September 28, 2003

Ahmad Samih Khalidi says that Arabs cannot accept the existence of Israel: But that is not all; the moral terms of Palestinian-Israeli debate have also changed. Thus former Mossad head and national security adviser Ephraim Halevy believes that Israel's real post-Oslo mistake has been to accept a trade-off whereby the Israelis acknowledge Palestinian rights (such as that of "statehood"), while the Palestinians merely concede contingent realities which, by implication, they could overturn at a later date. Henceforth, he says, the Palestinians must accept Israeli-Jewish rights, and the moral legitimacy of their presence in Palestine. But there are no conceivable circumstances in which any Palestinian can concede their own history in favour of the Zionist narrative. It would mean that they would have to accept that for 1,400 years the Arab-Muslim presence in Palestine was transient and unlawful, and based on the false premise that continuity of habitation conferred rights of ownership. Furthermore, the Palestinians would have to accept that the pulverisation of Arab Palestine in 1948, and the 50-odd years of subsequent dispersal and occupation, are the rightful outcome of an illegal struggle against the real owners of the land. Simply put, Halevy wants Palestinians to become good Zionists. Palestinians cannot confer legitimacy on the Zionist narrative and should not be asked to do so, or vice versa However this is their problem. Demanding the end of Israel as a Jewish state is not a path for peace but a continued declaration of war. He also writes: One can almost hear the sheer panic in former prime minister Ehud Barak's voice as he argues that the Palestinians may demand not two states for two peoples, but one state west of the Jordan river: "But," he warns, "that single state will have to be in the spirit of the 21st century: democratic, secular, one-man, one-vote. One-man, one-vote? Remind you of something? Yes. South Africa. And that's no accident. It's precisely their intention." As it happens, having espoused the two states for some three decades, the PLO and the Palestinian Authority are desperately clinging to the fading prospects of a viable partition. But let us suppose that the Palestinians do "demand" one-man, one-vote as in South Africa. What is the argument against? All these threats that if Israel were to require a few percentage of the West Bank for its security then the remaining area would be too small for a Palestinian state are just rhetoric. Israel can always claim quite convincingly that the Palestinian areas should be joined to Jordan, a country that already has a Palestinian majority. Furthermore the size of a country has never been a defining requirement for statehood, if not then Liechtenstein would face being absorbed into Germany or Switzerland. 10:19:09 PM

Why doesn’t The Guardian’s Middle East page have a link to an article about the terrorist attack that killed a Jewish seven-month-old girl and a man on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year? Well it’s The Guardian to start. Must not suggest Palestinians are anything other than victims, as opposed to in this case a brutal murder. 10:16:18 PM