[Peace-discuss] Right to exist

[David Green]

Thanks. The antidote for bad speech is better speech.

DG

--- "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:

> [It may do no more than create more trouble for
> Brother Green,
> but I've sent a shortened version of the following
> to the
> News-Gazette.  --CGE] 
> 
> 
> In response to a thoughtful letter from David Green,
> the
> writer of a letter to the News-Gazette [Feb. 23]
> asks, "I
> wonder if Green believes Israel has the right to
> exist?"  I
> don't know how Mr. Green would answer, but that's a
> strange
> question for an American to ask.
> 
> The United States is based on the principle that no
> state has
> a right to exist.  "Whenever any form of government
> becomes
> destructive of [securing human rights], it is in the
> right of
> the people to alter or abolish it," says the
> Declaration of
> Independence. Although we may tend to forget it,
> this
> principle has been clear throughout our history.  In
> his first
> inaugural address, Lincoln pointed out that a
> country belongs
> to the people who inhabit it.  "Whenever they shall
> grow weary
> of the existing government, they can exercise their
> constitutional right of amending it or their
> revolutionary
> right to dismember or overthrow it."
> 
> The United States began by overthrowing a government
> that had
> forfeited its right to exist -- the Declaration of
> Independence is a bill of particulars, meant to show
> how that
> had happened.  A government has a right to exist,
> according to
> American doctrine, only when it works to "establish
> justice,
> insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common
> defense,
> promote the general welfare, and secure the
> blessings of
> liberty." If it does not work towards these things
> --
> especially if it actively works against them -- it
> has no such
> right.
> 
> In the present case we must ask if the government of
> Israel
> satisfies this condition in regard to the people it
> rules over
> -- some ten million between the Jordan River and the
> Mediterranean.  The answer is obvious.  Like the
> government of
> the former apartheid state of South Africa, it works
> in the
> interests of only a minority of those inhabitants --
> and is
> destructive of the rights of the others -- so in
> neither case
> can the state be said to have a right to exist.
> 
> There's a further difficulty.  All states, whether
> democracies
> or dictatorships, are the states of their
> inhabitants, as
> Lincoln noted -- except the state of Israel.  By
> law, Israel
> declares itself the state not of its inhabitants but
> of the
> Jewish people world-wide.  
> 
>   ###
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> 


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