[WCUSP] CS Monitor: What 'Israel's right to exist' means to Palestinians

[KATHARLOW at aol.com]

 (http://www.csmonitor.com/)      
     
from the February 02, 2007 edition of the Christian Science  Monitor- 
_http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0202/p09s02-coop.html_ 
(http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0202/p09s02-coop.html)   
What  'Israel's right to exist'  means to Palestinians 
Recognition  would imply acceptance that they deserve to be treated as  
subhumans. 
By John V. Whitbeck  
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 â?" indeed, 
nonsensical â?" 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 â?" the expulsion of the great  majority of Palestinians from 
their homeland between 1947 and 1949  â?" 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. 
â?¢  John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer, is the author of, "The  World 
According to Whitbeck." He has advised Palestinian officials  in negotiations 
with Israel.  







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