What 'Israel's right to exist' means to Palestinians

A view from the other side:


What 'Israel's right to exist' means to Palestinians

February 02, 2007 edition

Recognition would imply acceptance that they deserve to be treated as subhumans.
By John V. Whitbeck

JEDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA - Since the Palestinian elections in 2006, Israel and much of the West have asserted that the principal obstacle to any progress toward Israeli-Palestinian peace is 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 Israel, the United States, and the European Union as a rationale for collective punishment of the Palestinian people. The phrases are also used by the 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 one 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 of the Palestinians.

"Recognizing Israel's existence" appears on first impression to involve a relatively straightforward acknowledgment of a fact of life. Yet there are serious practical problems with this language. What Israel, within what borders, is involved? Is it the 55 percent of historical Palestine recommended for a Jewish state by the UN General Assembly in 1947? The 78 percent 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 percent 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 the ruling political party to acknowledge, as a fact of life, that a state of Israel exists today within some specified borders. Indeed, Hamas leadership has effectively done so in recent weeks.

"Recognizing Israel's right to exist," the actual demand being made of Hamas and Palestinians, 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 would be 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 been treated as subhumans unworthy of basic human rights publicly proclaim that they are subhumans. It would imply Palestinians' acceptance that they deserve what has been done and continues to be done to them. Even 19th-century US governments did not require the surviving native Americans to publicly proclaim the "rightness" of their ethnic cleansing by European colonists as a condition precedent to even discussing what sort of land reservation they might receive. Nor did native Americans have to live 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. But in fact, in his famous 1988 statement in Stockholm, he accepted "Israel's right to exist in peace and security." This language, 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 phrase "Israel's right to exist" and of its use as an excuse for not talking with any Palestinian leaders who still stood up for the rights of their people are attributed to former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It is highly likely that those countries that still employ this phrase do so in full awareness of what it entails, morally and psychologically, for the Palestinian people.

However, many people of goodwill and decent values may well be taken in by the surface simplicity of the words, "Israel's right to exist," and believe that they constitute a reasonable demand. And if the "right to exist" is reasonable, then refusing to accept it must represent perversity, rather than Palestinians' deeply felt need to cling to their self-respect and dignity as full-fledged human beings. That this need is deeply felt is evidenced by polls showing that the percentage of the Palestinian population that approves of Hamas's refusal to bow to this demand substantially exceeds the percentage that 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, the economic siege of the Palestinian territories be lifted, and the pursuit of peace with some measure of justice be resumed with the urgency it deserves.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0202/p09s02-coop.html

Scary but the above article makes sense to me. We did not make the Indians proclaim our right to take the land from them and move them to a reservation. If Israel and the Palastine can come to an agreement without the proclamation of "Israel's right to exist" should that matter? If peace is the goal I see no need to rub their noses in it.

What do you think?

I haven't read much about Jimmy Carter's recent book on this subject, but I think Carter is correct to define Israel vs Palestine rights as the most important issue that has to get resolved before the Middle East will begin to settle down.

I haven't read enough of the history of the region to say with 100% certainty that this guy is saying is correct - but I think the essence of what he is saying is hard to refute.

Quite frankly I have hard time saying that if I was not in the same position that the Palestinians are in I would not be doing the same things they are doing. Getting forced out of your home and forced to live in refugee camps and such is usually not the kind of thing that leads to peace love and understanding. The Israelis above all else should understand this because the very creation of the state of Israel was due to the Germans doing to the Jews what the Israelis have been doing to the Palestinians for decades now. The Germans did it much more brutally and methodically - but the European Jews were forced out of their homes just the same as the Palestinians have been.

The other thing that needs to be taken with a grain of salt here is the fact that a lot of the Muslim terrorist groups don't really care all that much about the Palestinians - they just use that whole situation as a rallying point to get people to buy into their agenda.

The whole Israel - Palestine thing should get solved one way or another because it is just wrong - I wouldn't expect it to solve the whole Islamic terrorism problem though.

Doc said:

Scary but the above article makes sense to me. We did not make the Indians proclaim our right to take the land from them and move them to a reservation. If Israel and the Palastine can come to an agreement without the proclamation of "Israel's right to exist" should that matter? If peace is the goal I see no need to rub their noses in it.

What do you think?

Click to expand...

I think you'll find that American Indian nations DID sign peace treaties and DID agree to land treaties.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_treaties#U.S._Native_American_treaties

Put the Palestinians on reservations and let them live untaxed with the right to build casinos and sell untaxed cigarettes.

Doc said:

Scary but the above article makes sense to me. We did not make the Indians proclaim our right to take the land from them and move them to a reservation. If Israel and the Palastine can come to an agreement without the proclamation of "Israel's right to exist" should that matter? If peace is the goal I see no need to rub their noses in it.

What do you think?

Click to expand...

You are assuming that Israel "took" the land from the "Palastinians" in the first place. Was there ever a nation of Palastine that existed in the exact same spot as Israel? Don't you think that is the question that should be answered first before speculating any alleged rights of a non-existent nation?

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=28222

Palestinian people do not exist

[SIZE=-1]Posted: July 11, 2002
1:00 a.m. Eastern
[/SIZE][FONT=Palatino, Book Antiqua, Times New Roman, Georgia, Times][/FONT]
A provocative headline? It's more than that. It's the truth.
Truth does not change. Truth is truth. If something was true 50 years ago, 40 years ago, 30 years ago, it is still true today.
And the truth is that only 30 years ago, there was very little confusion on this issue of Palestine.

You might remember the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir making the bold political statement: "There is no such thing as a Palestinian people."
The statement has been a source of ridicule and derision by Arab propagandists ever since. They love to talk about Golda Meir's "racism." They love to suggest she was in historical denial. They love to say her statement is patently false – an intentional lie, a strategic deception.
What they don't like to talk about, however, are the very similar statements made by Yasser Arafat and his inner circle of political leadership years after Meir had told the truth – that there is no distinct Palestinian cultural or national identity.

So, despite the fact that conventional wisdom has now proclaimed that there is such a thing as the Palestinian people, I'm going to raise those uncomfortable quotations made by Arafat and his henchmen when their public-relations guard was down.




Way back on March 31, 1977, the Dutch newspaper Trouw published an interview with Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee member Zahir Muhsein. Here's what he said:That's pretty clear, isn't it? It's even more specific than Golda Meir's statement. It reaffirms what I have written on this subject. And it is hardly the only such statement of its kind. Arafat himself made a very definitive and unequivocal statement along these lines as late as 1993. It demonstrates conclusively that the Palestinian nationhood argument is the real strategic deception – one geared to set up the destruction of Israel.
In fact, on the same day Arafat signed the Declaration of Principles on the White House lawn in 1993, he explained his actions on Jordan TV. Here's what he said: "Since we cannot defeat Israel in war, we do this in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish a sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel."

No matter how many people convince themselves that the aspirations for Palestinian statehood are genuine and the key to peace in the Middle East, they are still deceiving themselves.

I've said it before and I will say it again, in the history of the world, Palestine has never existed as a nation. The region known as Palestine was ruled alternately by Rome, by Islamic and Christian crusaders, by the Ottoman Empire and, briefly, by the British after World War I. The British agreed to restore at least part of the land to the Jewish people as their ancestral homeland. It was never ruled by Arabs as a separate nation.
Why now has it become such a critical priority?

The answer is because of a massive deception campaign and relentless terrorism over 40 years.

Golda Meir was right. Her statement is validated by the truth of history and by the candid, but not widely circulated, pronouncements of Arafat and his lieutenants.
Israel and the West must not surrender to terrorism by granting the killers just what they want – a public relations triumph and a strategic victory. It's not too late to say no to terrorism. It's not too late to say no to another Arab terror state. It's not too late to tell the truth about Palestine.

The issue about Palistine is not the question. IF Israel and Palistine are sitting at a table coming to an agreement in so called "Peace Talks", no one is questioning whether or not Palistine exists. But one part of the agreement is to make Palistine agree about Israels right to exist. Why? It accomplishes nothing.
Since they have already agreed to talk with the Palistine representatives, the question of whether there is such a thing as Palistine seems moot to me....but so does the question about Israel's right to exist. They are both at the table so they must exist. Move on from there.

I realize this is an outsiders view. The people tied up in the middle of all this carry so much baggage from the past 50 years that the issue is not as simple as that. But it sure would help things move along if they could move past those points.

Israel's #1 colossal mistake was recognizing "Palastinians" in the first place and negotiating with them. Do you, or does anyone here, actually believe that any of the Arab states true intent is to negotiate peace? Why is it that people continually bring up "the peace process" concerning Israel and the technically non-existant so-called "Palastinians" when these "Palastinians" have repeatedly stated their true goal is the anhilation of Israel and the Jews?

This so-called "peace-process" and faux-negotiation is what is moot. It is amazing that Israel continues to play this silly little game in which they know all the Arab states surrounding them what nothing other than to genocide the Jews.

Doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is not only insanity, it is idiocy.

CB, we're saying the same thing in a different way.
They've made huge mistakes in the past. They need to get over it and look at things a little differently.
What's done is done. They have recognized each other by agreeing to talk. Now divide up the pie and move on. The 'right to exist' bs just gets in the way. It's water under the bridge from my point of view.

One other thing to consider, is that in 1947, the Palestinians that were living in what is not Israel, voluntarily left the land and moved out, since they didn't want to be under Jewish rule. Those that stayed today enjoy the same freedoms, benefits, etc. as any other Israeli Citizen. It is only the families of those that left that are now claiming that they were "pushed out". Once they abandoned their property, Jewish settlers came in and took up residence in those abandoned homes. Had not one Palestinian left in 1947, there would be no problem today, and they both would continue to live in harmony. Also, one of the things that many people don't realize, is that if a Palestinian is injured in any incident in Israel, there health and medical needs are tended for just the same as if they were an Israeli citizen. The Israeli health system is as good, if not better than any other in the world, including those in the USA. If the Palestinians were willing to co exist in Israel, then this would be a win/win situation for all concerned. There isn't even a problem within the governing body, because the political process allows for, and has both Christians and Muslims already in it.

Doc said:

CB, we're saying the same thing in a different way.
They've made huge mistakes in the past. They need to get over it and look at things a little differently.
What's done is done. They have recognized each other by agreeing to talk. Now divide up the pie and move on. The 'right to exist' bs just gets in the way. It's water under the bridge from my point of view.

Click to expand...

Who, exactly needs to get over what, and look at what differently?

The "Palastinians" want only the complete destruction of Israel. The "Palastinians" are nothing more than a tool of the Arab states to bring about that end. The Israeli's have divided the pie over and over again, giving up more and more to the "Palastinians" each time. And each time, it is never enough for the "Palastinians". Can everyone not see this? It is completely obvious to anyone with minimal observatory skills. Why then do we keep insisting Israel continue to play this silly game?

This right to exist BS? Yes, that's exactly the way the "Palastinians" and arab states see it too.