What 'Israel's right to exist' means to Palestinians

from the February 02, 2007 edition

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.

Hillary To Donors: "No Money To Anybody Else"

Hillary To Donors: "No Money To Anybody Else"

The Huffington Post | Posted February 1, 2007 06:19 PM

AP

Hillary Clinton is personally putting out the word that she has no intention of sharing the wealth: "She's calling all the big-hitter fundraisers and saying, 'I want you to understand: NO money to anybody else. You cannot play both sides of the street,'" in the '08 presidential race, says a longtime Democratic operative who has worked for the Clintons in the past but turned down a role in the current campaign, and is so far sitting this one out.

And what's the reaction been? "People don't like it, but they're afraid of her." Yet the far more palpable fear for Democrats, discussed constantly, is that she'll have so much money she'll sail to the nomination.\

130 killed in attacks across Iraq

Baghdad - A pair of suicide bombers detonated explosives Thursday among shoppers in a crowded outdoor market in a Shiite city south of Baghdad, killing at least 73 people and wounding 163, police said.

Bombs and a mortar attack killed at least 17 others in both Shiite and Sunni areas of Baghdad.

Overall, about 130 people were killed or found dead across the country, reflecting the ongoing wave of sectarian and insurgency bloodletting as the U.S. military gears up for a major security operation to stem the violence.

The U.S. military also said Friday it was investigating reports of a U.S. helicopter going down north of Baghdad.

The statement came after police and witnesses reported that at least one helicopter had been shot down Friday in the area surrounding Taji, an air base 12 miles north of the capital. Some witnesses described two helicopters going down.

"I can confirm that we are looking into reports that a helicopter went down north of Baghdad," U.S. military spokeswoman Lt. Col. Josslyn Aberle said.

Police and witnesses said the area had been sealed off by American forces and U.S. planes were flying overhead.

The biggest attack Thursday took place in the center of Hillah, a city about 60 miles south of Baghdad. Police and witnesses said the two bombers strolled into the Maktabat market about 6 p.m. when the area was packed with shoppers buying food for the evening meal.

One of the bombers detonated his explosives when he was approached by police and the other blew himself up moments later, according to police spokesman Capt. Muthanna Khaled, who gave the casualty figures. He said Friday that the toll had risen after several of the wounded died and more bodies were found in recovery efforts.

The blasts sent bodies hurling through the air and set fire to wooden stalls where vendors sold fruits and vegetables, witnesses said. Shoppers fled screaming in panic, while others stopped to help rescuers carry away the wounded.

Dr. Mohammed Diya of the Hillah General Hospital said some of the wounded were in critical condition, raising concern the death toll could rise.

Qassim Abed Sadah, 33, a bookseller, said the first explosion blew him out of his chair. He raced to the door of his shop just as the second blast occurred. "People were flying in the air," he said.

Mahdi Latif, 35, a fruit vendor, said he saw a policeman motion for the first bomber to stop for a search.

"Seconds later I saw a ball of fire and all I remember is me and many other people trying to flee the area," he said.

Pools of blood were scattered along the market streets, along with bits of fruits and vegetables. Paramedics wearing white gloves roamed through the area removing body parts.

No group claimed responsibility for the attack, the latest in a long series that have occurred in Hillah since the insurgency erupted in late 2003. The Shiite city, located in a religiously mixed province, was the scene of one of Iraq's deadliest attacks — a February 2005 suicide car bombing that killed 125 people.

In Baghdad, sectarian violence flared in both Shiite and Sunni areas of the capital, where U.S. and Iraqi forces are preparing for the third major security crackdown in a year.

Six people died and 12 were wounded when a car bomb exploded on Rashid Street in the mostly Shiite heart of the city. A bomb on a public bus killed another six people and wounded eight in the upscale Shiite commercial district of Karradah.

Several mortar rounds slammed into the Sunni district of Azamiyah for a third straight day, killing five people and wounding 12, according to hospital and police officials.

"What have we done to be attacked like this almost every day?" asked Saad Abdul-Karim, 50, whose son was wounded when one of the rounds struck their home.

Police found the bullet-riddled bodies of 33 men scattered across the Iraqi capital, the Interior Ministry said. Most showed signs of torture and were believed to be the victims of Shiite and Sunni death squads.

Elsewhere, a U.S. soldier died Thursday of wounds suffered two days ago in Anbar province, a Sunni insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad, the military said. Three civilians were killed in separate shootings in the northern city of Mosul, and a policeman died in a car bombing in the city of Qaim on the Syrian border, police said.

In Baqouba, five gunmen broke into the athletic department of a local university, seized the son of the department's director, took him into his father's office and shot both of them dead, police said. The city, located about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, has been riveted by sectarian violence for months.

U.S. officials have accused Iran of fomenting sectarian strife by arming and training Shiite militias. President Bush has authorized U.S. forces to kill or capture any Iranian agents found in this country. Defense officials are also looking into the possibility that Iranian agents may have been behind the Jan. 20 attack in Karbala in which five Americans were killed — four of them after being taken prisoner.

In an interview with NPR, U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said there was a "political and moral difference" between what the United States and the Iranians are doing in Iraq, reiterating allegations that Tehran has been supporting Shiite militias that have been blamed for much of the recent sectarian violence in Iraq.

However, the U.S.-backed Iraqi government includes Shiite and Kurdish parties with longtime ties to Iran, and the rising U.S.-Iranian tensions adds new strains to an Iraqi leadership barely able to cope with the worsening security crisis.

During a news conference Thursday, the chief government spokesman said Iraq would consider any attack against U.S. forces in Iraq as an assault against this country. But he added that Iraq also wants good relations with Iran.

"We have long borders with (the Iranians), we have local interests with (them) and we would like to have our relation not in the shadow of the others," spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, said on CNN that Baghdad had told both the Iranians and the Americans "to solve your problems outside of Iraq."

As a sign of the war's toll, a Health Ministry official said 1,990 civilians had been killed in violence in January, a more than threefold increase from the 548 civilians the ministry reported killed in the same month last year. Casualty figures are controversial and widely disputed in Iraq, and counts kept by other groups, including the United Nations, have listed far higher numbers.

The official, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to release the data, said 1,936 civilians also had been wounded, according to the figures, which were compiled from daily reports sent by morgues and hospitals nationwide.

Figures provided by the Defense and Interior ministries also showed that 100 Iraqi security forces were killed in January, while 593 insurgents were killed and 1,926 detained. -- Associated Press

Fl. Gov Proposes $32 Million Program For Statewide Voting Paper Trails

February 1, 2007
Governor Seeks Overhaul of Voting System in Florida
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DELRAY BEACH, Fla. — Gov. Charlie Crist said Thursday he wants to spend about $32 million to convert all voting machines in Florida to produce paper trails.

''What we're talking about here is Democracy and it is precious,'' Crist told a crowd of several hundred people at a gathering of the nonpartisan Voters Coalition of Palm Beach County.

''You should, when you go vote, be able to have a record of it,'' Crist said, calling it ''common sense.''

The proposal will be part of Crist's budget he presents to the Legislature on Friday.

Fifteen of Florida's 67 counties use paperless touch-screen voting machines. The remaining counties use optical scan machines where a voter marks a paper ballot with a pencil and it is electronically scanned.

Critics of the paperless machines say voters are disenfranchised because there is no record for a manual recount should questions arise about an election.

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Bush-Linked Group Offers Cash To Debunk UN Climate Report

Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Friday February 2, 2007
The Guardian


The arctic habitat of polar bears is under threat as climate change causes ice to melt. Photograph: Joseph Napaaqtuq Sage/AP

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

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Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere, attack the UN's panel as "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work" and ask for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs".

Climate scientists described the move yesterday as an attempt to cast doubt over the "overwhelming scientific evidence" on global warming. "It's a desperate attempt by an organisation who wants to distort science for their own political aims," said David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

"The IPCC process is probably the most thorough and open review undertaken in any discipline. This undermines the confidence of the public in the scientific community and the ability of governments to take on sound scientific advice," he said.

The letters were sent by Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at AEI, who confirmed that the organisation had approached scientists, economists and policy analysts to write articles for an independent review that would highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.

"Right now, the whole debate is polarised," he said. "One group says that anyone with any doubts whatsoever are deniers and the other group is saying that anyone who wants to take action is alarmist. We don't think that approach has a lot of utility for intelligent policy."

One American scientist turned down the offer, citing fears that the report could easily be misused for political gain. "You wouldn't know if some of the other authors might say nothing's going to happen, that we should ignore it, or that it's not our fault," said Steve Schroeder, a professor at Texas A&M university.

The contents of the IPCC report have been an open secret since the Bush administration posted its draft copy on the internet in April. It says there is a 90% chance that human activity is warming the planet, and that global average temperatures will rise by another 1.5 to 5.8C this century, depending on emissions.

Lord Rees of Ludlow, the president of the Royal Society, Britain's most prestigious scientific institute, said: "The IPCC is the world's leading authority on climate change and its latest report will provide a comprehensive picture of the latest scientific understanding on the issue. It is expected to stress, more convincingly than ever before, that our planet is already warming due to human actions, and that 'business as usual' would lead to unacceptable risks, underscoring the urgent need for concerted international action to reduce the worst impacts of climate change. However, yet again, there will be a vocal minority with their own agendas who will try to suggest otherwise."

Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said: "The AEI is more than just a thinktank, it functions as the Bush administration's intellectual Cosa Nostra. They are White House surrogates in the last throes of their campaign of climate change denial. They lost on the science; they lost on the moral case for action. All they've got left is a suitcase full of cash."

On Monday, another Exxon-funded organisation based in Canada will launch a review in London which casts doubt on the IPCC report. Among its authors are Tad Murty, a former scientist who believes human activity makes no contribution to global warming. Confirmed VIPs attending include Nigel Lawson and David Bellamy, who believes there is no link between burning fossil fuels and global warming.

Missing Molly Ivins: PAUL KRUGMAN

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
The New York Times
OP-ED COLUMNIST

Missing Molly Ivins

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: February 2, 2007

The Texas columnist’s satire was only the means to an end: holding the powerful accountable.

Molly Ivins, the Texas columnist, died of breast cancer on Wednesday. I first met her more than three years ago, when our book tours crossed. She was, as she wrote, “a card-carrying member of The Great Liberal Backlash of 2003, one of the half-dozen or so writers now schlepping around the country promoting books that do not speak kindly of Our Leader’s record.”

I can’t claim to have known her well. But I spent enough time with her, and paid enough attention to her work, to know that obituaries that mostly stressed her satirical gifts missed the main point. Yes, she liked to poke fun at the powerful, and was very good at it. But her satire was only the means to an end: holding the powerful accountable.

She explained her philosophy in a stinging 1995 article in Mother Jones magazine about Rush Limbaugh. “Satire … has historically been the weapon of powerless people aimed at the powerful,” she wrote. “When you use satire against powerless people … it is like kicking a cripple.”

Molly never lost sight of two eternal truths: rulers lie, and the times when people are most afraid to challenge authority are also the times when it’s most important to do just that. And the fact that she remembered these truths explains something I haven’t seen pointed out in any of the tributes: her extraordinary prescience on the central political issue of our time.

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Muslims are now getting the same treatment Jews had a century ago

Today's anti-Muslim racism uncannily echoes earlier anti-semitism - both minorities abused as an alien security threat

Maleiha Malik
Friday February 2, 2007
The Guardian

Migrants fleeing persecution and poverty settled with their children in the East End of London. As believers in one God they were devoted to their holy book, which contained strict religious laws, harsh penalties and gender inequality. Some of them established separate religious courts. The men wore dark clothes and had long beards; some women covered their hair. A royal commission warned of the grave dangers of self-segregation. Politicians said different religious dress was a sign of separation. Some migrants were members of extremist political groups. Others actively organised to overthrow the established western political order. Campaigners against the migrants carefully framed their arguments as objections to "alien extremists" and not to a race or religion. A British cabinet minister said we were facing a clash about civilisation: this was about values; a battle between progress and "arrested development".

All this happened a hundred years ago to Jewish migrants seeking asylum in Britain. The political movements with which they were closely associated were anarchism and later Bolshevism. As in the case of contemporary political violence, or even the radical Islamism supported by a minority of British Muslims, anarchism and Bolshevism only commanded minority support among the Jewish community. But shared countries of origin and a common ethnic and religious background were enough to create a racialised discourse whenever there were anarchist outrages in London in the early 20th century.

Most anarchists were peaceful, but a few resorted to violent attacks such as the bombing of Greenwich Observatory in 1894 - described at the time as an "international terrorist outrage". Anarchist violence was an international phenomenon. In Europe it claimed hundreds of lives, including those of several heads of government, and resulted in anti- terrorism laws. In the siege of Sidney Street in London in 1911, police and troops confronted east European Jewish anarchists. This violent confrontation in the heart of London created a racialised moral panic in which the whole Jewish community was stigmatised. It was claimed that London was "seething" with violent aliens, and the British establishment was said to be "in a state of denial". East End Jews were said to be "alienated", not "integrated", and a "threat to our security" a long time before anyone dreamed up the phrase "Londonistan".

Today the Middle East is the focus of a challenge to American political and economic hegemony, which is being presented as a "civilisational conflict with Islam". Nearly a century ago, the Russian revolution sent shockwaves through western states and financial markets. Anti-semites argued that Jewish involvement in revolutionary politics was part of a conspiracy by "the homeless wandering Jew" to replace European states with their "Hebrew nation". Winston Churchill, as secretary of state for war in 1920, wrote an article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald claiming there were three categories of Jews - good, bad and indifferent - and arguing that they were part of a "worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development".

Jews were the first non-Christian, yet monotheistic, religious minority in Britain. They are also one of its earliest "racialised" people. Despite important differences, the treatment of British Jews provides an illuminating comparison with contemporary anti-Muslim racism. There are recurring patterns in British society that racialise Jews and Muslims, which we need to understand if we are to develop an effective strategy for national security.

Jews and now Muslims have been and are the targets of cultural racism: differences arising from their religious culture are pathologised and systematically excluded from definitions of "being British". Both anti-semitism and anti-Muslim racism focus on belief in religious law to construct Jews and Muslims as a threat to the nation. Pnina Werbner, professor of social anthropology at Keele University, argues that Jews are predominantly racialised as an assimilated threat to national interests emerging at moments of crisis. Muslims are now being represented as a different kind of "folk devil" - a social group that is openly and aggressively trying to impose its religion on national culture. This partially explains the recent concerns about multiculturalism. "Anti-fundamentalist images provide racists with a legitimising discourse against Muslims," as Werbner puts it, which is used by "intellectual elites as well as 'real' violent racists".

The Jewish-Muslim comparison reveals another recurring pattern in recent British history: the rapid collapse of security fears associated with a religious minority into a racialised discourse of "civilisation versus barbarism". The American philosopher William Connolly predicted after September 11 that "the terrorism of al-Qaida, in turn, generates new fears and hostilities. The McCarthyism of our day will connect internal state security to an exclusionary version of the Judeo-Christian tradition".

The ease with which security fears can generate "moral panics and folk devils" was recently highlighted at a conference organised by London mayor Ken Livingstone to debate the neoconservatives' insistence that we now face a new clash of civilisation versus barbarism. In London's past, the East End British Brothers' League carefully framed its objections using terms such as aliens, anarchists and Bolsheviks rather than Jews. At last month's conference, many cheered as if at a rally, as these new advocates of "civilisational conflict" worked hard to keep separate their categories of barbarian and civilised. They cited Ayaan Hirsi Ali as their exemplar of a "good Muslim", thus clarifying the "civilisation" they are encouraging Muslims to emulate. Hirsi Ali, whose research is funded by the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute, argues that the west should launch a war against Iran - with the prospect of the deaths of thousands more innocents - as it earlier agitated for war on Iraq.

The neocons want us to treat domestic security like the war against fascism. This manipulation of Europe's memory of its struggle against nazism mirrors the propaganda of some Muslims - the July 7 bombers who, citing Iraq, insisted that they were martyrs in a holy war; and those who portray domestic anti-terrorism policy as a new western crusade against 1 billion Muslims. The London mayor's refusal to lapse into such "war talk" is one factor that has so far helped to prevent fear of domestic terrorism from collapsing into a racialised conflict of civilisations in the heart of diverse London. This is not just about foreign neocon wars, or politically correct anti-racism, or multiculturalism - or even the defence of the human rights of British citizens who are Muslims. It is about the security of all British citizens. As Ken Macdonald, director of public prosecutions, warned last week, if we want to safeguard our security we must abandon delusions that we are fighting wars, and deal with terrorism in the context of criminal justice. With more terror arrests inevitable, and the prospect of new anti-terrorism legislation any day, the need to grasp what is really going on could not be more urgent.

· Maleiha Malik is a lecturer in law at King's College London.

· This is an edited version of lectures prepared for presentation at the Clash of Civilisations conference in London on January 20 and at Finchley Progressive Synagogue

law-feminismworkshop@kcl.ac.uk