Jewish Voice for Peace + Christian Science Monitor On the Same Page

My first of four journeys to Israel Palestine was in June 2005.

I was the Christian delegate traveling with the Muslim and Jewish founders of the 501 3-c Olive Trees Foundation for Peace.

Although I had researched the conflict for over a year and listened to the stories of a 1948 refugee from the Galilee,

Until I went to the Little Town of Bethlehem: which is OCCUPIED Territory:

That I learned: I didn't know a thing!

It is because of my intimate relationship with Jesus who rose up against the corrupt temple institution of his time and challenged the Roman occupying forces in defense of the voiceless, the outcast, the sinner, the widow and orphan,

That I do what I do.

May the following two articles illuminate what the
USA MEDIA refuse to report on:

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Jewish Voice for Peace Commentary:

This article addresses the fraught question of Hamas' failure to recognize Israel. It contextualizes Hamas' position in a number of useful ways.

First, it points out that the PLO gained nothing from submitting to international pressure to recognize Israel. Given this cautionary historical lesson, Hamas seems to want to hold recognition for Israel in reserve.

Second, Hamas officials have "accepted" if not "recognized" Israel's existence. This is not simply a factual identification ("there appears to be a large country on the left") but a political acknowledgement - Hamas has repeatedly said that it will stop its attacks if Israel withdraws to the Green Line.

Finally, the article addresses the question of Hamas' Islamic fundamentalism. It argues that Hamas has evolved over the past 20 years; it has eased up on the fundamentalist rhetoric, and is integrating Islam with democratic institutions in a way that the Bush administration (for instance) is ideologically committed to thinking impossible. Western media has also been ignoring both this trend and the politically significant gestures towards accommodation and conciliation coming from the Hamas leadership. As a result, the media paints an overly pessimistic picture of Hamas' fundamentalism and intransigence.

Underlying Hamas' position is, of course, Israel's refusal to recognize both the legitimacy of the Hamas government and the border separating Israel proper from a future Palestinian state (i.e. the Green Line). This is a point of contention where international pressure might be more usefully applied. -Jewish Voice for Peace commentary

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The Sunni Islamists' changing agendas

What Hamas Really Wants

Paul Delmotte

http://mondediplo.com/2007/01/05hamas

Tension remains high in Gaza because of clashes between Fatah and Hamas militants, which increased when Mahmoud Abbas decided to hold new presidential and parliamentary elections. One of the main sticking points is Hamas's refusal to recognise Israel formally.

THE failure to form a Palestinian coalition government again raises the question of why Hamas persists, despite considerable pressure at home and abroad, in refusing to recognise Israel officially and explicitly. The first answer, which is rarely discussed, is that Hamas is convinced that recognition would be a pointless concession.

It has not forgotten that for decades the international community pressured the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Fatah, both secular bodies, to make the same concession: they were given nothing in return, neither a Palestinian state nor a capital in East Jerusalem. Worse, Israel did not accept any responsibility for the Palestinian exodus of 1947-49 nor did it recognise the right of return (or the entitlement to compensation) of some 5 million refugees.

In March 2006 the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, announced a unilateral programme of withdrawal from occupied territory, stipulating that Israel intended to keep 36.5% of the West Bank, not including East Jerusalem and the Jordan valley. This represented almost half of the 22% of the post-1949 Palestine on which Yasser Arafat had hoped to build a Palestinian state. Hamas consequently seems to have decided to stick to the position the PLO defended in the 1970s and 1980s, keeping recognition for Israel in reserve, while making a succession of minor statements reflecting de facto recognition of Israel.

Many commentators maintain that Hamas's radical stance is due entirely to its Islamist world view. As the researchers Bruno Guigue (1) and Khaled Hroub (2) have often pointed out, this analysis of Hamas policy is based only on its charter, published in August 1988.

Hroub has analysed in detail three key documents published by Hamas since the charter: its autumn 2005 election manifesto, Change and Reform; its March 2006 draft programme for a government of national unity; and the government programme presented by the Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, to the new parliament on 27 March 2006. Hroub points out that Hamas is now a different organisation from the Hamas that took shape at the beginning of the first intifada in December 1987.

Democratic concerns

According to Hroub, Hamas now claims to be concerned about political freedom: freedom of expression, press and association; pluralism; the separation of powers; and due electoral process. It also wants to build a proper civil society and uphold minority rights. Between the first and third documents, the number of religious references decreases and the theme of armed struggle disappears almost completely (3) to make room for matters of governance and civil reform. There is also a noticeable change towards the "two states for two peoples" solution and in the attitude of Hamas towards international agreements on Palestine.

Western media and government bodies have not publicised any of these documents.

Hroub notes that of the 13 items in the manifesto addressing legislative and judicial policy, only the first, which stipulates that Islamic law should be the principal source of legislation, has attracted any public attention; it prompted fears of an Islamic society. The 12 other items, which do not mention Islam, have gone unnoticed.

Guigue writes: "On an issue as essential as the Islamic status of Palestine it is striking that the election manifesto makes passing reference to Qur'anic tradition, without dwelling on the topic." He also finds it significant that the manifesto should refer to United Nations resolutions when condemning Israel's illegal occupation. He writes that this does not mean that Hamas is ready officially to recognise the state of Israel, a requirement that also features in several UN resolutions. But explicit appeals for compliance with international law "will sooner or later lead to accepting all the [attendant] consequences".

As for the programme for a national unity government, its preamble recalls the need to preserve non-negotiable national imperatives: an end to occupation; the right of return; the right to resistance in all forms; the construction of an independent and fully sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital; and the rejection of partial solutions.

Setting aside the fact that these priorities are common to all Palestinian organisations, including those that the international community is prepared to endorse, many clauses in the programme reflect the efforts of Hamas to make allowance for international demands, even if they fall short of fulfilling all its requirements.

Hroub maintains that the programme as a whole hinges on a two-state solution, referring to territory occupied in 1967 without any mention of liberating the whole of Palestine or destroying Israel, as was the case in the charter. He notes that the government platform of 27 March shows no sign of backtracking on the ideas outlined in the programme of national unity. This is significant, for by this stage the other political organisations had rejected plans for a coalition. The platform consequently only concerned Hamas, which had no further need for concessions.

Stifling Palestine

The silence that has greeted the texts published by Hamas should prompt questions about the international community and the European Union. The obsession with Hamas's Islamist leanings was not the only the justification for the decision to impose economic sanctions on the Palestinians unless they unilaterally renounced their part in the violence and officially recognised Israel (without any gesture being demanded of Israel), but it made it easier to convince public opinion of the need for sanctions.

Commentators in the United States and Europe have been quick to condemn the shocking remarks about Israel and the Holocaust made by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (4), since October 2005. But their swift response has distracted attention from the positive reception that his words enjoyed in the Middle East, and farther afield. What Ahmadinejad made explicit with these remarks (at least as they were understood by some in his Arab and Muslim audience) was that recognition or denial of the reality of the Holocaust was less important than the idea that, 60 years after the Nazi genocide, the West still uses it, along with Zionism, to justify the fate of the Palestinian Arabs.

Several years ago the Israeli historian Dan Diner identified three orders of legitimacy for Israel, to which he allocated degrees of universality (5). He classified Zionist legitimacy as unilateral, because it was only valid for Jews, being based on a promise by God to the Jews (6). He acknowledged that Jewish legitimacy, rooted in the horror of the Holocaust, was only partly universal. He rated Israeli legitimacy as universal since, in his view, it was based on Israel's irrevocable right to exist because it already did exist.

We may acknowledge this Israeli legitimacy and conclude, as Maxime Rodinson did, that "the rights derived from making good use of land, from work done and from personal sacrifice are the only ones that may be validly invoked" (7). In which case, we may ask why Palestinians are not entitled to such rights.

Recogition is a two-way street

The legitimacy of Israel is only likely to be recognised, particularly in the Arab and Muslim world, if it is unbreakably linked with universal legitimacy for Palestine. In resolution 181 of 29 November 1947, on the partition of Palestine under the British mandate, the UN General Assembly jointly recognised the legitimacy of two independent states.

It might be helpful to recall the legitimacy granted by the UN to Israel. The international community seems to be suffering from amnesia in demanding that Hamas recognise Israel unconditionally. There is no longer any question at the UN of the 44% of the territory covered by the mandate, offered (8) to the Arab state of Palestine under resolution 181. Nor yet of resolution 194 covering the Palestinian refugees' right of return and entitlement to compensation.

By locking itself in this omission and making de jure recognition of Israel an obligation the EU is digging itself deeper into a hole. It will soon be unable to frame an overall strategy, backed by political proposals, to convince Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims that the West has decided to end double standards.

The Israeli journalist Amira Hass once joked that Hamas extremists think that Allah will give Palestine back to the Arab world and Islam in 50 years, whereas their more moderate brothers think it will take five centuries. As long ago as 1995 Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (9) offered Israel a long-term truce in exchange for a Palestinian state on the West Bank and in Gaza. In 2004 he added that, if this was achieved, he would leave the rest of the occupied territories to history.

Senior Hamas leaders have repeated this offer since and allowance should be made for such statements. They seem to confirm Guigue's view that Hamas has come to "tacitly accept a share-out of Palestine on the basis of the borders as they stood before the 1967 war".

It took Fatah 20 years to make this acceptance official. Europe's lack of political courage since Hamas first made these concessions is partly to blame for the collapse of subsequent negotiations. Given Israel's persistently intransigent attitude and the worsening tension in the Middle East, it is urgent that the international community act and work towards a solution based on Hamas's de facto recognition of Israel.

"The international community," writes Guigue, "must finally show that its resolutions are serious, after 40 years of conniving with Israel".

-Translated by Harry Forster

*Paul Delmotte teaches international politics at the Brussels Institute of Social Communication Studies (IHECS) and lectures at Brussels Free University (ULB)

(1) http://www.oumma.com, 27 March 2006. Bruno Guigue is the author of Proche-Orient: la guerre des mots, L'Harmattan, Paris, 2003.

(2) "A new Hamas through its new documents", Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. XXXV, n° 4, Washington, DC, summer 2006. Khaled Hroub is a specialist on Hamas and author of Hamas: Political Thought and Practice, Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington DC, 2000.

(3) In Change and Reform, only a few passages mention "armed struggle" and they lump it together with all the means Hamas considers legitimate to end the occupation. In the government platform of March 2006, Hroub points out that it is highly significant that the main reference to resistance underlines its importance in the past.

(4) On 11-12 December the Iranian authorities organised a conference in Tehran emphasising denials that the Holocaust happened. During it Ahmadinejad said that Israel "would soon disappear".

(5) See "Les trois légitimités d'Israël", Le Monde, 18 19 August 2002. Diner teaches history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Jewish history and culture at Leipzig University.

(6) It is simplistic to consider a "divine promise" as the basis for the Zionist movement, which was secular at the outset.

(7) Maxime Rodinson, Peuple juif ou problème juif?, La Découverte, Paris, 1997.

(8) The Arabs of Palestine accounted for 66% of the total population. The UN allocated 56% of the land to the Jewish community which then numbered 650,000. In 1948-9 Israel seized half of the remaining 44%.

(9) Founder of Hamas in 1987. He was killed in a deliberate Israeli attack on 22 March 2004.

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

by John V. Whitbeck

Christian Science Monitor
2 February 2007

[JEDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA] Since the Palestinian elections in 2006, Israel and much of the West have asserted that the principal obstacle to any progress toward Israeli-Palestinian peace is the refusal of Hamas to "recognize Israel," or to "recognize Israel's existence," or to "recognize Israel's right to exist."

These three verbal formulations have been used by Israel, the United States, and the European Union as a rationale for collective punishment of the Palestinian people. The phrases are also used by the media, politicians, and even diplomats interchangeably, as though they mean the same thing. They do not.

"Recognizing Israel" or any other state is a formal legal and diplomatic act by one state with respect to another state. It is inappropriate -indeed, nonsensical - to talk about a political party or movement extending diplomatic recognition to a state. To talk of Hamas "recognizing Israel" is simply to use sloppy, confusing, and deceptive shorthand for the real demand being made of the Palestinians.

"Recognizing Israel's existence" appears on first impression to involve a relatively straightforward acknowledgment of a fact of life. Yet there are serious practical problems with this language.

What Israel, within what borders, is involved?

Is it the 55 percent of historical Palestine recommended for a Jewish state by the UN General Assembly in 1947?

The 78 percent of historical Palestine occupied by the Zionist movement in 1948 and
now viewed by most of the world as "Israel" or "Israel proper"?

The 100 percent of historical Palestine occupied by Israel since June 1967 and shown
as "Israel" (without any "Green Line") on maps in Israeli schoolbooks?

Israel has never defined its own borders, since doing so would necessarily place limits on them.

Still, if this were all that was being demanded of Hamas, it might be possible for the ruling political party to acknowledge, as a fact of life, that a state of Israel exists today within some specified
borders. Indeed, Hamas leadership has effectively done so in recent weeks.

"Recognizing Israel's right to exist," the actual demand being made of Hamas and Palestinians, is in an entirely different league. This formulation does not address diplomatic formalities or a simple acceptance of present realities. It calls for a moral judgment.

There is an enormous difference between "recognizing Israel's existence" and "recognizing Israel's right to exist."

From a Palestinian perspective, the difference is in the same league as the difference between asking a Jew to acknowledge that the Holocaust happened and asking him to concede that the
Holocaust was morally justified.

For Palestinians to acknowledge the occurrence of the Nakba - the expulsion of the great majority of
Palestinians from their homeland between 1947 and 1949 - is one thing. For them to publicly concede that it was "right" for the Nakba to have happened would be something else entirely. For the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, the Holocaust and the Nakba, respectively, represent catastrophes and
injustices on an unimaginable scale that can neither be forgotten nor forgiven.

To demand that Palestinians recognize "Israel's right to exist" is to demand that a people who have been treated as subhumans unworthy of basic human rights publicly proclaim that they are subhumans.

It would imply Palestinians' acceptance that they deserve what has been done and continues to be done to them. Even 19th-century US governments did not require the surviving native Americans to publicly proclaim the "rightness" of their ethnic cleansing by European colonists as a condition precedent to even discussing what sort of land reservation they might receive.

Nor did native Americans have to live under economic blockade and threat of starvation until they shed whatever pride they had left and conceded the point.

Some believe that Yasser Arafat did concede the point in order to buy his ticket out of the wilderness of demonization and earn the right to be lectured directly by the Americans. But in fact, in his famous 1988 statement in Stockholm, he accepted "Israel's right to exist in peace and security."

This language, significantly, addresses the conditions of existence of a state which, as a matter of fact, exists. It does not address the existential question of the "rightness" of the dispossession and
dispersal of the Palestinian people from their homeland to make way for another people coming from abroad.

The original conception of the phrase "Israel's right to exist" and of its use as an excuse for not talking with any Palestinian leaders who still stood up for the rights of their people are attributed to former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It is highly likely that those countries that still employ this phrase do so in full awareness of what it entails, morally and psychologically, for the Palestinian people.

However, many people of goodwill and decent values may well be taken in by the surface simplicity of the words, "Israel's right to exist," and believe that they constitute a reasonable demand. And if the "right to exist" is reasonable, then refusing to accept it must represent perversity, rather than Palestinians' deeply felt need to cling to their self-respect and dignity as full-fledged human beings.

That this need is deeply felt is evidenced by polls showing that the percentage of the Palestinian population that approves of Hamas's refusal to bow to this demand substantially exceeds the percentage that voted for Hamas in January 2006.

Those who recognize the critical importance of Israeli-Palestinian peace and truly seek a decent future for both peoples must recognize that the demand that Hamas recognize "Israel's right to exist" is unreasonable, immoral, and impossible to meet.

Then, they must insist that this roadblock to peace be removed, the economic siege of the Palestinian territories be lifted, and the pursuit of peace with some measure of justice be resumed with the urgency it deserves.

-John V. Whitbeck, an international lawyer, is the author of, "The World According to Whitbeck." He has advised Palestinian officials in negotiations with Israel.

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