csmonitor.com - What 'Israel's right to exist' means to Palestinians

csmonitor.com - The Christian Science Monitor Online
from the February 02, 2007 edition -
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

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.

• John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer, is the author of, "The World
According to Whitbeck." He has advised Palestinian officials in
negotiations with Israel.