Ray

A very thought provoking article, even if one does not quite accept it in its totality, working on the legalities of phrases.

Is the Problem all about these phrases or has it greater connotation for world peace.

Much is said by the moderate Moslems that the whole issue of Islamic terrorism hinges on the Palestinian Question. Is that true, or is it a drowning man clutching the straw?

One wonders if what the article claims is the sole and are the only issues involved for the imbroglio and mayhem that signatures the Israeli - Palestinian issue.

__________________


"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

HAKUNA MATATA

zraver

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.

Utter tripe, the Nakba cannot be fairly compared to the Holocuast. It is more properly compared to the expulsion of German speaking peoples from Poland, Russia, Chezklovakia, Baltic and France following the end of WW2 and the redrawing of Germanies borders by the victors. All in responce to the German leaders decision to go to war and national philosophy of discrimination and anti-semtism.

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.

Shek

Aranthus,

Nice post.

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"So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

Aranthus

Thanks. I've been seeing this claim batted around lately. Noam Chomsky has been talking it up as well. No surprise.

bonehead

For many hard line muslims, the very existance of Isreal marks a failure of Islam, and that is something they simply will not accept or tolerate.

Aranthus

Good point. This is a great analogy that I wish I had used myself.

Stan187

Even then, a great deal of the Palestinians left voluntarily, granted not because the really wanted to leave, but because Arab governments told them to leave until they could reconquer the whole of the territory. I don't think the Germans were given the same choice when being expelled.

There are quite a few Arab villages still in Israel, who accepted back in 1948 the choice to stay and become members of that state. I've been to them, and I've met the people. Their living standards are anything but subhuman. And they live relatively peacefully alongside with Israelis.


And I agree with Shek, Arathus that was a very well thought out post.

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Kansas Bear

Granted this is a "what-if ", but what would the ME be like if the Arab nations hadn't attacked in 1948 and instead used diplomacy to resolve the issue of the Palestinians(as if that was the 'real' issue).

The Arab response was solely(IMHO) motivated by their ultra nationalism. After centuries of having the Ottoman Empire's boot on their neck, they responded as most have done(Serbians 1914) with violence.

Aranthus

An interesting point. Have you read "War and Peace in the Middle East" by Avi Shlaim? He calls it the Post Ottoman Syndrome.

I doubt that the Arab states would have attacked if the Palestinians themselves had chosen to resolve the issue peacefully. If they had, you might have seen the Jews and the Palestinians fighting side by side to repel the invaders. In any case, there wouldn't have been any refugees. On the other hand, there wasn't much chance that the Arabs would have stayed out of it if the Palestinians went to war, which is what happened historically. If they had stayed out of a purely Palestinian was against Israel, the Israelis would probably have taken all of Palestine west of the river, the Palestinians would have become citizens of Jordan, and that would have been the end of it.

Stan187

I think that considering that for the past 60 years the Arab countries have used the Palestinians as pawns, I think they would have attacked anyway. Think about it. The creation of Israel was blessing from Allah for unpopular Arab governments, it gave them a physical entity that they could blame all of their problems on, thus diverting the populations resentment away from them and towards the Israelis.

Look at Ahmenijad. People are beginning to complain, because for all his rhetoric against Israel and America, he hasn't helped the country domestically at all.

They would have either invaded Israel, or many ME governments would have eventually been toppled or coup-de-etat'd so to speak. If you were the leader of one of these regimes, what would you have done? I would have invaded too.

Kansas Bear

Unfortunately, no.

I've read "Crescent and Star" by Kinzer, "The Ottoman Centuries" and "Ataturd" by Kinross, "Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire" by Palmer, and the "Byzantium: The Early Centuries", "Byzantium: The Apogee", "Byzantium:The Decline and Fall" all by Norwich, "Age of Faith" and "The Reformation" by Will Durant..............Just to name the few that specifically discuss the Ottoman Empire.


Apparently he and I came to the same conclusion....

astralis

kansas bear,

unfortunately, too simplistic. yes, nationalism was there (at that point, i don't think it would have been fair to call it ultra-nationalist). the creation of the israeli state in that area prompted very real fears about colonialism, both in the action of actually creating the state THERE, of all places, and of fears that israel would be used as a staging ground for further imperial adventures.

of course, the religious aspect. and also, the fact that the europeans had screwed the arabs over repeatedly in the past by breaking their oaths and treaties.

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Kansas Bear

I would have considered this a motivating factor, except that the Brits DID remove their troops prior to Israel's proclamation of statehood. Stan187's summation "hit the nail on the head".


Yet, there were NO European troops in Israel/Palestine May 14, 1948. The Arab nations knew this, and had their troops(from as far away as Iraq) already in position to attack Israel.

Archer

Very true.

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