[Peace-discuss] On "Israel's Right to Exist"

[David Green]

 On "Israel's Right to Exist"
> 
> 
"Recognizing Israel" or any other state is a formal legal/diplomatic act by a state with respect to another state.
> 
> 
> "Recognizing Israel's existence?". ..there are serious practical problems with
> this formulation. What Israel, within what borders, is involved? The 55% of
> historical Palestine recommended for a Jewish state by the UN General Assembly
> in 1947? The 78% of historical Palestine occupied by Israel 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
> (including the Syrian Golan Heights) and shown as "Israel" on maps in Israeli
> schoolbooks? 
> 
> By John Whitbeck
> 
> Now that the Palestinian civil war long sought by Israel, the U.S. and the EU
> appears on the verge of breaking out, it may be timely to examine the
> justification put forward by Israel, the U.S. and the EU for their collective
> punishment of the Palestinian people in retaliation for their having made the
> "wrong" choice in last January's democratic election -- the refusal of Hamas
> to "recognize Israel" or to "recognize Israel's existence" or to "recognize
> Israel's right to exist".
> 
> 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/diplomatic act by a
> state with respect to another state. It is inappropriate -- indeed,
> nonsensical -- to talk about a political party or movement, even one in a
> sovereign state, extending diplomatic recognition to a state. To talk of Hamas
> "recognizing Israel" is simply sloppy, confusing and deceptive shorthand for
> the real demand being made.
> 
> "Recognizing Israel's existence" is not a logical nonsense and appears on
> first impression to involve a relatively straightforward acknowledgement of a
> fact of life -- like death and taxes. Yet there are serious practical problems
> with this formulation. What Israel, within what borders, is involved? The 55%
> of historical Palestine recommended for a Jewish state by the UN General
> Assembly in 1947? The 78% of historical Palestine occupied by Israel 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" 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 were 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
> 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 acknowledge that it
> was "right" that the Holocaust happened -- that the Holocaust (or, in the
> Palestinian case, the Nakba) was morally justified.
> 
> 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 sub-humans publicly proclaim that they ARE sub-humans -- 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 Pale Faces as a condition precedent to even discussing
> what 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 to 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 their enemies,
> notwithstanding the intensity of the economic pain and suffering inflicted on
> them by the Israeli and Western siege, substantially exceeds the percentage of
> the population which voted for Hamas in January.
> 
> It may not be too late to focus decent minds around the world on the grotesque
> and fundamental immorality of this demand and of the bizarre verbal
> formulation on which it is based, whose use and abuse have already caused so
> much misery and threaten to cause more.

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