Monday, February 5, 2007
It's hard to know where to begin with this CS Monitor piece by John V. Whitbeck...Whitbeck represents exactly the kind of Westerner feeding the Arab grievance machine, encouraging them in their unwillingness to accept a non-Arab/non-Muslim state, excusing their terror (a word Whitbeck believes has no meaning) and indoctrination machine...and it's more than theoretical, as Whitbeck "has advised Palestinian officials in negotiations with Israel." This one must be read to be believed.
What 'Israel's right to exist' means to Palestinians
...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...
Whitbeck repeats the canard that Israeli schoolbooks do not show the "green line" (they do), mischaracterizes the history of population and territory in the area, compares, weakly, Palestinians to Native Americans, stating that we would never expect them to recognize the United States...not noticing that Indians are subject to Federal Law inside homelands within the USA, have signed treaties with the US Government...and that there are not many of those folks left still living as their ancestors did...and that if they had done what the Palestinians are now doing, there would, frankly, be even fewer of them.
What's bad is that there are people like Hamas supporter Whitbeck out advising Palestinians to keep up the fight...what's worse is that a paper like the Christian Science Monitor prints them.
Update: Honest Reporting discusses this piece, here:CSM: Beyond Recognition
My letter to CSM:
RE: John Whitbeck's article "What Israel's Right To Exist Means to Palestinians"
Why are you publishing Hamas propaganda?
Have you no shame?
The delegitimization of Israel is wrong and it's genocidal. The Jewish people are indigenous to the Middle East - over half Israel's Jewish population descends from the Sephardic and Mizrachi Jews who experienced pogroms, murders and expulsions and the theft of their property in the 20th century after having endured centuries of second class citizenship (at best) under Islam.
We shouldn't have to discuss what happened to the Jewish people in Europe. Yet, it seems to have slipped a few minds already.
We shouldn't be discussing the destruction of a legitimate, UN member state.
Why haven't regional solutions to the Palestinian's stateless situation been addressed? Why are we still discussing whether or not the world's only Jewish state has the right to live? Are we not discussing the probability of a genocide? Have Jews, alone among the world's nations, no rights to self-determination?
Why is the Christian Science Monitor buying into this madness?
There are any number of examples where states have been created, partitioned, populations transferred voluntarily or involuntarily. Warfare often, sadly, creates disasters.
Moreover, people MOVE. That's what people do.
The United States of America and all the other New Hemisphere states, some of which are among the most progressive in the world, wouldn't exist if people hadn't migrated here from other lands.
The people of Israel have far more inherent rights to live there than any but the indigenous American peoples have to live HERE or anywhere else in this hemisphere.
It is horrifying to me that the absurd irony of the Islamist position isn't noted anywhere in their propaganda - all that's needed to see how ridiculous this is, is an brief examination of a map, a brief study of the huge empires created under their banners.
The Turks, for example, flowed west all the way from Mongolia.
Shall we send them back?
The Arabs control 1/9 of the world's landmass and possess enormous resources - yet - no home is found for the Palestinian people, kept in refugee status for almost 60 years, until the original few hundred thousand has swelled to millions.
Yet, tiny Israel absorbed the hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern Jews whose lives were endangered after 1948, when there was no money, when there wasn't enough food, when people lived in tent cities on the naked plain.
The search for "justice" shouldn't include the destruction of a state nor the victimization of a people who have suffered enough already.
Publishing the propaganda of an organization which has committed horrendous crimes against innocent people, and which doesn't intend to stop until they've destroyed the rest, is simply not right.
Well put, Sophia.
"Whitbeck repeats the canard that Israeli schoolbooks do not show the "green line" "
Why is that so important to him? They are only the 1948 armistice lines. They are not final borders.
Funny he does not get his knickers in a twist about what is in the Palestinian school books.
Of course like the CSM his basic hatred of Jews colours everything.
By the way there is this thinking to influence CSM and its ilk which is in keeping with Hamas principles:
"UK: Pupils aged five 'poisoned' at Islamic school that 'teaches hate' "
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/015136.php
"Colin Cook, 57, says textbooks used by children as young as five at the King Fahad Academy in Acton describe Jews as "repugnant" and "apes" and Christians as "pigs"