[WCUSP] Apartheid as our frame? Dems Repudiate Carter Book/ Hamas and Israel's "Right to Exist"

[Marlene Santoyo]

  I think  Pat & Joyce's idea is a good one & know that JVP, Jewish Voices
for Peace, Philadelphia chapter ( & probably National would agree.)

Marlena Santoyo
From: wcusp-bounces at wilpf.org [mailto:wcusp-bounces at wilpf.org]On Behalf Of
Joyce McLean
Sent: 2006 October 28 Saturday 10:42 AM
To: JoanWDrake at aol.com; lmfrank1 at verizon.net; beejayssite at yahoo.com;
kzaidan at wilpf.org; wcusp at wilpf.org
Cc: turacc at earthlink.com
Subject: Re: [WCUSP] Apartheid as our frame? Dems Repudiate Carter Book


  yeah...so excuse my 'nagging'.... though it may just be a waste of
paper....can't a letter be written to the Dem leaders Pelosi, Conyers,etc
and perhaps as a model for all to send to their own
Congressperson....expressing our discontent at their criticism of Carter and
their refusal to acknowledge the injustices being done against
Palestineans.....could Kate write up such a proposed letter and unless there
is a 'block' it be sent and posted......
    ----- Original Message -----
    From: JoanWDrake at aol.com
    To: lmfrank1 at verizon.net ; beejayssite at yahoo.com ; kzaidan at wilpf.org ;
wcusp at wilpf.org
    Cc: turacc at earthlink.com
    Sent: Saturday, October 28, 2006 6:20 AM
    Subject: Re: [WCUSP] Apartheid as our frame? Dems Repudiate Carter Book


    Over the past twenty years or more I have concluded that there is no way
of framing the issues posed by Israel's 60-year long military occupation of
Palestine that will be acceptable to the US Jewish community. So I see
little difference in mincing words or being expansive when trying to reason
with or appeal to Jews in the US on this issue; I don't believe our choice
of vocabulary words will make much difference in being heard and responded
to in a reasoned discussion. Reason does not work -- international human
rights conventions and the Geneva Accords have no impact on Israeli
policy -- words of the victims have no impact and the facts on the ground
have no impact on the wall of silence and steadfast denial that American
Jewry has built around Israel's total debasement of the Palestinian
community and its people. Golda Meir denied the very existence of Palestine
and Palestinians -- and today's generation follows in that vein by denying
Israel's vicious policies of extermination and control. While there are
notable exceptions in our community, such as Libby and Odile and their
Israeli counterparts, they are few and far between and they do not speak for
the mainstream -- and their attempts to point a way to peace and stability
in the region is appreciated more in activist circles than within their own
community. I know that they experience the same frustrations that those of
us working on the issue have experienced. The knee jerk response to Carter's
book title by Democratic Party office holders is quite understandable -- you
don't serve in Congress unless you are in line with AIPAC policy -- the
politicians who have spoken out on the matter clearly want to hold on to
their jobs. I really think the current debate is not very enlightening or
helpful -- call it what you like, but if it looks like a duck, walks like a
duck, and quacks like a duck...?


----------------------------------------------------------------------------


    _In going through all of my stuff preparing for the move I came across a
pamphlet titled Israel and South Africa, the Unholy Alliance written by
George J. Tomeh in 1972..he talks about Israeli-Zionist apartheid.. against
the poorer Arab community within Israel...so if you follow his thesis you
see that Zionism has a history of apartheid..Tomeh, a Syrian, served in 1970
as President of the UN Security Council..wasn't it at that time the UN
declared Zionism as racism..?

    So I think you are right Kate that we need to to use this as a frame of
reference..for it is a good way to help people understand what is taking
place..it is not without good reason the End the Occupation chose this as
their focus for this year..it was unanimously adopted.. so it seems the
people who voted for it didn't need too much persuasion..
    Pat__

    Also see encl:

    Some responses I've received from my earlier post make this one
necessary: a most important piece from Professor Virginia Tilley. Before one
goes off on Hamas and their "refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist"
(...and does Israel recognize the right of Palestine to exist????? No, they
emphatically do NOT), please read this. I promise you, you will never read
that phrase the same way again.


    If Israel truly wants to survive, it can only do so by making peace with
its neighbors, not constant war.


    I have to wonder why this subject (Israel/Palestine) generates so little
discussion on most of the politically-oriented lists to which I subscribe,
including the Progressives list.  How can any of this horror ever be
resolved if the people in the best position to call for justice  -
Americans - rest their heads firmly in the sand? Is that what's happening?
Is the horror too awful, or are people just too afraid of talking about it
for fear of reprisal?


    Marianne


    Hamas and Israel's "Right to Exist"
    Virginia TILLEY - 15 May 2006

    To the great consternation of most of the world, the European Union,
followed now by Norway and Canada, has halted payments to the Hamas-led
government of the Palestinian Authority (PA). The stated reason is that
Hamas has not recognized Israel's "right to exist" or "renounced violence,"
but the action so violates all common sense that its logic requires our
closer scrutiny.

    Let us first be clear: no conceivable good can come from this policy. It
will slash the PA's capacity to govern a shattered and desperate population.
It will wreck the capacity of Hamas to mediate and contain tense factional
divides. It could even demoralize and destroy the Palestinians'
long-standing commitment to democracy, ruining Palestinian political
stability and therefore any possibility of peace negotiations. So why impose
sanctions that can only result in dangerous disintegration of the political
situation?

    A certain withered diplomatic logic does underlie this measure. The PA
itself was invented in 1995 to administer Oslo's implicit two-state
solution. Hamas's refusal to recognize Israel's "right to exist" would seem
to negate the diplomatic agreement that established the terms of its own
authority. Until it agrees to those terms, the international community might
deem that Hamas has rendered the PA's legitimacy uncertain.

    Unfortunately for its proponents, this rationale has crashed on one
glaring pitfall: the premise that Israel itself supports the terms of Oslo
or the Road Map. Prime Minister Olmert has openly declared the "Road Map" a
dead letter. His stated policy of "ingathering" settlers into the major West
Bank settlement blocs is accepted by everyone as signaling Israel's intent
permanently to annex major portions of the West Bank. The advancing Wall and
settlement construction are ample material evidence that this plan is
Israel's real program and is already half-achieved. No one disagrees that
these developments signify permanent territorial dismemberment of any
Palestinian "state." No one disagrees that the terms of Oslo have vanished
like the morning mist.

    It must therefore be evident even to the EU, Norway, and Canada that
Israel has negated the diplomatic agreement that established the terms of
its recognition by the Palestinians. So why pretend that Israel has not
openly cast onto the trash heap of history the very peace deal that these
countries now insist Hamas endorse?

    The first answer is too obvious to belabor: craven capitulation to US
pressure. The entire international community has been cajoled or threatened
into continuing lip service to the Road Map while standing by passively as
the US and Israel render the Road Map obsolete. Diplomatic nonsense always
requires some political or moralistic palliative, however. The cover story
is that Hamas's recognizing Israel's "right to exist" and abandoning armed
struggle will somehow restore the diplomatic conditions of the Road Map,
trigger comprehensive Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank, and allow
peace finally to break out. Let us take this argument step by step.

    First, it is simply unbelievable. All agree that Israel's withdrawal of
major settlement blocs in the West Bank (especially, the major cities of
Ma'ale Adumim, Ariel, and Gush Etzion) is not foreseeable. The Israeli
government itself has declared them permanent. No international actor or
combination of actors has the political will and/or clout to change Israeli
policy. Israel will not withdraw the major settlement blocs under any
circumstances short of a national emergency. Hamas's suddenly waxing nice
will not constitute that emergency.

    Second, the argument adopts specious Israeli claims about Arab logics
that only dwindling ranks of Israel's die-hard supporters still believe.
Israeli propaganda holds that Arab "hatred" for Israel is irrational, born
solely of Judeophobia, religious zealotry, and cultural backwardness, and
that tough measures can therefore leverage Arab capitulation to reality even
while the occupation continues. In this view, Israel's hold on the West Bank
is not really an "occupation," serving a program of land annexation, but
only a benign "administration," forced on Israel by collective Arab and
Palestinian unwillingness to recognize Israel's "right to exist."

    The funding cut-off endorses this fantasy in holding that Hamas has
rejected Israel's authentic "promise of peace" due to its rejectionist
Islamic dogma and not because Hamas has graphic evidence that Israel has no
intention of permitting Palestinians a viable state. In this twisted view,
cutting vital funds should make Hamas rethink this "irrationality," abandon
its "extremism," recognize Israel's "right to exist," and end all hostile
actions toward it. Hamas and the PA will then be rewarded (it is hinted
vacantly) with a return to the Road Map.

    Aside from its transparent tomfoolery (full awareness the US and Israel
are eliminating the conditions for the Road Map as quickly as possible),
deeper problems plague this papery notion. For if we look more closely at
what Hamas is being asked to do, none of it makes sense either.

    What does a "right to exist" mean exactly? There is no "right to exist"
for states under international law. The formula has arisen in international
diplomacy uniquely regarding Israel. It does not mean simply diplomatic
recognition, which is the "fact" of existence. It does not mean recognizing
Israel's "right to self-determination," either, or we would be using that
famous term.

    Let us pretend for a moment that Hamas is being asked to recognize
Israel in the normal diplomatic sense. In this case, however, the EU
position is unsupportable, because diplomatic recognition of a state
routinely requires one bit of vital information: "right to exist" where?
Israel's borders are not set. Even its plans for those borders are not
known; with impressive brashness, Mr. Olmert has announced that we will not
know until 2010.

    It is entirely legitimate for Hamas to require firm confirmation of
Israel's borders before recognizing it. It should also be incumbent on the
international community to confirm where those borders will be before
insisting that Hamas recognize Israel's "right" to them. Otherwise,
recognizing Israel's "right to exist" could be construed to mean that Israel
has a "right to exist" within whatever borders it chooses in coming years.

    As the Palestinians stand to lose most of what is left of their homeland
to this fuzziness, Hamas is refusing to endorse it. Is this extremist
Islamic intransigence, warranting a funding freeze? Let us run a little
thought experiment: Would Canadian, or Norwegian, or English, or French
governments be called on the international carpet for not recognizing the
"right to exist" of a neighboring state that is, with military force,
settling its own ethnically defined population within contiguous walled
cities and enclaves in Canadian, Norwegian, English or French national
territories, while promising to carve those nations into "cantons?"

    Absent clear borders, recognizing Israel's "right to exist" must mean
something else. And of course it does. Clearly implicit in the term is
Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. In other words, the "right" Hamas
is being required to endorse is that Israel can legitimately compose itself
as a state in Palestine that is populated and run primarily by Jews,
primarily for Jews. Such a state would thus be authorized by Hamas to
sustain whatever laws and policies necessary to preserving its Jewish
majority, even rejecting the return of Palestinian refugees mandated by
international law. Or building a massive Wall on Palestinian land designed
to protect the Jewish state from the "demographic threat" of mass non-Jewish
citizenship-i.e., the Palestinians. Israel's would also be legitimized for
past actions on the same agenda, such as expelling the Palestinians from
their homes in 1948, and for its future plans, such as confining Palestine's
indigenous people to cantons.

    Israel's leadership has declared all these measures necessary to
preserve Israel as "a Jewish and democratic state," as phrased in Israel's
Basic Law (and reiterated by Mr. Sharon, Mr. Olmert, and almost every
Israeli party across the political spectrum). Yet it is not the fact of this
open policy of ethnic cleansing, but Israel's right to pursue it, that is
expressed in the phrase, "right to exist."

    Hence bitter reluctance by the PLO, the Arab states, and much of the
Muslim world to do so for many decades. They abandoned that position in
1989-90, as a pragmatic gesture toward a two-state solution. Cannot the EU
then insist that Hamas recognize Israel's "right to exist" if the PLO, the
PA, and all other governments in the world have recognized it?

    The problem is that the quid pro quo that supported this recognition,
formalized in the Oslo process, is now clearly wrecked by Israel's
unilateral annexations of land. Carving the West Bank into cantons has
eliminated any hope of a viable Palestinian state. The two-state solution is
not working. In these conditions, should Hamas recognize Israel's "right to
exist" if it is recognized to be eliminating Palestinian sovereignty
altogether?

    The more embarrassing problem, however, is that the EU itself has not
explicitly recognized Israel's "right to exist" in this sense. Nor has
Canada, or Norway. The United Nations has not done so, either. They haven't,
because they can't.

    This may take some people by surprise, but the UN has not used the term
"Jewish state" since 1947. Resolution 181 then called for a "Jewish state"
and an "Arab state," with gerrymandered borders designed to craft Jewish and
Arab majorities in each state. But the attempt was rendered obsolete when
Zionist forces established "Israel" on a much greater swath of territory
that had, in total, held a substantial Arab majority, and expelled most of
the Arab residents. As refugees, according to the Geneva Conventions, those
Arab residents have the right to return to their homes, villages, towns and
cities. But their return would eliminate the Jewish majority in what became
"Israel," so Israel hasn't allowed this.

    Hence the UN cannot confirm Israel as a Jewish state (i.e., a state that
can legitimately sustain a Jewish majority) without contradicting
international law regarding the right of refugees. When the UN refers to
"Israel" today, it does not understand Israel as the "Jewish state" in the
old ethnic-majority terms of 1947, because Israel can be granted no "right"
to an ethnic demography that would prevent the return of refugees.

    Also, times have simply changed. In 1947, ethnic nationalism still made
some belated sense, although it was already discredited by the dreadful
abuses wreaked by Germany and Japan. Today, recognizing the "right" of any
state to compose itself legally as an ethnic-majority state would clearly
flout UN conventions on human rights and non-discrimination. The UN and EU
therefore cannot openly endorse Israel's right to compose itself as one. It
would make hash of international efforts in Rwanda, the Sudan, Kashmir,
Afghanistan, Kosovo, and many other crisis spots.

    So the US has lured the EU, Canada, and Norway into a trap. If they hold
that Hamas must recognize Israel as a Jewish state (with a right to preserve
an ethnic-Jewish majority), then they must state clearly that it endorses
ethnic-majority governance. But them themselves cannot explicitly endorse
Israel's right to ethnocracy, because it would contradict international law
as well as its own diplomacy in a host of other conflict zones, so on what
grounds does they require Hamas to do so?

    Worse for them, they are adhering to international norms in insisting
that the State of Palestine must comprise a stable democracy that secures
equal rights for all its citizens irrespective of religion or race. But if
they hold Palestine to this standard, then why are they not holding Israel
to the same standard?

    But if they did hold Israel to that standard, then the entire rationale
for a two-state solution would evaporate. The Road Map is based on the
supposition that the only peaceful solution in Palestine is to establish one
state for Jews and another for everyone else. If Israel's "right to exist"
does not entail sustaining a Jewish majority (which necessitates
discriminatory legislation, ethnic cleansing, land grabs, and social
engineering), then the ethnic logic supporting two states disappears. Why
agree to compose two secular-democratic states sitting next to each other in
this small land? No one can articulate an answer, because ethnic demography
is their only rationale.

    So what are the EU, Norway and Canada requiring Hamas to do? Recognize
Israel as an ethnic state with a "right to exist" wherever it decides to set
its borders-even though doing so would not only mean Palestinian national
suicide but would violate principles that govern their own diplomacy as well
as their own internal laws and values about nondiscrimination? Or is Hamas
supposed to evade the issue by recognizing Israel's "right to exist" simply
as a normal state, even though "normal" (non-ethnic) status would then
obligate Israel to permit Palestinian refugees to return-thus implying that
the EU, Norway and Canada do not support Israel in sustaining a Jewish
majority?

    This conundrum should have diplomats, parliamentarians, and foreign
ministries huddled in their back rooms trying to sort out their own
positions, rather than attempting to starve the Palestinians into Hamas's
capitulation. For it is not only the funding freeze that has become rampant
nonsense. The entire Road Map logic has become nonsense, too.

    May its dutiful proponents in foreign capitals lie sleepless in their
beds contemplating their own confusion and the terrible bloody consequences
it is likely to wreak.

    Virginia Tilley is associate professor of Political Science and
International Relations, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and author of
The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian
Deadlock. She is currently at the Centre for Policy Studies, Johannesburg,
South Africa and available at tilley at hws.edu.

    First published at: http://www.counterpunch.org/tilley05112006.html
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