Zionist hardliners have typically denied the very existence of Palestine after the creation of Israel. Indeed, it’s likely that many Jews are unaware of the true history of the basis upon which Israel was first created.
I suggested that she and her husband were perhaps confused about the non-existence of Palestine and Palestinians and they should look up the actual text of Resolution 181 which speaks of the “future Government of Palestine” and the creation of “Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem.” I reiterated that this resolution which called for Jewish and Arab states was proposed for existence WITHIN Palestine. Get it? The resolution was about the future government of PALESTINE. It did not say there is to be NO Palestine, nor did it deny the existence of Palestine. And when Ben-Gurion declared the creation of the Jewish state WITHIN Palestine, he used these exact words, “We hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish State in Palestine to be called the State of Israel.”
The great paradox about Israeli hardliners is their insistence that the world recognise Israel’s right to exist. On the face of it, this appears irrelevant seeing as Israel’s existence was internationally recognised by the International community more than half a century ago, but perhaps there is another explanation for why this matter is so frequently laboured.
Israel’s right to exist” is code for a very specific demand. It isn’t asking the Palestinians to recognize that the state of Israel exists and has the right to security within mutually agreed borders (which is essentially what the PLO has accepted). And it doesn’t mean that the Palestinians must recognize an Israeli state where Jewish and non-Jewish citizens alike enjoy full rights of citizenship (as proposed in the partition resolution of 1947, in which “Jewish Palestine” was essentially a binational state). When Israel and its supporters demand that Palestinians must “recognize Israel’s right to exist” they specifically mean that Palestinians must acknowledge Israel’s “right” to exist as a Jewish state on the lands of former Mandate Palestine.
More specifically:
When you demand that Palestinians acknowledge the “right” of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, you are asking them to say that they too think Zionism is worth all this “collateral damage”. You are asking them to acknowledge that it was and is morally right to do all the things that were and are necessary for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, even though these necessary things include their own displacement, dispossession and disenfranchisement. You are asking them to internalize the fact that they have less right to live freely on their own ancestral lands where they have lived in unbroken continuity for millenia, than an immigrant to the Middle East who, by an accident of birth, happens to have been born into a “preferred” religion.
So there you have it. A definition of “Israel’s right to exist” that you won’t find in any phrase book or encyclopedia.