Does Palestine Have The Right To Exist?

Taken from Haaretz, Israel, 16/03/2007
By Bradley Burston (A Special Place In Hell Column)

Nationalism often robs a people of its intelligence even as it grants that people a sense of dignity.
Israel may serve as an instructive example. The Palestinians are giving every indication that they are not far behind.

The Hamas-Fatah government is assuming power at the low-water mark in decades for Palestinian nationalism. The movement for an independent Palestine, at once fueled and hobbled by the occupation, is in a state of atomized despair, the memory of internal blood feuds still fresh, its international standing, no less than the welfare of the people under its rule, slipping from nadir to nadir.

There is a certain stubborn irony in the circumstance that a central stumbling block to international recognition of the legitimacy of the Palestinian government's right to exist, has been that government's refusal to recognize the legitimacy of Israel's right to exist.

Stated differently, the movement to found a Palestinian state has not been well-served by the strategy of suggesting that the very establishment of its neighbor Israel was a historical abomination.

Nor was the cause moved far forward this week, when Hamas, stung by Al-Qaida criticism of its coalition deal with Fatah, declared it was still committed to Israel's destruction.

Defending itself to Osama Bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, who said "They have ditched the movement of martyrdom operations ? for a government that plays with words in palace halls," Hamas was quick to issue a statement of reassurance:

"We will not betray promises we made to God to continue the path of jihad and resistance until the liberation of Palestine, all of Palestine."

"So be assured, Doctor Ayman, and all those who love Palestine like yourself, that Hamas is still the group you knew when it was founded and it will never abandon its path."

Of late, it has become something of a fashion to explain why Hamas refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist, by arguing that it was an error for anyone to have ever agreed to do so.

The drumbeat began years ago, with opinion pieces such as Faisal Bodi's Israel simply has no right to exist, which appeared in The Guardian at the outset of the second intifada.

"Certainly there is no moral case for the existence of Israel," Bodi writes, attacking the PLO for having accepted Israel's right to exist as part of the Oslo peace process. With a nod to the intifada, Bodi suggests that grass roots Palestinian society, left to its own, would not have made the same mistake. "As the latest troubles have shown, ordinary Palestinians are not prepared to follow their leaders in this feat of intellectual amnesia."

Neither, apparently, is Saudi-based attorney and author John V. Whitbeck. The demand that Hamas recognize Israel's right to exist is "unreasonable, immoral, and impossible to meet." Whitbeck wrote in the Christian Science Monitor last month.

Whitbeck underscores the distinction 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 Naqba - 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 Naqba to have happened would be something else entirely."

The invocation of the Holocaust in a different context, direct comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany made by Palestinians and their supporters, has also little advanced the Palestinian drive for legitimacy.

An apparent rise in such comparisons by Germans has triggered apprehension in Israel, even among some leftists whose own criticism of Israel is unsparing, and whose support for a Palestinian state is strong. In a January opinion poll by the Bertelsmann Foundation, 30 percent of German respondents agreed that Israel was doing to the Palestinians "what the Nazis did to the Jews in the Third Reich."

More recently, when a group of German bishops followed a visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial with a trip to the West Bank, Bishop Gregor Maria Hanke of Eichstatt told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper:

"In the morning, we see the photos of the inhuman Warsaw Ghetto, and this evening we travel to the ghetto in Ramallah; that makes you angry."

The Palestinian arguments against recognizing Israel are many, and often well-articulated.

Palestinians believe that they should not be made to pay the price of the Holocaust, and they are right. Palestinians believe that they have been subjugated, mistreated, and denied self-determination, and they are right.

Palestinians believe, as well, that the existence of the state of Israel should not come at the expense of the existence of a state of Palestine. And that is true as well.

But if Palestinians are to have a legitimate, internationally recognized state of their own, it must not come at the expense of the existence of the state of Israel.

That is to say, if it is necessary for Hamas to nurse its dreams of destroying Israel by military force in order to establish a Greater Palestine from the river to the sea, it can think again about international recognition.

There is, after all, a name for the kind of government that does that to another country: an occupying power.