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.

Paul O'Hanlon
mail e-mail: o_hanlon@hotmail.com


Too late

25.12.2007 23:13

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.

Pragmatist


Oh those nice cuddly Hamas people

26.12.2007 04:32

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

Quetzal


Quetzal

26.12.2007 13:37

"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.




Pragmatist


Typo

26.12.2007 14:27

"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.

Pragmatist


Pragmatist

26.12.2007 20:03

"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.

Quetzal


Deadlock

27.12.2007 12:18

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.

Pragmatist


Cut The Baby In Half

28.12.2007 22:55

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

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