If they only recognized Israel's right to exist!
That generous $900 million in aid the United States pledged to clean up the remnants of the buildings destroyed by weapons it supplied to Israel is now coming with a big condition: any Palestinian unity government has to "recognize Israel's right to exist."
Here we go again. That same old dance is starting.
Just when it seemed American foreign policy might make sense again, they bring in this squishy, abstract, non-sensical demand. Such a request is the opposite of the nuanced, intelligent, indirect diplomacy that is needed right now -- it is making an issue out of the immaterial.
It is on the level of rhetoric only, yet is loaded with enough baggage to keep the cycle of Israeli procrastination and Palestinian shimmering going. It is the nonsense demand that comes up when things look like they may improve, yet it puts Hamas in an impossible bind. What political power would recognize the right of an occupying force that just killed one thousand of its civilian constituents, denies them rice, soap and chick peas?
It is simply politically impossible for Hamas to say "we recognize Israel's right." Why? Because Hamas is the party of refugees, and no refugees will ever, and I mean ever, accept the right of the usurper to keep the fruits of the usurpation. So why make that an upfront issue? It seems that again American policymakers cannot quite handle the power of the Palestinian narrative in their own experience.
Well, as a one-stater, that is all fine by me. Time is truly on our side.
Just to demonstrate how silly this demand of recognizing Israel's right to exit is, I am suggesting various responses Hamas could provide. Warning: they range in level of absurdity, a natural response to such a silly demand.
[I would never charge for such advice, and no one with any sense would pay for it; therefore I am not providing any material support to Hamas. So, don't arrest me and ship me off to Bagram]
1. We cannot recognize Israel's right to exist because no country in the history of the world ever had a natural right to exist. And certainly no state has such an inherent right that they can freely and perpetually violate international law since inception (starting with the UN resolution, 181, that drew its first borders). After breaking over 60 UN resolutions, Israel would be hard-pressed to claim any rights at all!
2. We cannot recognize Israel's right to exist because we have not recognized formally any other state's right to exist. If we just recognized Israel's, we would in effect be negating the rights of all other states since having a right means having an authority against another power. It would be bad for us to say only one state has such a right since it would imply that no other state's have that rights, and we are not prepared to recognize every state.
Also, if we recognized just Israel, we would be "singling out" Israel, and Alan Dershowitz would say we're anti-Semitic.
3. We cannot recognize Israel's right to exist. But let's make a deal. We will recognize the right of the Israel lobby in the United States to exist, even though the Washington Post denies their existence.
4. We do not recognize Israel's right to exist, but we recognize it exists. In fact, we had a truce with it for six months last year. And during that time, Israel committed extrajudicial assassinations, kept an embargo in place, and increased the suffering of the Palestinians. Should we recognize their right to do those, as well?
5. We recognize the right of Israel to exist so long as it does not discriminate between Jews, Muslims and Christians, starting with expanding the Law of Return (which grants Jews anywhere in the world nearly-automatic immigration privileges) to also include the rights of Palestinian refugees to return.
The international community did not deny South Africa's right to exist during the Apartheid sanctions movement, they recognized it should exist in a different, equal rights-based form. So there is international precedent for this position.
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Perhaps the only way for Clinton to effectuate progress with this move is to pin Hamas's recognition of Israel, with America and Israel's recognition of Israel, which would means taking it off the terrorist list, and not killing its leaders. That's not going to happen.
What saddens me is that such idiotic posturing by the United States and Israel will only embolden the most inflexible and scary elements within Hamas.
The Case Against Israel's "Right To Exist
By Roger Tucker
An Open Letter to Representative David Price (D) 4th District, NC
As you know, Mr. Price, I was invited to join a group of activists who met with you Monday morning to urge you to take action regarding the siege of Gaza, the Occupation and American support for Israel. I declined to attend because my particular focus is on One State advocacy, and you have made it crystal clear that this is not your view, nor is it ever likely to be (unless and until, in the due course of time, it becomes politically expedient). You represent the Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill), fondly known as the pat of butter in a sea of grits, a highly educated, liberal, metropolitan area that votes heavily Democratic. You received 63% of the vote in the recent election, and fly under the "progressive" flag. Yet you voted for House Resolution 34, supporting Israel's massacre in Gaza.
Dr. Sarah Shields of UNC took you to task for that in her excellent article, but biting and accurate as that was, she only went halfway. All of the actions you were urged to take are mere palliatives .They would serve no other purpose than to apply a little band-aid to a wound so deep and life threatening that the patient belongs in the Intensive Care Unit (too bad the hospital was bombed out of existence). That sort of thing makes progressives feel good about themselves but doesn't even begin to address the real problem, which is the continued existence of the State of Israel. To say such a thing is the most blasphemous conceivable heresy from the Zionist perspective, which they have managed to convince most Americans is a sane and reasonable point of view. But, like the "official" version of the Holocaust, that other jury-rigged pillar supporting the edifice of the Rube Goldberg contraption called Israel, it is actually sane and reasonable to call such dogmas into question. From the point of view of science and history, of reason and the pursuit of truth, there can be no forbidden subjects, or we take the risk of returning to the Dark Ages.
So let us examine this curious notion that Israel has some sort of inherent "right to exist," a claim that no other nation-state has ever felt it necessary to make. We would all agree that human beings have a right to exist, although there are many who would make an exception for those who commit murder. Some even go further and say that all sentient beings have a right to exist, but only in this one peculiar case is there this insistence that a particular nation-state has such an inalienable right. Why is that? Is it, perhaps, because in this particular case the contention is on particularly shaky ground? Sorry, but methinks the lady protesteth too much. We can't, particularly as Americans, question Israel's right to exist on the basis that they commit mass murder - so many nations, including our own, have routinely done so. Nor can we merely point to the fact that Israel is an ethnocentric colonial-settler state - patterned on the now universally abhorred orgy of 19th century European colonialism - which has established itself through a long, ongoing process of genocide against the indigenous population.
Would pointing out that Israel is a xenophobic, racist state that has been practicing ethnic cleansing since its inception do the trick? How about making the case that Israel practices a form of apartheid that observers like Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu say is worse than what existed in South Africa - would that suffice? What about the numerous crimes against humanity, serial violations of the fundamental principles of the UN enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Then, of course, one might say that Israel's flagrant flouting of International Law would be sufficient, or the fact that Israel has refused to even acknowledge numerous UN resolutions, let alone abide by them, or the commission of numerous war crimes, as perpetrated during the recent holocaust in Gaza,. Wasn't the not forgotten false flag attack on the USS Liberty in itself sufficient cause to change course? Still not enough? How about the clandestine development of nuclear weapons irrespective of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Israel refused to sign? These facts are beginning to add up - perhaps the combination of the above would be sufficient to make the case.
The Zionists chose to locate their Jewish State in Palestine, of all places. Actually, the idea was first cooked up by the British Home Office in the early 19th Century, one of many strategies contemplated to establish and secure the Empire. That came to nought, but the notion was popular in some circles and gained renewed momentum when Theodor Herzl popularized a paranoid scheme to create an impregnable ghetto somewhere, anywhere, where the Jewish People would at long last be insulated from the consequences of their actions. After shopping around, Palestine was chosen. This was the result of various coincidences; the sentimental attachment to their supposed origin in the Holy Land, as expressed in the venerable saying "Next year in Jerusalem," that it also happened to promise proxy control over the resources and markets of the Middle East, as well as offering a simple and convenient means for the Europeans to rid themselves, once again, of the accursed Jews (as they were nearly universally perceived).
The land, however, was already populated, and thus began the organized hasbara (Heb: propaganda) campaign that has reached a crescendo in our time, to the point that Zionism now has effective control of the entire Western world, with even the Vatican paying obeisance to their Zionist Inquisitors. They said, "A land without a people, for a people without a land" (coined by Lord Shaftesbury, 1853). The brazen self-deception and lying had begun, and has only gathered steam over time. And how were they going to reconcile a dream based firmly within the tradition of the Western Enlightenment, replete with democratic ideals and socialist idealism, with the stark reality of colonizing someone else's land against their will? The idealists at that time were in the firm majority, so, in the spirit of Cecil Rhodes and their own version of Manifest Destiny, they conjured up a vision of enlightened Westerners (never mind that the new settlers were the widely detested Eastern European ashkenazim , the scattered turko-finnic remnants of the Khazarian Empire, established by tribes allied with Attila the Hun) uplifting the primitive peoples of the Orient (never mind that the Palestinians were a highly cosmopolitan and civilized people consisting of Muslims, Christians and Jews - largely secular - who all got along rather swimmingly).
They would buy the land fair and square and build a veritable City of Light in Jerusalem, or so the story went. It would be a bi-national state shared between the natives and the newcomers. This was cultural Zionism, primarily a product of the idealistic Viennese and other Western European Jews, which predominated until the early days of the Third Reich, at which time a much darker form of Zionism (a near mirror image of Nazism) began to gain ascendancy among the immigrant Jews in Palestine. This was the political Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky, and with it came the original outrages of Middle Eastern terrorism at the hands of the Irgun and the Stern Gang, directed at both their Arab neighbors and the representatives of the British Mandate. The leaders of these terror organizations became the future Prime Ministers of Israel, Menachem Begin among them (Albert Einstein's warning was and is applicable to all of them), and this tradition has continued into another generation in the person of Tzipi Livni, the current Foreign Minister and daughter of Eitan Livni and Sara Rosenberg, both prominent former Irgun members. Israel is a terrorist organization masquerading as a nation.
Israel has been more or less continuously at war with its neighbors as well as the indigenous population since its inception. It has made no serious attempt to resolve the conflict other than through force, stonewalling and subversion (Oslo, Annapolis and Camp David were all charades), only a steady, seemingly inexorable process of bringing to fruition the Zionist dream of Greater Israel - either the more grandiose version that would encompass all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates, or the relatively modest one, from the Jordan River to the sea. Through financial and political arm-twisting, relentless hasbara that has established the fanciful Zionist narrative as "history" in the popular mind, and using the Holocaust to guilt-trip the craven and gullible Western world, the secular fascist ideology of Zionism and its quasi-religious sibling, the Holocult, have, in a very real sense, also conquered the West. An extraordinarily successful campaign one might say, the ultimate real estate scam, but one that is doomed, as it is based only on lies and greed, violence, bribery and extortion.
Merely pointing out that the State of Israel is an abomination on moral, ethical and legal grounds (and religious ones) is perhaps insufficient, but we can do better than that. We Americans are known for being a pragmatic people, so let's look at it from that perspective. I'll use a few analogies from the field of medicine to illustrate what I mean.
Zionism has been compared to a virus, even to a viral meme complex. The latter usage is apropos, but I'm referring to its biological meaning. It is an adaptation by a primitive organism that allows it to invade a host body and then multiply many fold, often inflicting serious injury on the host and sometimes even death. The original host was Palestine, but viruses are often contagious and may even cause epidemics, and there is no shred of a doubt that Zionism has become a major pandemic. It has already done enormous damage to the interests of the United States, and it threatens the well-being of the entire human race - in the worst case scenario, which is not all that far fetched, it threatens to plunge the world into a major nuclear conflagration.
Sometimes a useful plant is improved by grafting on a part from a closely related species, resulting in a beneficial hybrid. Grafting is also used in medicine, as in skin grafts. It is elementary to observe that the practitioners of these specialties must take great care to avoid rejection of the graft, or organ in the case of human transplants - otherwise the graft does harm to the host or patient, and often leads to death. Therefore, one would suppose that a group of people, with little in the way of military might and intending to colonize a foreign land would take sensible precautions to avoid such an outcome. In the case of the early 19th century Zionist "pioneers" in Palestine there was a healthy awareness of such dangers and therefore a tendency to act like civilized human beings. But as time went on and the settlers became much stronger vis-a-vis the locals such precautions were cast to the winds, and were replaced by the hoary adage that might makes right. The logical result of such a malignant grafting technique is the death of the host, as we have been witnessing over the last agonizing 60 years. And what, then, happens to the graft - can it survive by replacing the host? Perhaps, if the host had merely been Palestine, but the difficulty here is that Palestine was in many ways the hub of the Middle East and remains at the heart of the Islamic world, the larger host in this case. Can the graft survive in the midst of 1.2 billion people that have been outraged to the point of vowing that sooner or later, whatever it takes, the graft will get the shaft? As they say in medicine, the adverse side affects far outweigh any benefit and therefore the procedure is contra-indicated.
Last but not least, Israel resembles most closely a malignant tumor. It exists in a state of war with its host, sucking the life blood out of it. There are various modalities for dealing with such a tumor. One is to cut off its supply of blood, but we do just the opposite. Another is to improve the health and bolster the immune system of the affected patient. We do just the opposite. In the end it will have to be killed. There are various ways of doing this, from poisoning it with radiation and/or chemicals to having it surgically removed. It would be good if such drastic and dangerous methods could be avoided, but they are inevitable if in the meantime the tumor is not only allowed, but encouraged, to grow. The benign method, not available to modern medicine but easily achieved through political intervention, is to transform the whole of Palestine into a healthy, thriving. multiethnic democracy. Isn't that what we preach to the world (except in this one instance)? All it would take is a worldwide movement, similar to that which brought down apartheid South Africa. It is very doable, but decent, compassionate, aware people - people who pay more than mere lip service to such notions as peace and justice - need to stop pussyfooting around and get on the same page.
Israel cannot exist except in a state of war with an external enemy. Those who have lived there, like myself, know full well that absent a unifying enemy, Israelis would go at one another like cats and dogs and the so-called State would quickly dissolve into chaos. After all, Israel is comprised of a melting pot population that is only nominally "Jewish" and has no commonality other than the mostly fictitious Zionist narrative, a resurrected dead language, and the dubious opportunity to lord it over the untermenschen. It is only the Zionist elite who benefit by this ongoing tragedy - ordinary Israelis and Jews worldwide are as much victims of this scheme as are the Palestinians. They haven't suffered to anywhere near the same extent yet, but give it time. History has a way of repeating itself, and we all know that what goes around comes around. I can tell you that Jews like myself, who are aware of what has been going on and can see the handwriting on the wall, have no great desire to be up against the wall when the shit hits the fan.
As in South Africa, when the bloom began to fade from the rose - ah, the romantic and inspiring tale of the Afrikaaners as the 13th tribe of Israel! - the Israeli government has been desperately trying to combat the demographic problem by importing many thousands of pseudo-Jews, as well as trying to bribe the Persian Jews (at $10K/head). That was the rationale for importing the Ethiopians, hundreds of thousands of Russians who merely have to declare that they are Jews no matter how far-fetched (or purely fictitious) the connection, and now they have gone so far as to ship in Peruvian Incas no less. They'll take anybody, as long as they aren't Palestinians (the rightful owners of the land) or Muslims from anywhere. In spite of all that, there has been a net loss of population in the last two years as the rats begin to leave the ship.
Congressman Price, isn't it high time something were done about this, that Americans finally stand up and stop acting like pitiful sheep with wool covering their eyes? And don't even think about mentioning the so called "two state solution," that fraudulent scam, that ridiculous fig-leaf for further ethnic cleansing, or any of the other lame excuses for procrastinating (I've heard them all), like waiting for the Palestinians to take the lead. Don't you think they would jump at the chance (70% support a one-state solution in historic Palestine where Muslims, Christians and Jews would live together with equal rights and responsibilities), or do you think they're stupid?
Little talked about are the obvious benefits to the Israelis (even the Zionists). At long last they could have the peace and security that they, like any other people, long for. They would have the option of living anywhere they choose in Palestine, without having to act like ravening beasts. In cooperation with the Palestinians and the neighboring peoples, they could develop a healthy, prosperous and respected country and region. And if this all happens voluntarily, while the demographics are still on their side, they could negotiate an advantageous deal that would leave them with much of what they now have, and without the enormous expense of an incredibly out-sized military or the threat of eventual destruction. That would truly be a real victory for the Israelis, for all Jews, for the Palestinians and for everyone else - what they call a win-win situation. But the clock is ticking.
The choice is, theoretically, among four possible solutions. Which among them would you choose, based on the best available information? It is, as they say, a no-brainer.
Roger Tucker is a writer and activist living in the Triangle, NC. He is a committed advocate for the One State Solution. He is thinking of moving out of the country, perhaps to Mexico, conceivably to Tierra del Fuego, maybe even off planet, although he worries that he might be getting too old to learn a new language. This essay was first published on his website http://onestate.info on Mar 13, 2009.
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