    a long time, we claimed there is no reason to recognise the Jewish
    state, or the state of Israel ’s right to exist, unless on the condition
    of reciprocity at the very least. Hamas’ in its refusal to bow before
    the idol of Jewish supremacy follows the way of Abraham who refused to
    pay obeisance to idols. Now the forces of Mahmud Abbas began their
    fratricidal war in order to force Hamas to surrender this important
    principle. Here are two good texts by our friends Witbeck and Cook
    explaining why such a recognition would be an error.

    (1) From John Whitbeck

    Now that the Palestinian civil war long sought by Israel, the U.S. and
    the EU appears on the verge of breaking out, it may be timely to examine
    the justification put forward by Israel, the U.S. and the EU for their
    collective punishment of the Palestinian people in retaliation for their
    having made the "wrong" choice in last January's democratic election --
    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 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/diplomatic
    act by a state with respect to another state. It is inappropriate --
    indeed, nonsensical -- to talk about a political party or movement, even
    one in a sovereign state, extending diplomatic recognition to a state.
    To talk of Hamas "recognizing Israel " is simply sloppy, confusing and
    deceptive shorthand for the real demand being made.

    "Recognizing Israel 's existence" is not a logical nonsense and appears
    on first impression to involve a relatively straightforward
    acknowledgement of a fact of life -- like death and taxes. Yet there are
    serious practical problems with this formulation. What Israel , within
    what borders, is involved? The 55% of historical Palestine recommended
    for a Jewish state by the UN General Assembly in 1947? The 78% of
    historical Palestine occupied by Israel in 1948 and now viewed by most
    of the world as " Israel " or " Israel proper"? The 100% of historical
    Palestine occupied by Israel since June 1967 and shown as " Israel " 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 were being demanded of Hamas, it might be possible for it
    to acknowledge, as a fact of life, that a State of Israel exists today
    within some specified borders.

    "Recognizing Israel 's right to exist", the actual demand, is in an
    entirely different league. This formulation does not address diplomatic
    formalities or 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 acknowledge that it was "right" that the
    Holocaust happened -- that the Holocaust (or, in the Palestinian case,
    the Nakba) was morally justified.

    To demand that Palestinians recognize " Israel 's right to exist" is to
    demand that a people who have for almost 60 years been treated, and
    continue to be treated, as sub-humans publicly proclaim that they ARE
    sub-humans -- and, at least implicitly, that they deserve what has been
    done, and continues to be done, to them. Even 19th century U.S.
    governments did not require the surviving Native Americans to publicly
    proclaim the "rightness" of their ethnic cleansing by the Pale Faces as
    a condition precedent to even discussing what reservation might be set
    aside for them -- 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. In fact, in his famous statement
    in Stockholm in late 1988, he accepted " Israel 's right to exist in
    peace and security". This formulation, 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 formulation "Israel's right to exist" and
    of its utility as an excuse for not talking to any Palestinian
    leadership which still stood up for the fundamental rights of the
    Palestinian people are attributed to Henry Kissinger, the grand master
    of diplomatic cynicism. There can be little doubt that those states
    which still employ this formulation do so in full consciousness of what
    it entails, morally and psychologically, for the Palestinian people and
    for the same cynical purpose -- as a roadblock against any progress
    toward peace and justice in Israel/Palestine and as a way of helping to
    buy more time for Israel to create more "facts on the ground" while
    blaming the Palestinians for their own suffering.

    However, many private citizens of good will and decent values may well
    be taken in by the surface simplicity of the words "Israel's right to
    exist" (and even more easily by the other two shorthand formulations)
    into believing that they constitute a self-evidently reasonable demand
    and that refusing such a reasonable demand must represent perversity (or
    a "terrorist ideology") rather than a need to cling to their
    self-respect and dignity as full-fledged human beings which is deeply
    felt and thoroughly understandable in the hearts and minds of a
    long-abused people who have been stripped of almost everything else that
    makes life worth living. That this is so is evidenced by polls showing
    that the percentage of the Palestinian population which approves of
    Hamas' steadfastness in refusing to bow to this humiliating demand by
    their enemies, notwithstanding the intensity of the economic pain and
    suffering inflicted on them by the Israeli and Western siege,
    substantially exceeds the percentage of the population which voted for
    Hamas in January.

    It may not be too late to focus decent minds around the world on the
    grotesque and fundamental immorality of this demand and of the bizarre
    verbal formulation on which it is based, whose use and abuse have
    already caused so much misery and threaten to cause more.

    (2) The Trap of Recognizing Israel

    by Jonathan Cook

    December 16, 2006

    http://www.antiwar. com/orig/ cook.php? articleid= 10171

    The problem facing the Palestinian leadership, as they strive to bring
    the millions living in the occupied territories some small relief from
    their collective suffering, reduces to a matter of a few words. Like a
    naughty child who has only to say "sorry" to be released from his room,
    the Hamas government need only say "We recognize Israel " and supposedly
    aid and international goodwill will wash over the West Bank and Gaza .

    That, at least, was the gist of Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert's
    recent speech during a visit to the Negev, when he suggested that his
    country's hand was stretched out across the sands towards the starving
    masses of Gaza – if only Hamas would repent. "recognize us and we are
    ready to talk about peace" was the implication.

    Certainly the Palestinian people have been viciously punished for making
    their democratic choice early this year to elect a Hamas government that
    Israel and the Western powers disapprove of:

    · an economic blockade has been imposed, starving the Palestinian
    Authority of income to pay for services and remunerate its large
    workforce;

    · millions of dollars in tax monies owed to the Palestinians have been
    illegally withheld by Israel , exacerbating the humanitarian crisis;

    · a physical blockade of Gaza enforced by Israel has prevented the
    Palestinians from exporting their produce, mostly perishable crops, and
    from importing essentials like food and medicine;

    · Israeli military strikes have damaged Gaza 's vital infrastructure,
    including the supply of electricity and water, as well as randomly
    killing its inhabitants;

    · and thousands of families are being torn apart as Israel uses the
    pretext of its row with Hamas to stop renewing the visas of Palestinian
    foreign passport holders.

    The magic words "We recognize you" could end all this suffering. So why
    did their prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, vow last week never to utter
    them. Is Hamas so filled with hatred and loathing for Israel as a Jewish
    state that it cannot make such a simple statement of good intent?

    It is easy to forget that, though conditions have dramatically
    deteriorated of late, the Palestinians' problems did not start with the
    election of Hamas. Israel's occupation is four decades old, and no
    Palestinian leader has ever been able to extract from Israel a promise
    of real statehood in all of the occupied territories: not the mukhtars,
    the largely compliant local leaders, who for decades were the only
    representatives allowed to speak on behalf of the Palestinians after the
    national leadership was expelled; not the Palestinian Authority under
    the secular leadership of Yasser Arafat, who returned to the occupied
    territories in the mid-1990s after the PLO had recognized Israel; not
    the leadership of his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, the "moderate" who first
    called for an end to the armed intifada; and now not the leaders of
    Hamas, even though they have repeatedly called for a long-term truce
    (hudna) as the first step in building confidence.

    Similarly, few Palestinians doubt that Israel will continue to entrench
    the occupation – just as it did during the supposed peacemaking years of
    Oslo , when the number of Jewish settlers doubled in the occupied
    territories – even if Hamas is ousted and a government of national
    unity, of technocrats or even of Fatah takes its place.

    There is far more at stake for Israel in winning this little concession
    from Hamas than most observers appreciate. A statement saying that Hamas
    recognized Israel would do much more than meet Israel 's precondition
    for talks; it would mean that Hamas had walked into the same trap that
    was set earlier for Arafat and Fatah. That trap is designed to ensure
    that any peaceful solution to the conflict is impossible.

    It achieves this end in two ways.

    First, as has already been understood, at least by those paying
    attention, Hamas' recognition of Israel 's "right to exist" would
    effectively signify that the Palestinian government was publicly
    abandoning its own goal of struggling to create a viable Palestinian
    state.

    That is because Israel refuses to demarcate its own future borders,
    leaving it an open question what it considers to be the extent of "its
    existence" it is demanding Hamas recognize. We do know that no one in
    the Israeli leadership is talking about a return to Israel 's borders
    that existed before the 1967 war, or probably anything close to it.

    Without a return to those pre-1967 borders (plus a substantial injection
    of goodwill from Israel in ensuring unhindered passage between Gaza and
    the West Bank ) no possibility exists of a viable Palestinian state ever
    emerging.

    And no goodwill, of course, will be forthcoming. Every Israeli leader
    has refused to recognize the Palestinians, first as a people and now as
    a nation. And in the West's typically hypocritical fashion when dealing
    with the Palestinians, no one has ever suggested that Israel commit to
    such recognition.

    In fact, Israeli governments have glorified in their refusal to extend
    the same recognition to the Palestinians that they demand from them.
    Famously Golda Meir, a Labor prime minister, said that the Palestinians
    did not exist, adding in 1971 that Israel 's "borders are determined by
    where Jews live, not where there is a line on a map." At the same time
    she ordered that the Green Line, Israel 's border until the 1967 war, be
    erased from all official maps.

    That legacy hit the headlines last week when the dovish education
    minister, Yuli Tamir, caused a storm by issuing a directive that the
    Green Line should be reintroduced in Israeli schoolbooks. There were
    widespread protests against her "extreme leftist ideology" from
    politicians and rabbis.

    According to Israeli educators, the chances of textbooks showing the
    Green Line again – or dropping references to "Judea and Samaria ," the
    Biblical names for the West Bank, or including Arab towns on maps of
    Israel – are close to nil. The private publishers who print the
    textbooks would refuse to incur the extra costs of reprinting the maps,
    said Prof Yoram Bar-Gal, head of geography at Haifa University .

    Sensitive to the damage that the row might do to Israel 's international
    image, and aware that Tamir's directive is never likely to be
    implemented, Olmert agreed in principle to the change. "There is nothing
    wrong with marking the Green Line," he said. But, in a statement that
    made his agreement entirely hollow, he added: "But there is an
    obligation to emphasize that the government's position and public
    consensus rule out returning to the 1967 lines."

    The second element to the trap is far less well understood. It explains
    the strange formulation of words Israel uses in making its demand of
    Hamas. Israel does not ask it simply to "recognize Israel ," but to
    "recognize Israel 's right to exist." The difference is not a just
    matter of semantics.

    The concept of a state having any rights is not only strange but alien
    to international law. People have rights, not states. And that is
    precisely the point: when Israel demands that its "right to exist" be
    recognized, the subtext is that we are not speaking of recognition of
    Israel as a normal nation state but as the state of a specific people,
    the Jews.

    In demanding recognition of its right to exist, Israel is ensuring that
    the Palestinians agree to Israel 's character being set in stone as an
    exclusivist Jewish state, one that privileges the rights of Jews over
    all other ethnic, religious and national groups inside the same
    territory. The question of what such a state entails is largely glossed
    over both by Israel and the West.

    For most observers, it means simply that Israel must refuse to allow the
    return of the millions of Palestinians languishing in refugee camps
    throughout the region, whose former homes in Israel have now been
    appropriated for the benefit of Jews. Were they allowed to come back,
    Israel's Jewish majority would be eroded overnight and it could no
    longer claim to be a Jewish state, except in the same sense that
    apartheid South Africa was a white state.

    This conclusion is apparently accepted by Romano Prodi, Italy 's prime
    minister, after a round of lobbying in European capitals from Israel 's
    telegenic foreign minister, Tzipi Livni. According to the Jerusalem
    Post, Prodi is saying in private that Israel should receive guarantees
    from the Palestinians that its Jewish character will never be in doubt.

    Israeli officials are cheering what they believe is the first crack in
    Europe 's support for international law and the rights of the refugees.
    "It's important to get everyone on the same page on this one," an
    official told the Post.

    But in truth the consequences of the Palestinian leadership recognising
    Israel as a Jewish state run far deeper than the question of the future
    of the Palestinian refugees. In my book Blood and Religion, I set out
    these harsh consequences both for the Palestinians in the occupied
    territories and for the million or so Palestinians who live inside
    Israel as citizens, supposedly with the same rights as Jewish citizens.

    My argument is that this need to maintain Israel 's Jewish character at
    all costs is actually the engine of its conflict with the Palestinians.
    No solution is possible as long as Israel insists on privileging
    citizenship for Jews above other groups, and on distorting the region's
    territorial and demographic realities to ensure that the numbers
    continue to weigh in the Jews' favor.

    Although ultimately the return of the refugees poses the biggest threat
    to Israel 's "existence," Israel has a far more pressing demographic
    concern: the refusal by the Palestinians living in the West Bank to
    leave the parts of that territory Israel covets (and which it knows by
    the Biblical names of Judea and Samaria ).

    Within a decade, the Palestinians in the occupied territories and the
    million Palestinian citizens living inside Israel will outnumber Jews,
    both those living in Israel and the settlers in the West Bank .

    That was one of the chief reasons for the "disengagement" from Gaza :
    Israel could claim that, even though it is still occupying the small
    piece of land militarily, it was no longer responsible for the
    population there. By withdrawing a few thousand settlers from the Strip,
    1.4 million Gazans were instantly wiped from the demographic score
    sheet.

    But though the loss of Gaza has postponed for a few years the threat of
    a Palestinian majority in the expanded state Israel desires, it has not
    magically guaranteed Israel 's continuing existence as a Jewish state.
    That is because Israel 's Palestinian citizens, though a minority
    comprising no more than fifth of Israel 's population, can potentially
    bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.

    For the past decade they have been demanding that Israel be reformed
    from a Jewish state, which systematically discriminates against them and
    denies their Palestinian identity, into a "state of all its citizens," a
    liberal democracy that would give all citizens, Jews and Palestinians,
    equal rights.

    Israel has characterized the demand for a state of all its citizens as
    subversion and treason, realizing that, were the Jewish state to become
    a liberal democracy, Palestinian citizens could justifiably demand:

    · the right to marry Palestinians from the occupied territories and from
    the Diaspora, winning them Israeli citizenship – "a right of return
    through the backdoor" as officials call it.

    · the right to bring Palestinian relatives in exile back to Israel under
    a Right of Return program that would be a pale shadow of the existing
    Law of Return that guarantees any Jew anywhere in the world the
    automatic right to Israeli citizenship.

    To prevent the first threat, Israel passed a flagrantly racist law in
    2003 that makes it all but impossible for Palestinians with Israeli
    citizenship to bring a Palestinian spouse to Israel . For the time
    being, such couples have little choice but to seek asylum abroad, if
    other countries will give them refuge.

    But like the Gaza disengagement, this piece of legislation is a delaying
    tactic rather than a solution to the problem of Israel 's "existence."
    So behind the scenes Israel has been formulating ideas that taken
    together would remove large segments of Israel's Palestinian population
    from its borders and strip any remaining "citizens" of their political
    rights – unless they swear loyalty to a "Jewish and democratic state"
    and thereby renounce their demand that Israel reform itself into a
    liberal democracy.

    This is the bottom line for a Jewish state, just as it was for a white
    apartheid South Africa: if we are to survive, then we must be able to do
    whatever it takes to keep ourselves in power, even if it means
    systematically violating the human rights of all those we rule over and
    who do not belong to our group.

    Ultimately, the consequences of Israel being allowed to remain a Jewish
    state will be felt by all of us, wherever we live – and not only because
    of the fallout from the continuing and growing anger in the Arab and
    Muslim worlds at the double standards applied by the West to the
    conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

    Given Israel 's view that its most pressing interest is not peace or
    regional accommodation with its neighbours but the need to ensure a
    Jewish majority at all costs to protect its "existence," Israel is
    likely to act in ways that endanger regional and global stability.

    A small taste of that was suggested in the role played by Israel 's
    supporters in Washington in making the case for the invasion of Iraq ,
    and this summer in Israel 's assault on Lebanon . But it is most evident
    in its drumbeat of war against Iran .

    Israel has been leading the attempts to characterize the Iranian regime
    as profoundly anti-Semitic, and its presumed ambitions for nuclear
    weapons as directed by the sole goal of wanting to "wipe Israel off the
    map" – a calculatedly mischievous mistranslation of Iranian president
    Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech.

    Most observers have assumed that Israel is genuinely concerned for its
    safety from nuclear attack, however implausible the idea that even the
    most fanatical Muslim regime would, unprovoked, launch nuclear missiles
    against a small area of land that contains some of Islam's holiest
    sites, in Jerusalem .

    But in truth there is another reason why Israel is concerned about a
    nuclear-armed Iran that has nothing to do with conventional ideas about
    safety.

    Last month, Ephraim Sneh, one of Israel's most distinguished generals
    and now Olmert's deputy defence minister, revealed that the government's
    primary concern was not the threat posed by Ahmadinejad firing nuclear
    missiles at Israel but the effect of Iran's possession of such weapons
    on Jews who expect Israel to have a monopoly on the nuclear threat.

    If Iran got such weapons, "Most Israelis would prefer not to live here;
    most Jews would prefer not to come here with families, and Israelis who
    can live abroad will ... I am afraid Ahmadinejad will be able to kill
    the Zionist dream without pushing a button. That's why we must prevent
    this regime from obtaining nuclear capability at all costs."

    In other words, the Israeli government is considering either its own
    pre-emptive strike on Iran or encouraging the United States to undertake
    such an attack – despite the terrible consequences for global security –
    simply because a nuclear-armed Iran might make Israel a less attractive
    place for Jews to live, lead to increased emigration and tip the
    demographic balance in the Palestinians' favour.

    Regional and possibly global war may be triggered simply to ensure that
    Israel 's "existence" as a state that offers exclusive privileges to
    Jews continues.

    For all our sakes, we must hope that the Palestinians and their Hamas
    government continue refusing to "recognize Israel 's right to exist."