"Do you believe in Israel's right to exist?" has replaced "What do you think about suicide bombing?" as the number one question posed to Palestinians since the past elections in the occupied territories. In fact, the Palestinians' refusal to answer the former question in the manner prescribed by their occupiers has effectively put them on Israeli government advisor Dov Weinglas's 'starvation diet,' which means thousands of Palestinian Authority workers aren't getting paid because of sanctions imposed by the US and Palestinians' own tax revenues withheld by Israel.
Of course the question remains, whether mighty Israel really gives two shakes whether the weak and occupied Palestinians recognize their "right to exist," or uses it as a cover to buy time in order to effect its continuing cantonization of the miniscule remaining patch of historic Palestine.
Some of the mainstream media, however, have dealt rather cogently with Israel's demand, sparing readers the usual mantra voiced repeatedly by politicians that Palestinians must eschew violence and recognize Israel's right to exist before they may eat a balanced diet again.
And despite Fox News' Susan Estrich, who criticised Barack Obama's debate performance for his inadvertent negligence in discharging his duties to recognize Israel's right to be our "friend," in addition to her total disregard for the Palestinians other than to blame them for their own misery, one hopes that politicians may soon pick up on the media's coming round; i.e.,the Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor, who actually opened their pages to views that don't condemn Palestinians to the irrelevance usually afforded them by politicians and the mainstream media.
In his op-ed,War of Words, in the Times, Saree Makdisi, while criticizing the Times for following Israel's lead in this "right to exist" notion, writes:
Endlessly repeating the mantra that the Palestinians don't recognize Israel helps paint Israel as an innocent victim, politely asking to be recognized but being rebuffed by its cruel enemies.
He maintains that Israel's insistence that Palestinians recognize its right to exist
reflects its own anxiety, not about its existence but about its failure to successfully eliminate the Palestinians' presence inside their homeland — a failure for which verbal recognition would serve merely a palliative and therapeutic function.
International lawyer John V. Whitbeck writes in the Christian Science Monitor that what Israel is demanding is no less than "a moral judgment."
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.
In Charles Shiro Inouye's essay, "I Remember Pearl Harbor: Dealing With the Problem Race," he maintains that Japanese-Americans who, during World War II, were destined for America's internment camps never lost their dignity, nor their self-respect.
Along with one suitcase of personal effects, dignity was something everyone took with them to the camps. The evacuation did not disgrace those who went but those who sent them.
Whitbeck elucidates the 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.
Expecting Palestinians to recognize Israel's right to exist without Israel recognizing the right of Palestinians to live in their own homeland is tantamount to asking for the right to take away not only the Palestinians' land, but also their dignity and self-respect.
Inouye, Charles Shiro. "I Remember Pearl Harbor: Dealing with the 'Problem Race,'" in Houston, Jeanne and James, Farewell to Manzanar, Evanston: McDougal Littell, 1998, 187.