[Peace-discuss] The Recognition Trap

[Morton K. Brussel]

December 14, 2006

Why Hamas May Be Right

By JONATHAN COOK

in Nazareth.

The problem facing the Palestinian leadership, as they strive to  
bring the millions living in the occupied territories some small  
relief from their collective suffering, reduces to a matter of a few  
words. Like a naughty child who has only to say "sorry" to be  
released from his room, the Hamas government need only say "We  
recognise Israel" and supposedly aid and international goodwill will  
wash over the West Bank and Gaza.

That, at least, was the gist of Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert's  
recent speech during a visit to the Negev, when he suggested that his  
country's hand was stretched out across the sands towards the  
starving masses of Gaza -- if only Hamas would repent. "Recognise us  
and we are ready to talk about peace" was the implication.

Certainly the Palestinian people have been viciously punished for  
making their democratic choice early this year to elect a Hamas  
government that Israel and the Western powers disapprove of:

* an economic blockade has been imposed, starving the Palestinian  
Authority of income to pay for services and remunerate its large  
workforce;

* millions of dollars in tax monies owed to the Palestinians have  
been illegally withheld by Israel, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis;

* a physical blockade of Gaza enforced by Israel has prevented the  
Palestinians from exporting their produce, mostly perishable crops,  
and from importing essentials like food and medicine;

* Israeli military strikes have damaged Gaza's vital infrastructure,  
including the supply of electricity and water, as well as randomly  
killing its inhabitants;

* and thousands of families are being torn apart as Israel uses the  
pretext of its row with Hamas to stop renewing the visas of  
Palestinian foreign passport holders.

The magic words "We recognise you" could end all this suffering. So  
why did their prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, vow last week never to  
utter them. Is Hamas so filled with hatred and loathing for Israel as  
a Jewish state that it cannot make such a simple statement of good  
intent?

It is easy to forget that, though conditions have dramatically  
deteriorated of late, the Palestinians' problems did not start with  
the election of Hamas. Israel's occupation is four decades old, and  
no Palestinian leader has ever been able to extract from Israel a  
promise of real statehood in all of the occupied territories: not the  
mukhtars, the largely compliant local leaders, who for decades were  
the only representatives allowed to speak on behalf of the  
Palestinians after the national leadership was expelled; not the  
Palestinian Authority under the secular leadership of Yasser Arafat,  
who returned to the occupied territories in the mid-1990s after the  
PLO had recognised Israel; not the leadership of his successor,  
Mahmoud Abbas, the "moderate" who first called for an end to the  
armed intifada; and now not the leaders of Hamas, even though they  
have repeatedly called for a long-term truce (hudna) as the first  
step in building confidence.

Similarly, few Palestinians doubt that Israel will continue to  
entrench the occupation -- just as it did during the supposed peace-  
making years of Oslo, when the number of Jewish settlers doubled in  
the occupied territories -- even if Hamas is ousted and a government  
of national unity, of technocrats or even of Fatah takes its place.

There is far more at stake for Israel in winning this little  
concession from Hamas than most observers appreciate. A statement  
saying that Hamas recognised Israel would do much more than meet  
Israel's precondition for talks; it would mean that Hamas had walked  
into the same trap that was set earlier for Arafat and Fatah. That  
trap is designed to ensure that any peaceful solution to the conflict  
is impossible.

It achieves this end in two ways.

First, as has already been understood, at least by those paying  
attention, Hamas' recognition of Israel's "right to exist" would  
effectively signify that the Palestinian government was publicly  
abandoning its own goal of struggling to create a viable Palestinian  
state.

That is because Israel refuses to demarcate its own future borders,  
leaving it an open question what it considers to be the extent of  
"its existence" it is demanding Hamas recognise. We do know that no  
one in the Israeli leadership is talking about a return to Israel's  
borders that existed before the 1967 war, or probably anything close  
to it.

Without a return to those pre-1967 borders (plus a substantial  
injection of goodwill from Israel in ensuring unhindered passage  
between Gaza and the West Bank) no possibility exists of a viable  
Palestinian state ever emerging.

And no goodwill, of course, will be forthcoming. Every Israeli leader  
has refused to recognise the Palestinians, first as a people and now  
as a nation. And in the West's typically hypocritical fashion when  
dealing with the Palestinians, no one has ever suggested that Israel  
commit to such recognition.

In fact, Israeli governments have glorified in their refusal to  
extend the same recognition to the Palestinians that they demand from  
them. Famously Golda Meir, a Labor prime minister, said that the  
Palestinians did not exist, adding in 1971 that Israel's "borders are  
determined by where Jews live, not where there is a line on a map."  
At the same time she ordered that the Green Line, Israel's border  
until the 1967 war, be erased from all official maps.

That legacy hit the headlines last week when the dovish education  
minister, Yuli Tamir, caused a storm by issuing a directive that the  
Green Line should be reintroduced in Israeli schoolbooks. There were  
widespread protests against her "extreme leftist ideology" from  
politicians and rabbis.

According to Israeli educators, the chances of textbooks showing the  
Green Line again -- or dropping references to "Judea and Samaria",  
the Biblical names for the West Bank, or including Arab towns on maps  
of Israel -- are close to nil. The private publishers who print the  
textbooks would refuse to incur the extra costs of reprinting the  
maps, said Prof Yoram Bar-Gal, head of geography at Haifa University.

Sensitive to the damage that the row might do to Israel's  
international image, and aware that Tamir's directive is never likely  
to be implemented, Olmert agreed in principle to the change. "There  
is nothing wrong with marking the Green Line," he said. But, in a  
statement that made his agreement entirely hollow, he added: "But  
there is an obligation to emphasize that the government's position  
and public consensus rule out returning to the 1967 lines."

The second element to the trap is far less well understood. It  
explains the strange formulation of words Israel uses in making its  
demand of Hamas. Israel does not ask it simply to "recognise Israel",  
but to "recognise Israel's right to exist". The difference is not a  
just matter of semantics.

The concept of a state having any rights is not only strange but  
alien to international law. People have rights, not states. And that  
is precisely the point: when Israel demands that its "right to exist"  
be recognised, the subtext is that we are not speaking of recognition  
of Israel as a normal nation state but as the state of a specific  
people, the Jews.

In demanding recognition of its right to exist, Israel is ensuring  
that the Palestinians agree to Israel's character being set in stone  
as an exclusivist Jewish state, one that privileges the rights of  
Jews over all other ethnic, religious and national groups inside the  
same territory. The question of what such a state entails is largely  
glossed over both by Israel and the West.

For most observers, it means simply that Israel must refuse to allow  
the return of the millions of Palestinians languishing in refugee  
camps throughout the region, whose former homes in Israel have now  
been appropriated for the benefit of Jews. Were they allowed to come  
back, Israel's Jewish majority would be eroded overnight and it could  
no longer claim to be a Jewish state, except in the same sense that  
apartheid South Africa was a white state.

This conclusion is apparently accepted by Romano Prodi, Italy's prime  
minister, after a round of lobbying in European captials from  
Israel's telegenic foreign minister, Tzipi Livni. According to the  
Jerusalem Post, Prodi is saying in private that Israel should receive  
guarantees from the Palestinians that its Jewish character will never  
be in doubt.

Israeli officials are cheering what they believe is the first crack  
in Europe's support for international law and the rights of the  
refugees. "It's important to get everyone on the same page on this  
one," an official told the Post.

But in truth the consequences of the Palestinian leadership  
recognising Israel as a Jewish state run far deeper than the question  
of the future of the Palestinian refugees. In my book Blood and  
Religion, I set out these harsh consequences both for the  
Palestinians in the occupied territories and for the million or so  
Palestinians who live inside Israel as citizens, supposedly with the  
same rights as Jewish citizens.

My argument is that this need to maintain Israel's Jewish character  
at all costs is actually the engine of its conflict with the  
Palestinians. No solution is possible as long as Israel insists on  
privileging citizenship for Jews above other groups, and on  
distorting the region's territorial and demographic realities to  
ensure that the numbers continue to weigh in the Jews' favour.

Although ultimately the return of the refugees poses the biggest  
threat to Israel's "existence", Israel has a far more pressing  
demographic concern: the refusal by the Palestinians living in the  
West Bank to leave the parts of that territory Israel covets (and  
which it knows by the Biblical names of Judea and Samaria).

Within a decade, the Palestinians in the occupied territories and the  
million Palestinian citizens living inside Israel will outnumber  
Jews, both those living in Israel and the settlers in the West Bank.

That was one of the chief reasons for the "disengagement" from Gaza:  
Israel could claim that, even though it is still occupying the small  
piece of land militarily, it was no longer responsible for the  
population there. By withdrawing a few thousand settlers from the  
Strip, 1.4 million Gazans were instantly wiped from the demographic  
score sheet.

But though the loss of Gaza has posponed for a few years the threat  
of a Palestinian majority in the expanded state Israel desires, it  
has not magicly guaranteed Israel's continuing existence as a Jewish  
state. That is because Israel's Palestinian citizens, though a  
minority comprising no more than fifth of Israel's population, can  
potentially bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.

For the past decade they have been demanding that Israel be reformed  
from a Jewish state, which systematically discriminates against them  
and denies their Palestinian identity, into a "state of all its  
citizens", a liberal democracy that would give all citizens, Jews and  
Palestinians, equal rights.

Israel has characterised the demand for a state of all its citizens  
as subversion and treason, realising that, were the Jewish state to  
become a liberal democracy, Palestinian citizens could justifiably  
demand: * the right to marry Palestinians from the occupied  
territories and from the Diaspora, winning them Israeli citizenship  
-- "a right of return through the backdoor" as officials call it. *  
the right to bring Palestinian relatives in exile back to Israel  
under a Right of Return programme that would be a pale shadow of the  
existing Law of Return that guarantees any Jew anywhere in the world  
the automatic right to Israeli citizenship.

To prevent the first threat, Israel passed a flagrantly racist law in  
2003 that makes it all but impossible for Palestinians with Israeli  
citizenship to bring a Palestinian spouse to Israel. For the time  
being, such couples have little choice but to seek asylum abroad, if  
other countries will give them refuge.

But like the Gaza disengagement, this piece of legislation is a  
delaying tactic rather than a solution to the problem of Israel's  
"existence". So behind the scenes Israel has been formulating ideas  
that taken together would remove large segments of Israel's  
Palestinian population from its borders and strip any remaining  
"citizens" of their political rights -- unless they swear loyalty to  
a "Jewish and democratic state" and thereby renounce their demand  
that Israel reform itself into a liberal democracy.

This is the bottom line for a Jewish state, just as it was for a  
white apartheid South Africa: if we are to survive, then we must be  
able to do whatever it takes to keep ourselves in power, even if it  
means systematically violating the human rights of all those we rule  
over and who do not belong to our group.

Ultimately, the consequences of Israel being allowed to remain a  
Jewish state will be felt by all of us, wherever we live -- and not  
only because of the fallout from the continuing and growing anger in  
the Arab and Muslim worlds at the double standards applied by the  
West to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Given Israel's view that its most pressing interest is not peace or  
regional accommodation with its neighbours but the need to ensure a  
Jewish majority at all costs to protect its "existence", Israel is  
likely to act in ways that endanger regional and global stability.

A small taste of that was suggested in the role played by Israel's  
supporters in Washington in making the case for the invasion of Iraq,  
and this summer in Israel's assault on Lebanon. But it is most  
evident in its drumbeat of war against Iran.

Israel has been leading the attempts to characterise the Iranian  
regime as profoundly anti-Semitic, and its presumed ambitions for  
nuclear weapons as directed by the sole goal of wanting to "wipe  
Israel off the map" -- a calculatedly mischievious mistranslation of  
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech.

Most observers have assumed that Israel is genuinely concerned for  
its safety from nuclear attack, however implausible the idea that  
even the most fanatical Muslim regime would, unprovoked, launch  
nuclear missiles against a small area of land that contains some of  
Islam's holiest sites, in Jerusalem.

But in truth there is another reason why Israel is concerned about a  
nuclear-armed Iran that has nothing to do with conventional ideas  
about safety.

Last month, Ephraim Sneh, one of Israel's most distinguished generals  
and now Olmert's deputy defence minister, revealed that the  
government's primary concern was not the threat posed by Ahmadinejad  
firing nuclear missiles at Israel but the effect of Iran's possession  
of such weapons on Jews who expect Israel to have a monopoly on the  
nuclear threat.

If Iran got such weapons, "Most Israelis would prefer not to live  
here; most Jews would prefer not to come here with families, and  
Israelis who can live abroad will ... I am afraid Ahmadinejad will be  
able to kill the Zionist dream without pushing a button. That's why  
we must prevent this regime from obtaining nuclear capability at all  
costs."

In other words, the Israeli government is considering either its own  
pre-emptive strike on Iran or encouraging the United States to  
undertake such an attack -- despite the terrible consequences for  
global security -- simply because a nuclear-armed Iran might make  
Israel a less attractive place for Jews to live, lead to increased  
emigration and tip the demographic balance in the Palestinians' favour.

Regional and possibly global war may be triggered simply to ensure  
that Israel's "existence" as a state that offers exclusive privileges  
to Jews continues.

For all our sakes, we must hope that the Palestinians and their Hamas  
government continue refusing to "recognise Israel's right to exist".

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel.  
He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The  
Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto  
Press, and available in the United States from the University of  
Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
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