Aranthus

The problem is that the Palestinians refuse to accept the legitimacy of Israel's existence. It really has nothing to do with the technicality of the words. This war (since 1947) has always been about whether the Arabs would accept a Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East under any circumstances. They don't. Whitbeck's article is just one more version of the effort to cover up that basic truth and make the unacceptable Arab position look better.

Let's start with the claim that the Palestinians can't recognize Israel because the borders are not defined. Tell that to the Japanese and the Russians (still disputing the border in the Kurile Islands), India and Pakistan (Kashmir) several South American countries, etc. All those governments recognize each other. Recognizing a sovereign government doesn't mean recognizing the borders of a state. The argument is simply false.

It's also telling that Whitbeck claims that Hamas has done something like recognizing Israel. I have never heard of such a thing. Instead I have heard every Hamas leader who would offer a quote claim that Hamas would never recognize Israel. Whitbeck is engaging in a lot of disinformation here.

The final whopper is this idea that recognizing the "right of Israel to exist" somehow means accepting as justified every injustice visited on the Palestinians by the Israelis. Particularly noxious is the idea that it's the same as Jews having to accept the justice of the Holocaust. There Whitbeck sinks from mere dishonesty to insult. The two situations aren't even close. A better analogy to the Palestinian argument is the claim that by accepting the right of the Germans to have their own state, that the Jews must accept the justice of the Holocaust. It's an idea that's ridiculous on its face. The Devil is in the details, so let's talk about them.

First, no state has a right to exist. A state is just a set of organizations of government. Inanimate objects don't have rights. People do. When we talk about respecting Israel's right to exist we are really talking about the Jewish people's right to national self-determination. Going back to the Declaration of Independence, Americans have believed that people have the right to choose and control their government. In the early 20th century the idea was expanded to the belief that different peoples (nations) have the right to govern themselves in their own state. The reason is that different nations have distinct cultures, customs, laws, etc., and this animates the state. The belief in the right of national self-determination is the foundational philosophy of the modern nation state. That is what the Palestinians are being asked to accept about the Jews of Israel; that they have a right to a state of their own. This is what they have refused to accept for decades.

So where does this argument that accepting Israel's right to exist means accepting injustice come from? It comes from a terrible lie and a terrible truth.

The terrible lie is that Israel owes its existence to the Nakhba, the intentional dispossession of some 700,000 Palestinians. Israel, it is said, would not even exist today without the forced expulsion of these people because there would not be a Jewish majority in Israel, let alone an 80% Jewish majority. All lies.

Let's start with the fact that there would not have been any Arab refugees if there had not been a war. None. Next, consider that the number of Arabs who were forcibly evicted was about 20 to 30 thousand, that 30-40 thousand moved on orders of their leaders to be out of the way of the Arab armies, and that the rest ran from combat zones. A little common sense would help here. How many wars have there been that have not caused refugees? Maybe none? Does anyone really believe that this war was any different? That this war of all the wars in history is the only one where all of the refugees were forcibly evicted? Come on. The real cause of the refugee problem is the war. The party most responsible is that which started the war. The Palestinians need to look in the mirror, because the evidence is clear that they began this war, and that they started it to prevent the Jews from having their own state.

Now let's look at the demographics as if there was no war. Pre-war Israel had a total population of about 935,000: 538,000 Jews, and 397,000 Arabs. If there was no war, it is likely that there would still be some emigration of Arabs to the Palestinian state or to the Arab states, so let's assume that the Arab population dropped to 350,000. There would also still have been a massive emigration of Jews from the Arab states (where they were treated poorly), and more of them would have gone to Israel rather than Europe or the US because Israel would not have looked as dangerous to them without the war. So the Jewish population of Israel today would be about the same whether there was a war or not (about 5,000,000). What would the Arab population have been? The general population of Palestinians in the whole Middle East has grown between six and seven fold (the Arab population in Israel has grown at a slower rate because they are more affluent and because of emigration). A fair estimate is that the Arab population of Israel would today be about 2,000,000 if there had been no war. That means that with no war, and no refugees, Israel would still be about 70% Jewish.

So much for the Big Lie. What's the terrible truth? It's that the only way Whitbeck's argument makes any sense is if the Palestinians believe that Israel's very existence is some kind of cosmic injustice. This is certainly what Hamas thinks. They follow the doctrine of Waqf, which states that once land is conquered by Islam it must remain under Islamic domination forever. It is certainly what was expressed in the PLO charter which claimed that Jews do not have any right to any state anywhere. The issue isn't refugees or what was done to the Palestinians. The issue is whether the Jews have a right to a state of their own. Always has been.

Does accepting Israel's right to exist mean that the Palestinians would have to accept that they unjustly started the war which caused them to become refugees? Of course it does. Does that also mean that they would then have to accept responsibility for their own refugee status and occupation? You bet. That's the price of starting wars.