Israel's right to exist

God promised them that land?

Ha. I recognize a curse when I see one.

Posted by Alan | July 5, 2008 6:32 PM

Israel, the political entity, has the right to exist. That fact is essential and Israel must protect itself against enemies abroad, be they Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, etc. (I imagine I have extremely different views on how Israel should go about prosecuting that self-defense than others, but I digress.)

But the fundamental ethnic and religious character of Israel I don't think has an inherent right to exist. I echo Christopher Hitchens (for perhaps the first time in my life) in saying that, as someone who supports liberal democracy, I don't believe in nation-states with a national religion or preferred ethnicity. It's a simple matter of egalitarianism and democratic ideals. I don't think governments should be in the business of having religious or ethnic characters. Not an Islamic Iran, a Christian America or a Jewish Israel.

As for the Palestinians, I know there's going to be a firestorm in here as always. But the fundamental situation is this, no matter what else: several million people, because of their ethnic heritage, have been denied either true independence/self-determination, or citizenship rights. You can solve this either way, by giving them true independence and autonomy (a two-state solution) or by giving them all full citizenship (a de facto one-state solution.) But to continue to deny either to them renders them a permanently dispossessed and powerless people and is antithetical to the project of democracy.

Posted by Freddie | July 5, 2008 6:40 PM

I've long been puzzled by the claim that Israel has a "right to exist." Why should any particular state entity have rights independent of the rights of its citizens? And would Israel cease to exist if it simply absorbed the West Bank and the Gaza Strip?

What people really seem to mean by "Israel's right to exist" is that for some reason Israel should forever be a majority-Jewish state and is entitled to resort to state-sanctioned violence to maintain that status. I find this claim disturbingly illiberal. Were the Palestinians to become liberal democrats tomorrow, Israel would have no moral right to exclude them.

The problem with giving the Palestinians a right of return is that enormous numbers of them are anti-Semites who would surely vote to oppress Israel's Jewish residents if given the chance.

Posted by tennisfan | July 5, 2008 7:04 PM

"I don't believe in nation-states with a national religion or preferred ethnicity"

Given that Israel is a democracy, shouldn't the question of THEIR national religion be their's, and their's alone, to decide?

Posted by jwh | July 5, 2008 7:18 PM

we should take a page from Washington, the former President, and "beware of entangling alliances".

we should resolve, again, to "be a Friend of Liberty." if the supporters, individuals, here in the United States, of Israel, care to offer aid to Israel, they should be, and feel, free to do so.

they should take a page from the Salvadorans, the ~Million of which that are here, send a ~Billion U$D/yr. back to El Salvador.

certainly, the supporters of Israel could equal that, many times over.

the + side, for Israel, is that they'll get a headstart on the day when the U.S. can no longer afford to send them the multi-Billions it currently is..yes, the multi-Billions for Egypt should stop, too..

Free Trade not Foreign Aid.

Posted by Mark E Hoffer | July 5, 2008 7:43 PM

Interesting that you pick US and King George when the apt analogy would be the US and American Indians.

Posted by Ben | July 5, 2008 8:40 PM

The problem with, "Given that Israel is a democracy, shouldn't the question of THEIR national religion be their's, and their's alone, to decide?":

Is it a "democracy" when some residents are given substantially more rights than others, according to ethnicity?

And there's also the problem that someone gave someone else's land to one people and then, through acts of terror, the indigenous people were killed or forcibly removed, and now the government recruits people of the chosen ethnicity from all parts of the world so they'll become the majority.

It's sort of like Bloody Kansas - the U.S. government decided to allow Kansas to decide whether it wanted to come into the nation as a slave state or a free state - and slave owners and abolitionists rushed in large numbers to be able to vote. Of course, in the case of Israel, only one group gets to come.

Democracy, anyone?

Carolfrances

Posted by Carolfrances Likins | July 5, 2008 8:55 PM

Ben's analogy is no good for numerous reasons, but the thinking behind it does represent the sort of thinking that has created a situation where many believe Israel should justify its right to exist, when it has no more need--indeed, less need--to justify it's own existence than any of the nations surrounding it.

Posted by Larry | July 5, 2008 8:57 PM

Ditto for Carolfrances Likins, of course. Even if you accept her tendentious account of Israel, and I hope no one does, then you'd simply have to conclude that there isn't a single country in the Middle East that deserves to exist, so all must be destroyed, and newer countries with new laws put in their place.

Posted by Larry | July 5, 2008 9:04 PM

Can someone explain why such discussions never seem to surround questions like:

- Saudi Arabia's right to exist
- Pakistan's right to exist
- Zimbabwe's right to exist
- North Korea's right to exist

etc., etc., etc.

As far as I can tell, Israel is the only nation where this is ever discussed.

Posted by Bill Nelson | July 5, 2008 9:25 PM

Bill Nelson,

If you would notice, nearly all of the people who speak of "Israel's right to exist", are Jews debating against Strawmen.

But to educate you further, there have been mighty discussions about Kosovo's right to exist.

Further examples are not hard to find if you choose to look objectively at world history.

Posted by David Shor | July 5, 2008 9:35 PM

Thank you, David Shore, for raising Kosovo. However, Kosovo's independence is a matter that dates back to earlier this year, and not 1948.

For that matter, here are some Google returns for the phrase "right to exist" and...

Israel: 485,000
Kosovo: 40,500
Pakistan: 78,500
North Korea: 40,200
Saudi Arabia: 93,200
Northern Ireland: 18,100

However, these statistics are skewed, as they generally link to Israel's right to exist with only a mention of the referred-to nation in some other context.

Unfortunately, Google does not reveal the religion/ethnicity of the people behind those links, so it is hard to determine whether "nearly all of them" are Jews.

Posted by Bill Nelson | July 5, 2008 9:52 PM

Given that Israel is a democracy, shouldn't the question of THEIR national religion be their's, and their's alone, to decide?

No.

As far as I can tell, Israel is the only nation where this is ever discussed.

Israel is the only one of those nation's whose existence is predicated on the continued support of the United States, and as this is still a democratic state, the behavior of our government is a relevant object of discussion.

Posted by Freddie | July 5, 2008 10:08 PM

"The justification for Israel, like the justification for Northern Ireland, is simply that it exists. Whatever the injustices that went into its creation, the people are there and they are not going anywhere."

If this is true, then the 'logical' conclusion is that the justification for the existence of Israel can be eliminated simply by eliminating all the Israelis.

Now that's an immoral conclusion, but it's one drawn by just enough Palestinians to keep the violence going.

So trying to solve the problem by reducing Israel to a whole bunch of people won't get you anywhere.

Successful diplomacy requires some sort of Supreme Fiction or dense, secular obfuscation.

Posted by lampwick | July 5, 2008 10:12 PM

Israel is the only one of those nation's whose existence is predicated on the continued support of the United States, and as this is still a democratic state, the behavior of our government is a relevant object of discussion.

I cannot see why the presence of American (military, presumably) support has any moral bearing on whether there is a case for a country not existing -- which in this case, would be synonymous with genocide, again.

In any case, Israel's existence can probably be ensured by their own military arsenal.

Incidentally, American support also determines the existence of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait (remember that one?) -- and in a pinch, Canada.

Tell me, Freddie, should South Korea exist? Should Saudi Arabia exist?

Also, tell me, Freddie: If, hypothetically, Israel was dependent not on America, but instead on, say, China -- would you then drop all of your concerns about Israel's existence?

Posted by Bill Nelson | July 5, 2008 10:25 PM

Well, the obvious reason that the question comes up is because Israel is a state run by people whose families moved to the region within the last two generations, who essentially had no historical claim to the land (where by historical, I mean within the last few hundred years), who were allowed to move there only under the active support of European colonial powers and the US, who claim a divine right to rule based on their religion, and who have a tendentious relationship with the people who previously lived in the area.

Now, my position is the same as Megan's: Israel is there now, so we're not going to reset the clock to 1947 and have all the Jewish immigrants move out. But surely the question of why people question Israel's right to exist isn't a difficult one.

Posted by cure | July 5, 2008 10:39 PM

Mark Twain apparently was amazed to find the 'Holy Land' barren and depopulated in in the mid to late 1800s. While the Pope was losing the papal states to Italian nationalism and, pare passu, becoming infallible, nobody except the Jews as a group were interested in Palestine. They recovered the land and made it economically attractive for Arabs to move in in greater numbers. Unfortunately the British who got control of the region after WWI, for some reason passed over more honored candidates and chose an antisemitic Mufti for a ruler. This was deadly not only for Jews but also Arabs that might want to accommodate them. Etc. As far as alternate histories go, I'd like to know why that Mufti was appointed and assume things might have gone differently at that juncture. Speaking of 'rights to exist' and regulatory problems, you know Wall Street was once literally a log wall, a defensive structure against Native Americans who took a dimmer view presumably of 'Wall Street' than Ralph Nader. This of course finds analogies in 'Palestine.'

Posted by Michael | July 5, 2008 10:39 PM

Israel assert its right to exist because it has been challenged from the beginning by all of its neighbors and many other countries in the world, especially when questioning the right to exist has domestic political benefits as a distraction.

Arab and Muslim governments have often evoked Israel as a way to inspire Arab nationalism or the oneness of the Muslim world.

Israel's right to exist has been called into question at various times by the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the Non-Aligned Movement, and multiple subcommittees of the United Nations. Israel's existence has been sold as wrong perpetrated on the "Palestinians" (Arabs), and these poor folks have been made to live as refuges for five generations -- mostly by Arab governments where many of them resettled and were stored in camps, countries like Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon.

In a similar timeframe, the millions of Germans forcibly driven from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Soviet East Germany and the Baltic countries after WWII were resettled and fully integrated into West Germany. The millions of Indians and Pakistanis were resettled and integrated into India and Pakistan after those nations split without enclaves, refugee camps, or a dedicated UN organization looking out for their "welfare," such as Palestinian Arabs have (UNRWA).

Ignoring what fellow Arab states have perpetrated against their supposed Palestinian brethren, the world's metropolitan, wealthy leftist intelligentsia has mostly gone so far as to agree that Israel is akin to Nazi Germany, perpetrating a "Holocaust" on the Palestinian so-called "people." This would be the first holocaust in recorded history that had progressed for six decades and resulted in a five-fold increase in the population of the genocide's victims.

Posted by MarkG | July 5, 2008 10:41 PM

Well, the obvious reason that the question comes up is because Israel is a state run by people whose families moved to the region within the last two generations, who essentially had no historical claim to the land (where by historical, I mean within the last few hundred years), who were allowed to move there only under the active support of European colonial powers and the US,

You had better question Singapore's right to exist too, then...

who claim a divine right to rule based on their religion, and who have a tendentious relationship with the people who previously lived in the area.

...and it's the only country in the world with two consecutive vowels followed by an "l". Make your definition narrow enough, and, by golly, only Israel qualifies.

Incidentally, half of Israel's Jews are Arabic , so they did not move "to the area" in the last two generations. And, you should also note that Israel, unlike its neighbors, is a secular state.

Posted by Bill Nelson | July 5, 2008 10:51 PM

So Megan, there you sit at the Aspen Institute discussing covering Israel in the media. Glenn Greenwald has "documented" that you defended your position that the MSM has not neglected to report the facts as many see them of our own government's radical actions. Now you write from this seminar.

I issue you a challenge Megan. There is a young 24 year old award winning Palestinian journalist, Mohammed Omer, who last week while under diplomatic protection from the Dutch was detained, strip searched, humiliated and beaten by the Shin Bet. He was returning home to Gaza from a multi-European capital tour where he addressed the parliaments of Great Britain, Sweden and Greece while also accepting his latest award, the Martha Gellhorn award. This is the second award he has won Megan, the first was the Young America's Voices Award which he received in 2006. At that time, our own State Department had to intervene on his behalf in order to get him out of Gaza to come here and receive his prize. At that time he did a multi-city speaking tour and also appeared on CSPAN.

Here's the challenge Megan, various MSM's have been contacted with ALL the information to do a story about Mohammed's CRIMINAL treatment by the Shin Bet, links, phone numbers, proof, Reporters Without Borders condemnation and the contacts for the Hague. I personally spoke to Barbara Whitaker at the AP and sent her ALL information necessary.
She said to me on the phone, "I don't know if we have received this information and decided to take a pass on it" Interesting, huh?

CNN was also contacted, Rory Suchet in Los Angeles.

Mohammed is the Gaza correspondent for Washington Report who coordinated this tour of Europe, an AMERICAN publication. Yet it seems, and I have PROOF, the MSM is refusing to cover this crime of this state you feel has a "right to exist".

Do they have a right to exist in this racist manner Megan? Do they have a right to torture award winning journalists, YOUR colleague, Megan?

How DOES the MSM cover Israel Megan now that you are aware they are refusing to cover the torture of one of your own colleagues?

Awaiting your response Megan.......

Hope you don't think this is harrassing Megan, Mohammed is a collegue of yours.

Posted by Robin | July 5, 2008 10:55 PM

Israel assert its right to exist because it has been challenged from the beginning by all of its neighbors and many other countries in the world, especially when questioning the right to exist has domestic political benefits as a distraction.

Here is where Obama fits in perfectly. Hammas leader Haniyeh could be invited to dinner at the White House and a stay in the Lincoln bedroom and Barack could point out the above. Haniyeh no doubt would receive this in a strangely peaceful silence and think, 'Yeah, a distraction, You know I never thought of it that way.' You think, after a little bowing to the East, everything could be wrapped up?

Posted by Michael | July 5, 2008 11:08 PM

Megan McArdle refers to "Asymmetrical Information" when I would rather discuss asymmetrical power. The power of certain Zionists who decided to colonize and occupy Palestine, with the support of the governments of England and the USA, versus the relative powerlessness of the indigenous Palestinians, who face the daily, genocidal violence of a colonial power.

Or we could discuss asymmetrical warfare which is occurring as Israel deploys fighter jets, helicopters and high tech surveillance against the nonviolent resistance, stones and relatively small arms of the indigenous people. This asymmetry is made possible by U.S. military aid to Israel, and U.S. government control of other anti-democratic states in the region, like Saudi Arabia.

And I do use the word anti-democratic to describe Israel. No state is democratic when it seizes land from indigenous people and then attempts to eradicate or relocate them. And when it denies their right to return to the homes from which they were expelled with violence or threat of violence. Such a state may flatter itself by calling itself democratic, but clear observation tells another story. Israel is no more a democratic state than was apartheid South Africa. It is only the Israeli and U.S. governments(and their shot callers)which prefer to deny this to the whole world's detriment.

But South Africa has worked it out after a fashion, and if we express the same solidarity with Palestinians which we expressed with South Africans, then Israeli apartheid will also be transformed. Can you say Palisrael, or Ispalestine?

McArdle writes,"The justification for Israel, like the justification for Northern Ireland, is simply that it exists. Whatever the injustices that went into its creation, the people are there and they are not going anywhere. The wrongs of yesteryear cannot be righted without doing further injustice, so whatever the rightness or wrongness of their cause, the Palestinians are going to have to accept that they cannot have things as they would have been if Zionism had not happened."

There is some truth to this. Palestine is different now. But there is no legal or ethical reason why the wrongs of yesteryear cannot be addressed. They must be addressed to whatever extent possible, even if the process is incremental. Chile is now doing just that. South Africa attempted to do that with a Truth and Reconciliation process. The United States has a long way to go in addressing reparations and healing as regards the slavery of Africans, the genocide of indigenous people, the theft of the southwestern United States from Mexico, and the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, to name only a few issues.

When a crime is committed, do we tell the victim that it just happened, accept it, get over it? There is no statute of limitation on murder or crimes against humanity. The aggressive invasion and occupation of another country or land is a crime against humanity. No government, including Israel's, can escape this fact. The Israeli government may get away with occupation for a very long time, but the occupied and those who remember and seek justice never forget.

Posted by Jim Yarbrough | July 5, 2008 11:21 PM

Bill Nelson,

Taiwan might be a better example of a long-standing effective nation state whose right to exist is frequently questioned, in a matter far more severe than Israel has ever been subjected to. (Or see Believe-Guatemalan relations)

My claim is based on anecdotal evidence, but indeed, it is quite hard to experimentally verify.

Unfortunately, the term "right to exist" is not frequently used enough for Google Trends to provide regional breakdowns.

But after looking at services like Grokker, which try to group search terms, it became fairly clear that most of the sites were Jews "defending" Israel's right to exist.

But it was possible to isolate the Arab sites that speak of the issue. But all of the Arab sites speak of the difference between "Recognizing Israel's right to exist", and "Accepting the moral legitimacy of Israel's creation". (Admittedly, this is an English language search, Arabic might be different)

Once we move to the latter territory, it's hard to think of a country whose moral legitimacy has not been questioned. American's actions to the Indians, France's violent repression of regional separatism in the 19th century, The wide-scale expulsions associated with India's creation....

Another distinction seen is the stress between "Recognizing Israel's right to exist", and "Establishing Diplomatic relations with Israel".

This also seems pretty unexceptional. Most of Israel's neighbors have out-standing disputes with Israel, in the same manner that the US does with Cuba or Iran.

There does not however, seem to be large amounts of writers who question Israel's right to sovereignty.

Posted by David Shor | July 5, 2008 11:22 PM

Someone on a recent related thread remarked that it came down to the 'settlers' and Israel's political system. Basically, about 90% of the Israelis detest these settler types, think of them as being a particularly ignorant and nasty virulence. _BUT_ as a bloc, they can determine who is in power, and the settlers only requirement of the ruling coalition is that they endorse the settlements.

Get rid of those trouble-makers, and 95% of the problem goes away. Or so I've been told. Unfortunately, it's not unlike the situation here in the U.S., where the Christian fundies are able to hold certain people hostage and force them to endorse their rather bizarre beliefs. Get rid of the fundies ability to make mischief and a lot of the conflict in our system disappears.

Posted by ScentOfViolets | July 5, 2008 11:30 PM

The way to disprove any country's a right to exist is to beat it in a war. Maybe some day we'll progress to a more enlightened process of picking which people get to have what they want, but there's no sense pretending we're there already. We're not.

And that's probably for the best--I wouldn't like to be obliged to live by a popular world vote on whether my country was legitimate. Let them drop in and prove it if they want, or shut up if they don't.

Posted by Brown Label Commenter | July 5, 2008 11:54 PM

That is a terrible argument. The justification for Israel is the fact that Jews have been living there uninterrupted for thousands of years. There were many Jews living there well before the Turks, British, and others came in, and continued to live there throughout that time and afterwards. At no point was the country ever "owned" by Arabs, as opposed to Jews. At certain points, Jews constituted the majority, then the minority, but even then maintained sizable communities. The idea that other Jews wouldn't be allowed to immigrate is like saying that Arabs can't immigrate. At the end of British colonialism, as the Middle East was being resectioned, Israel was divided, with the Arabs gaining a new country called Jordan and the Jews gaining a much smaller country called Israel.

Posted by student | July 6, 2008 12:09 AM

Muslim governments and others have, of course, invoked Israel, not evoked it, as I claimed above. Long day.

Michael:

Hammas leader Haniyeh could be invited to dinner at the White House and a stay in the Lincoln bedroom and Barack could point out the above. Haniyeh no doubt would receive this in a strangely peaceful silence and think, 'Yeah, a distraction, You know I never thought of it that way.' You think, after a little bowing to the East, everything could be wrapped up?

What I meant was that Israel is a welcome political distraction from domestic repression in most Arab states -- "scapegoat" anyone? -- invoked repeatedly as the ultimate "criminal" in the neighborhood which must be defeated or "eradicated." Hamas needs Israel, as a matter of fact, because armed political parties with external scapegoats need someone to blame for their constituents' suffering.

Posted by MarkG | July 6, 2008 12:15 AM

I think Israel is the only country nowadays that has to explain time and time again why it has a right to exist. This is not because the country is young, but because half the world is hellbent on the destruction of Israel. But we feel flattered, if a billion (Muslim) people hate you, then they probably just envy you :)

Posted by palestinianpeace | July 6, 2008 1:35 AM

The question is not "Does Israel have a right to exist?" The question is: "By what right does Israel demand, and get, endless unconditional support from the United States, even in cases where this support is not in the interests of the United States?"

Unfortunately, asking the correct question is an easy way to get oneself called "anti-Semitic" here; many Jews have, essentially, substituted worship of the State of Israel for worship of the God of Israel. State-worship's much easier---no tiresome dietary laws, no (or very little) dreary time spent in synagogues; all you have to do is support Israel, and you're good to go!

One of my learned friends on this thread invokes Mark Twain's account of Palestine in his time. This is based on The Innocents Abroad, a work with which I am quite familiar. Twain wasn't too impressed with much of anything he saw on that trip, and was writing for an audience that would almost certainly never see the places he went; he was also writing for an audience that was far more Bible-soaked, and more literal about the Bible, than almost anybody nowadays. He was astounded to find that the Jordan River, by American standards, was a rather contemptible trickle; he had always had the impression of something like the Mississippi or Missouri River. In any case, the fact that Palestine was poor and backward under the Ottomans does not constitute a blank check for anybody to come and take it from its inhabitants. Twain, himself, would have written with wit and rage against the Israeli government; see his "King Leopold's Soliloquy" for an example of what he'd have had to say.

Posted by Xixobrax | July 6, 2008 1:58 AM

I think Megan pretty much nails this one.

And Jim, that's a nice fantasy you're pushing there. I'm sure any second now you will peacefully vacate your home for the Pueblo, Sioux, Iroquois, and other tribes whose homeland you're living on and whose ancestors yours helped slaughter.

While we're at it, let's send the Norman British back to France, and get busy on forcing the Han Chinese to make reparations to the Manchus et al.

The things that people find so horrifying about Israeli history are the same things that took place in the creation of pretty much every nation on earth. The difference strikes me as mostly that people who live in nations where all that happened some period of time ago are able to deplore the horrors of their history as reflected in the present of other cultures. What a horror that other nations have sweatshops! We only kept ours for half a century, after all.

Israel is a country which does a lot of horrible things, which deserve criticism and reprove from the rest of the world. And there are a lot of other things, such as the question of what it really means to have democracies which have an official state religion. But what offends Jews, including anti-statist libertarian Jews like myself who abhor AIPAC and everything they stand for, is the hysterical hypocrisy of people like Jim. Many European nations have official state religions which are favored by law. By a lot of standards, so does the United States. Let's not kid ourselves and pretend that all those Americans and elected officials who talk about the importance of America as a Christian nation mean nothing because of the First Amendment. It took the United States a mere five years to bring about the death of more Arabs than Israel has managed to achieve in the last sixty - one hardly needs to point out the disparity in the cause and need of any of those deaths for the "security" of the nation in question. If you wanted to pay equal attention to everyone's past crimes, well, in a few decades, Americans and Europeans would have time to worry about Israel.

Like I said at the top, Megan nailed this one. Today, nearly everyone involved in the creation of the Zionist movement, the supporters of it in the early United Nations, the various Arab leaders who rejected it and founded Palestinian terrorism - are dead. Beyond the reach of any human justice. Israel and its neighbors must learn to get along because they all live there. How they do that is a matter for debate, but they are the people the debate is between and our responsibility is to make sure that how they all live there is as non-fatal as our mediation can possibly make it. Otherwise, pretty much all we are asking is for people who aren't us to die because we think it supports a principle. I don't think very highly of that.

Posted by James Feldman | July 6, 2008 2:22 AM

Xixobrax-

The question is: "By what right does Israel demand, and get, endless unconditional support from the United States, even in cases where this support is not in the interests of the United States?"

The notion that Israel is actually capable of "demanding" endless unconditional support from the US seems absurd on its face. First of all, Israel isn't the same thing as "American supporters of Israel, both the Jewish-Americans and the considerable evangelical Christian Americans." There are more of those than Israel even has citizens, and unlike Israeli citizens, they can contribute to American politicians (and vote for them). If the United States abandoned its pro-Israel position, Israel would be capable of nearly nothing in response. But those Americans would be mighty pissed.

Second, what is in the interests of the United States is not an absolute. Clearly, those millions of Americans disagree with you (and with me) about what is in America's interest. And American interest is nothing more than the sum of the interests of a plurality of its population. America has no higher interest than what the American people think it is.

Posted by James Feldman | July 6, 2008 2:30 AM

"Very few people outside of ultra-religious US communities are willing to accept that Israel should be a Jewish state because G-d promised them they could have that land" MM

TR: Yes, but something like a third of Americans believe in the religious justification. Whether it's right or wrong, it's important. From the perspective of a libertarian blogger it's a "mistake" to use it, but if you're an Israeli wanting American aid it's perfectly practical to do so.

"The justification for Israel, like the justification for Northern Ireland, is simply that it exists. Whatever the injustices that went into its creation, the people are there and they are not going anywhere." MM

TR: I agree with this. My sympathies were once more with the Palestinians than they are now, but it seems like at some point you have to accept reality and for whatever reason many Arabs don't seem to do so. I don't think that sixty years after we "opened up" Oklahoma to whites, which would be 1949, members of the Creek Nation were blowing up restaurants in Tulsa. I could be wrong there, but I don't think so.

Yeah I know some are saying "Jews were always there", but I don't think that's all that convincing. Christians have continually been there as long as Christians have existed and there were "Christian states" in the region long after the Jewish diaspora. So should Palestine have been divied up between the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Pope after the Ottoman defeat in WWI? After all it once belonged to the Byzantine Empire and the Popes had only recently lost the Papal states.

Also the Canaanites were there before the Jews going by what I recall of the Bible. The Canaanites are a kind of Phoenician people and their closest living descendants are the Lebanese. Lebanese Christians I believe have "always been there" to some extent. So possibly Palestine should've went to the Maronites. Point being it's just not very useful doing that.

Lastly the Arab Jews are there largely because they were kicked out in revenge for the creation of Israel. There was a notable Jewish population from the Diaspora to the first aliyah, but they were very clearly a minority in this period.

Posted by Thomas R | July 6, 2008 2:55 AM

Question was: "Given that Israel is a democracy, shouldn't the question of THEIR national religion be their's, and their's alone, to decide?"

Freddie said, "No."

OK, I guess Freddie is the one who decides what religion everyone is supposed to be......boy, I hope Freddie's not an atheist.....

Posted by jwh | July 6, 2008 6:18 AM

Megan,
You are correct on your points but so long as a minority cannot agree with you or me there is not much point. The minority [and I use this word kindly, without malice], will only tire us out with their pointless discussion. If I died and came back in 200 years, the discussion would still be the same. I KNOW that I am tired of the Israeli/Palestinian question, and DO NOT wish to spend one more useless minute of time, pondering its merits.

Posted by susan | July 6, 2008 7:28 AM

Megan,
You are correct on your points but so long as a minority cannot agree with you or me there is not much point. The minority [and I use this word kindly, without malice], will only tire us out with their pointless discussion. If I died and came back in 200 years, the discussion would still be the same. I KNOW that I am tired of the Israeli/Palestinian question, and DO NOT wish to spend one more useless minute of time, pondering its merits.

Posted by susan | July 6, 2008 7:28 AM

The question is: "By what right does Israel demand, and get, endless unconditional support from the United States, even in cases where this support is not in the interests of the United States?"

Um, I would guess that because of the following three factors. 1. France gave Israel nuclear weapon technology, 2. The Israeli government would presumably use nuclear weapons if it felt it had no other military options to survive, and 3, various American governments has consistently decided that a war that goes nuclear in the Middle East is not in the interests of the United States. So the USA provides Israel with plenty of military aid so the Israeli government feels it has plenty of other options for winning wars.

If you want to persuade the USA government to stop supporting Israel, you need to persuade it either that nuclear war in the Middle East wouldn't harm American interests or that the Israeli government wouldn't use its nuclear weapons even if the Israeli government believed that otherwise Israel would be destroyed.

Posted by Tracy W | July 6, 2008 7:34 AM

Question was: "Given that Israel is a democracy, shouldn't the question of THEIR national religion be their's, and their's alone, to decide?"

Freddie said, "No."

OK, I guess Freddie is the one who decides what religion everyone is supposed to be......boy, I hope Freddie's not an atheist.....

No, Freddie doesn't get to decide what religion anyone is supposed to be, and, the point is, neither should anyone else, elected or not.

Posted by R C Dean | July 6, 2008 8:12 AM

You speak a great deal of sense. I think the problem is created by difficulties with what Israel is. How can you talk about anything existing if you don't know what that is. Like you I am a pragmatist and we need a Jewish state and the pre-1967 borders are the basis for that. (Palestinians understand this but they aren't going to recognise Israel until the problem of their state has been resolved.

So there are two problems. Israel has never formally defined its borders. The idea of a liberal democratic Jewish state is--ironies of ironies--problematic. Problematic because of demographic realities.

While the Palestinian statehood remains a pipedream Israeli statehood is going to justifiable through force to be sure, but problematic.

In summary, it's the Palestinians, stupid.

Posted by Chris Dornan | July 6, 2008 8:32 AM

Let me begin with a proposition. No nation has ever had a right to exist because no governing body exists that has the military power to enforce this right. Nations survive only as long as they are willing to fight to survive. They cease to exist when they no longer defend themselves because no other nation will fight their wars for them. The price of defense by some other nation is loss of independence.

The Middle East and Washington DC are very similar. In both cases, unlawful thugs now live in what used to be a somewhat peaceful area. In both cases there is a nominal governing body which promises to keep the peace. In both cases this governing body fails to keep the peace even though it keeps regular patrols of peacekeepers in the neighborhood. The peace keepers always fail to prevent violence but they are good at filing politically correct reports. As recent events have demonstrated in both the Middle East and Washington DC, negotiation with armed unlawful thugs fails unless you have a loaded gun in your hand or you have friends who have loaded guns and who are willing to risk their lives to defend you.

In the matter of Israel we should remember that traditionally for 3000 years people who are not Jews have killed Jews because they are Jews. For those of you who recently graduated in America, Hitler did not invent killing Jews. This tradition started long before there were Moslems and even before there were Christians. Unarmed negotiation has never worked for Jews in 3000 years of trying and it is not going to save them now.

Should Israel allow people who hate Israel to live in Israel and become citizens? Only a fool would open his home to people who have promised to kill him and his family. The Israeli government cannot be relied upon to protect Jews from pogroms (that’s the official word for killing Jews in bunches) unless only Jews run it.

I have lived in Beirut, Amman, Cairo, and Jerusalem and most people who live in these cities are apolitical and just want to live in peace and raise their families. These ordinary people have coexisted easily with Israel and will continue to do so. So why is there a problem?

There are the political types in the Middle East, just as there are in Europe, America, Asia -- indeed they are everywhere in this world -- and they have guns. These are political types who preach victimhood, who raise the armies of the night, who summon the merchants of death, who work to bring the apocalypse, who were born with an unquenchable thirst for blood. These are people who were born to kill, born to destroy cities and lives and order itself. Negotiation is impossible with these people because negotiation can only bring about those things that these political types were born to destroy.

Should the U.S. help Israel survive? It all depends on whether you are for or against pogroms. Personally I am against pogroms and I support Israel as a Jewish state. Should the Israel be in Palestine? Yes, because Israel has always been there for 3000 years, although Israel was not always run by Jews and not always called Israel.

Posted by sol vason | July 6, 2008 8:45 AM

Hmmmmm.

"But South Africa has worked it out after a fashion, and if we express the same solidarity with Palestinians which we expressed with South Africans, then Israeli apartheid will also be transformed. Can you say Palisrael, or Ispalestine?"

I notice you didn't use Zimbabwe as an example.

Posted by memomachine | July 6, 2008 9:09 AM

Like I said at the top, Megan nailed this one. Today, nearly everyone involved in the creation of the Zionist movement, the supporters of it in the early United Nations, the various Arab leaders who rejected it and founded Palestinian terrorism - are dead. Beyond the reach of any human justice. Israel and its neighbors must learn to get along because they all live there. How they do that is a matter for debate, but they are the people the debate is between and our responsibility is to make sure that how they all live there is as non-fatal as our mediation can possibly make it.

Unfortunately for your argument, Israel still has the status of an aggressor state. _They_ are the ones who are trying to occupy new land _now_. And you know, it really isn't cricket to rabbit-punch someone, and then yelp that that 'we should all just get along'. Something Israel has done repeatedly.

This 'Israel has a right to exist' is just so much codswallop dolled out to those who want to be gulled.

Posted by ScentOfViolets | July 6, 2008 9:16 AM

1. It is simply not historically accurate to say that Palestine was empty when the Zionist project began in earnest. That is a canard that has been abandoned even by conservative Israeli historians like Benny Morris.

2. It is also not true to claim that Arabs never had political control of the region.

3. I never said that I should be able to choose the religion of the people of a particular country. I said that I don't think that nations should have national religions or state ethnic identities. This is particularly problematic when you have a vast group living within your borders and occupied territories that don't share either that religion or ethnicity. I'm totally committed to individual rights to religion, but I don't agree with state religions. And that goes just as well for Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.

4. Israel has no more or less right to exist as a political entity than any other state at this point in their history, though I disagree with the manner of its founding. The problem here is how the question is framed. It simply isn't true that the impediment to a solution of the Israeli/Palestinian problem is a refusal of the Palestinians to recognize the right of Israel to exist. Even if that were the opinion of all of the Palestinians (which it certainly isn't), it would be immaterial. You couldn't possibly negotiate with an entity if your only satisfactory outcome was that entity ceasing to exist.

More to the point, the Palestinians couldn't ever possibly make it so that Israel ceases to exist. Neither could Iran, or Syria. This is a phenomenon that really aggravates me. People insist on dramatically misrepresenting the reality of Israel's strength in the region. Israel is the great power of the region. By itself, it's militarily dominant; if you include its allies, even more so. Talking about the threat to Israel's existence is a canard, a way to invoke terrible images that have little to no chance whatsoever of happening. Who, would you say, are more imperiled? The Israelis, with an advanced and powerful military, nuclear weapons, and the support of the USA and the EU? Or the Palestinians, who live in a barely functioning quasi-state, with no real military, no control of their own borders, waterways, or airspace, and no real ability to determine their own future?

A solution to the Israeli/Palestinian problem has been broadly understood for a long time. Give the Palestinians true autonomy, create a landbridge between the West Bank and Gaza (and cede an equal amount of territory back to Israel), and stop the settlements. Then let the two countries interact the way any two countries with a shared border would interact. But as long as the Israeli hardline insists on keeping the Palestinians a stateless, disenfranchised people, there isn't going to be a solution.

Posted by Freddie | July 6, 2008 10:59 AM

These debates don't get settled at least in part because the opposing sides don't even speak the same language.

For example, those who don't favor the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state would have to let out a little snort when reading that Freddie refers to Benny Morris as a conservative Israeli historian.

For those who don't have Israeli historians at their fingertips (and, really, you should all be ashamed of that ignorance), this is roughly like referring to Barack Obama as a conservative American politician. It makes sense if you think of Noam Chomsky as mainstream and the Democratic party as conservative.

Posted by Howard | July 6, 2008 12:59 PM

Freddie: Does Hamas have the right to exist?

Posted by Bill Nelson | July 6, 2008 1:15 PM

Bill: Do the Palestinians have a right to exist?

Posted by ScentOfViolets | July 6, 2008 1:35 PM

Of course Hamas has a right to exist. They do not have the right to bomb innocent Israelis, just like the IDF exists but lacks the right to murder innocent Palestinians.

Howard, it is simply a historical non-starter to say that Palestine was deserted in 1947, or "the late 1800s", or at any other time. That notion has been utterly debunked. Whatever semantic discussion you want to get into, acknowledge that simple fact.

Posted by Freddie | July 6, 2008 2:26 PM

Why do you think that Israel has to excuse her existence? Israel is an existing state and from that point of time there is no doubt or question regarding her right to exist. Just think that we will raise the question of justification of the existence of the US as white-European entity that had been forced on its Indian inhabitants.
The desire to create a Jewish state for Jews had been arised since 19th century and Zionism was its political body strived to implement the notion. At that time there wasn;t any Palestine nor Arab Palestinian people. As a matter of fact the British occupier of the land renewed it's Roman's name "Palestine" while that name was tied and linked to Jews only.
As Zionism succeeded in mission to bring more Jews to Palestine, Arabs from all vicinity poured into that land asking for jobs or escaping Arab dictators. Until 1948 all Palestine inhabitants were "Palestinians", Jews, Arabs and others.

Israel is the national state of the Jewish people. What national state is the US FOR? The new Hispano comers? With all respect to Christopher Hitchens his personal wishfull thinking is not an issue to influence or determine the nature of states in that world. Israel is a democracy; she is the national state of the Jewish people and a free state to non Jews. Those who interpret "Jewish state" as cleric one are wrong. Some delibretly misuse that falsehood claim in order to deliberately and fraudulently smear Israel. Israel is the Jewish national state as Britain is the national British state. Most Israelis are Jews as most British are Brits.

3Judaism is nationality and religion together and has nothing to do with ethnicity.
Arab Palestinians are denied their right of nationalhood. They already have their national state called Jorden (the eastern part of Palestine). Those who denied their right to full sovernity on their own land – in the western part of Palestine are the Jews. Anti Israeli activists not only oppose Israel's rights to here own lands in Judea and Samaria (as called by many "occupied land") but also the very existence of Israel at the first place, and by that giving the Arabs the 23th state, and the Arab Palestinians the whole of Palestine. This solution is mission impossible and will be the reason for further continuation the conflict.

No residents are given substantially more rights than others, according to ethnicity or according to what ever you wish. In Israel all are equal before the law, yet there are some duties that part of the population are not obliged to, such as most of Arab and exetreme religious Jews are not serving in the army. They can serve by their own will and volunteering but they are not forced to. The law considers their own religious and national emotions. But both enjoy fair and open opportunities as the other population. In some areas of employment there is fixing apparatus of recruiting personal for public and private jobs.

Posted by Abe Bird | July 6, 2008 3:32 PM

Freddie,

I'll concede your point since it's not really much of a concession... my point was a very narrow one and not related to the factual matter of the 1947 situation.

I think all of your comments continue to illustrate that Megan's broad claim is very sound. You're not going to win the "who's the biggest victim" argument and it's unclear why that game should be played.

Mainstream Israeli society and lots of American supporters of Israel recognize that the plight of the Palestinians is not, to understate matters, great. That concession means very little though to fair-minded thinkers who support Israel because it changes nothing about the policy question of how it is appropriate to deal with the existing conflict.

Acknowledging that there are some at least partly sound reasons behind why Palestinians celebrate when their children successfully blow themselves up in Israeli pizza parlors somehow doesn't change the fact that creating a single state including both peoples is rather a nonstarter. And supporters of the Palestinian cause do the Palestinians no favors by constantly apologizing for such acts (or issuing mealy-mouthed condemnations constantly connecting them to Israeli actions).

As to why Americans are so foolish that they would support Israel even when those who don't do so claim that it's not in our national interest, I guess all I can say is that Americans have a moderately long memory. We remember who was handing out candy and whooping it up on September 11th... and it wasn't the Israelis.

Posted by Howard | July 6, 2008 4:01 PM

It's remarkable that, still, lefty do-gooders think the reason Palestinians have been living in refugee camps for sixty years is that the world is insufficiently lefty and do-goodery to them. As if it makes perfect sense to sit in a refugee camp for six decades, if the people who won the war are being mean.

Posted by Brown Label Commenter | July 6, 2008 4:46 PM

Freddie, you raise some basic points of the conflict which I doubt if many people really know the facts regarding these issues. Let me answer you briefly on each issue.
1. You are right, Palestine wasn't realy emprt. There were small portion of (a) Arabs city's dwellers which are the hard core of what we call now the "Palestinian people", we had small Jewish communities at the same 5-6 major cities, and there were (b) "Falahin" (rural workers in Arabic) which were brought from all the Othoman empire to work in the "Effendi's" (land owner) lands on part of the open vallies. The "Effedis" were Arabs from around Palestine, mainly sitting in Syria and Lebanon and they bought the lands fron the Turkish Othoman empire. The third kind of Arabs were the (c) Beduins, Saudi origin, that were usually wondred from area to area in the ME, before they stoped their habit in the 20th century and settled in tents and tin sheds (one can see it even these days in Israel and all the ME). After Zionism created villages, jobs and opportunities from the end of the 19th century and after some Muslims escaped their home states (in the begining of the 20th cent. Muslims arrived at Palestine even from Albania, Bosnia, Sudan, India… and more far places! One more representative fact is that since 1840 the biggest population group in Jerusalem are the Jews.
2. Arabs had political control of the region before the 16th century. But the land of Israel (the Arabs didn't call this land Palestine) never considered to be independent but called "Southern Syria". Although Arabs had opportunities to create a state their they didn't do it because it wasn't considered in their eyes as worthwhile / legitimate. No Arab leader thought or talked about a genuine and visible "Arab Palestinian people" at that time. The first time that Arabs spoke about "Arab Palestinian people" was only after Israel was created.
3. National and religions states' identities are the basic of the Europeam modern national states, even after they created the European unity. Arab states are much more extremist in their national and religious obidiant and symbolism than any others Christian state and one Jewish state. Why all states can preserve and sefend their own national values but Jews can't according to your observation? I think that Britain is mainly Anglicanean and Spain, France and Italy Catholic just because the main religious group is so. But Britain is British too from the national point of view, as Spain is Spanish, France is French and Italy is Italian. What should we do that the nationality of the Jewish people is Judaism, exactly as you call their religion? So it is right to call Israel a Jewish sytate exactly as France is a French state.
4. Wht realy aggravate you? Arab Palestinians never accepted the right of the Jewish Palestinians to create their own national states. Even today the "moderate" Fatah fraction still deosn't recignise Israel the right to exist as the "Jewish state". So said Abu Mazen some months ago. Nor the HAMAS recognizes or will recognize Israel right to exist. Those decleration put all the peace process, what ever it is, as superfluous and unnecessary. The fact that Israel is a stable state and dominant shouldn't play against her. If Iran, Hizballah, Hamas and other extreme and militant groups in the Islamic world want to annihilate Israel, and they keep trying it on daily basis, and threat to launch attacks when ready, I think that Israel has the full obligation and duty to do what ever she needs to do in appropriate time and efforts to hold her vicious enemies back. Who are more imperiled? The world's grand power US or the extreme Islamic militant groups? The US has the best army in the world (realy? I doubt!), the largest nuclear arsenal and support of Israel and the US, Or the Islamic militant groups that hide in the Afgahn moumtains and the Somali deserts, in the underground of Europe and the University faculties in the US? I would say that the question is not whom is stronger on the paper, but what is the intensions and will of all parts involved. Al-Qaida is a placard name for all Islamic negative forces vowed from it's own perspective to forward the Islamic revolution and conquering the "Dahr el-Harb" (the area of the war and infidels). So the Arab Palestinians see their mission to destroy Israel (the "Zionist entity" as code name for their annihilating mission) and drive out or kill the Jews in order to acpmplish their mission to Islamise the last non-Islamic part in the "Dahr al-Salam" (the area of accomplishment the Islamic conquest). Israel can give more lands to the Arabs but it won't end the battle as long as the Muslims Arab will see the Jews in Israel as the new crusaders, as they still do.

Posted by Abe Bird | July 6, 2008 4:55 PM

OK, Freddie, you said: "But the fundamental ethnic and religious character of Israel I don't think has an inherent right to exist."

And you also said, "Of course Hamas has a right to exist."

But Hamas is an entirely religious (and for that matter, explicitly genocidal) body.

How do you reconcile this?

Posted by Bill Nelson | July 6, 2008 4:58 PM

"The Palestinians didn't have anything to do with the holocaust."

Unless you consider the Palestinian mufti causing the death of 400,000 hungarian jews not having "anything to do with the holocaust".

Scroll to the bottom past the rest of the Mufti's collaboration with Hitler.

http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/nazis.html

Posted by Dave | July 6, 2008 5:05 PM

This is a common tactic around here. Someone brings up a factually incorrect point (Palestine was empty before Israeli occupation), I respond to the factually incorrect point (Palestine in fact was not even close to empty), and then I'm accused of making some sort of larger claim because I responded to the factually incorrect point (you're trying to play "who's the bigger victim!". I didn't bring up the question of who's the bigger victim; I disputed specific incorrect historical claims.

Everyone's favorite kind of foreign policy BS rears its head again, relative morality. Why, Israel's occupation is less immoral than the Holocaust/Saudi Arabian sharia/bad Arab group X/bad thing Arab group X did. But that's not how morality functions, to me. No one is made more or less moral in comparison to other people. The question of Israel's righteousness is an independent question of whether or not they are more or less righteous than any other body, and it's the question I'm interested in asking in this context. (And, by the way, I didn't bring it up.) Now, you're free to go with a different moral framework. But this is genuinely understood to be a pretty basic notion of morality. Children on the playground know that "well Johnny did X" is not an acceptable excuse for other bad behavior.

But Hamas is an entirely religious (and for that matter, explicitly genocidal) body.

How do you reconcile this?

Hamas is a political origin with a religious character. I reject the religious character while supporting the right of the political body to exist. Saying that I support the right of the political body to exist in no way, shape or form says that I support the political body. I support the right of NAMBLA to exist while utterly disagreeing with the organization. See? I don't want Hamas to be a religious party, and in point of fact I'd be pretty jolly if Hamas as it exists now would just go away. But my country doesn't spend billions of dollars a year supporting Hamas, we don't have a truly unique relationship with Hamas in terms of military and intelligence co-operation, and we don't actively diplomatically shield Hamas from the influence of international bodies. All of those things are true of Israel's relationship with the United States, and as this is still a democracy, I am still responsible for disagreeing with Israel's government when they do thinks I find immoral or unwise-- even given my absolute devotion to Israel's right to security and prosperity.

And, as I've said before, Israel is a robust, functioning democracy. It has the capacity to be changed with standard democratic reforms. That isn't true of most of the bad actors that you guys have named.

Look, I can spell out for you guys why I'm opposed to theocracy or national ethnic identities, but I'd really just be giving you the basics of democracy, liberal values, human rights and the Enlightenment. We're talking Declaration of Independence, basic rights of man stuff. These things are considered pretty elementary.

Posted by Freddie | July 6, 2008 6:05 PM

So the all the progressive do-gooders here question Israel's right to exist because they oppress the poor old Palestinians. I guess the Arab countries get a pass because they expelled their Jewish populations long ago.

So if Israel expells their Palestinians like Egypt did their Jews, then that would be OK, right?

Right?

Posted by maguro | July 6, 2008 6:11 PM

So the all the progressive do-gooders here question Israel's right to exist because they oppress the poor old Palestinians.

Name a single commenter here who doesn't support Israel's right to exist.

Posted by Freddie | July 6, 2008 6:26 PM

I think Bruce Springsteen said it in Atlantic City. "Down here its just winners and losers and don't get caught on the wrong side of that line." Israel knows very well it and no other nation has a right to exist. That's why they have nukes, racist immigration policies, and take bellicose stands against people and nations they fear might be a threat to their existence (what do you think we'd do if Canada bombed one of our nuclear reactors). The question is whether the rest of the world (read Great Powers) should support them. Since Israel's political and cultural institutions are much closer to a good number of Great Powers (read the US and EU) than the nations around them, we tend to cut them a lot of slack. Morally, Israel is in the weeds, but who the hell isn't (well Canada sort of, didn't they actually hand over a chunk of the country to some indigenous peoples). That said, there comes a point where you just can't cross certain lines--look at South Africa. Israel is staring this sort of line in the face and I bet they are scared as hell. No one wants to be a minority in an illiberal democracy, even moreso in Israel with the holocaust of WW2 burned deep into the national consciousness.

Posted by themightypuck | July 6, 2008 6:35 PM

Name a single commenter here who doesn't support Israel's right to exist.

Freddie said: "But the fundamental ethnic and religious character of Israel I don't think has an inherent right to exist."

Memory giving you a bit of trouble?

Posted by maguro | July 6, 2008 6:41 PM

Memory giving you a bit of trouble?

Cognition giving you a bit of trouble? I have said and continue to say that Israel has a right to exist. I don't think that it has a right to exist as a specifically Jewish state, because I don't think states should have either dominant ethnic groups or state religions, on basic democratic grounds. What do you find so hard to understand about that?

Posted by Freddie | July 6, 2008 6:51 PM

Here is the deal. The Israel that you think has a right to exist is not the Israel that exists in the real world today. That country does have a fundamental religious character, like it or not. It is not a northern european secular democracy.

What I get from you is: Sure, it would be fine for Israel to exist if it just folowed my guidelines for a just state. If you choose not to accept Israel's legitimacy as a state, that is your prerogative but you can't fudge the issue by saying they'd have a right to exist if they just did A, B and C.

Back to the original point. When weighing Israel's moral position, is any allowance made for the fact that Israel's neighbors ethnically cleansed their own Jewish populations?

Posted by maguro | July 6, 2008 7:12 PM

Israel has a right to exist for the same reason that the USA has that right: they are collectively prepared to defend themselves. They formed a political entity through the franchise. Their government derives its just power from the consent of their governed citizens, expressed by voting, which is more than you can say for most of their neighbors. My impression is that they are committed to their fellow citizens and are strongly defended. Hostile cryptofacist despots in Syria and Iran should reflect upon what might transpire if they attempt to make good on their threats of ethnic liquidation.

Older Israeli citizens have no trouble recalling what happened the last time they followed a strategy of appeasement. Just say that it didn't work out real well for them. For several years, I shared an office with a fellow who had been captured and imprisoned by Mr. Hitler. He had no remaining delusions.

Posted by wGraves | July 6, 2008 7:48 PM

What I get from you is: Sure, it would be fine for Israel to exist if it just folowed my guidelines for a just state. If you choose not to accept Israel's legitimacy as a state, that is your prerogative but you can't fudge the issue by saying they'd have a right to exist if they just did A, B and C.

I'm curious. Do Palestinians have the right to exist? Do they have the right not to be bulldozed off of their land, their houses leveled, their possessions crushed into the dirt? Or is this one of those things that Israel gets to do because 'it has the right to exist'?

What isn't Israel allowed to do because 'it has the right to exist'? Really, that phrase is just so much semantic chaff. Do _you_ have the right to exist?

Back to the original point. When weighing Israel's moral position, is any allowance made for the fact that Israel's neighbors ethnically cleansed their own Jewish populations?

You seem to have a slight comprehension problem. The original thesis was that injustices were done in the creation of the state, but all those injustices are in the past and we've just got to live with it.

That thesis has long since been refuted; Israel still commits massive human rights abuses every day. All you're doing at this point is trying to move the goalposts.

I'll say it again: Israel is committing massive human rights abuses. Every day. Deal with it.

Posted by ScentOfViolets | July 6, 2008 8:30 PM

Hamas is a political origin with a religious character. I reject the religious character while supporting the right of the political body to exist.

No, Hamas; aka The Islamic Resistant Movement, is a religious organization.

From the Hamas Charter:

"Allah is its goal, the Prophet its model, the Qur’an its Constitution, Jihad its path and death for the case of Allah its most sublime belief."

"The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!"

Note, incidentally, that the above does not cite "Israel", but explicitly demands the genocide of Jews.

And yet, only Israel's right to exist is questioned. Not that of Hamas. Nor Saudi Arabia. Nor Egypt (a huge recipient of US aid), Etc.

Freddy's somewhat conflicting reasons for his views..

- Israel has a religious component
- Israel is a democracy
- Israel mistreats other people
- Israel is not a "bad actor"
- Israel receives American aid
- Etc., etc., etc...

..also apply to many other countries -- but other countries are not subject to such scrutiny.

Only Israel is.

I wonder why.

Posted by Bill Nelson | July 6, 2008 8:42 PM

Say Bill, you never did answer my question as to whether or not the Palestinians have a right to exist.

I wonder why.

Posted by ScentOfViolets | July 6, 2008 8:45 PM

Say Bill, you never did answer my question as to whether or not the Palestinians have a right to exist.

Everyone has the right to exist. Or, more exactly, no one has the right to initiate violence to end the existence of anyone else.

That includes Palestinians, Israelis, Jews, Muslims, the person preaching Jesus, the person shouting into a cell phone, you, me, Freddie, and everyone else.

I take it that you agree?

Posted by Bill Nelson | July 6, 2008 8:58 PM

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