‘AS SOON AS certain topics are raised,” George Orwell once wrote, “the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.” Such a combination of vagueness and sheer incompetence in language, Orwell warned, leads to political conformity.

No issue better illustrates Orwell’s point than coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the United States. Consider, for example, the editorial in The Times on Feb. 9 demanding that the Palestinians “recognize Israel” and its “right to exist.” This is a common enough sentiment — even a cliche. Yet many observers (most recently the international lawyer John Whitbeck) have pointed out that this proposition, assiduously propagated by Israel’s advocates and uncritically reiterated by American politicians and journalists, is — at best — utterly nonsensical.

First, the formal diplomatic language of “recognition” is traditionally used by one state with respect to another state. It is literally meaningless for a non-state to “recognize” a state. Moreover, in diplomacy, such recognition is supposed to be mutual. In order to earn its own recognition, Israel would have to simultaneously recognize the state of Palestine. This it steadfastly refuses to do (and for some reason, there are no high-minded newspaper editorials demanding that it do so).

Second, which Israel, precisely, are the Palestinians being asked to “recognize?” Israel has stubbornly refused to declare its own borders. So, territorially speaking, “Israel” is an open-ended concept. Are the Palestinians to recognize the Israel that ends at the lines proposed by the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan? Or the one that extends to the 1949 Armistice Line (the de facto border that resulted from the 1948 war)? Or does Israel include the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which it has occupied in violation of international law for 40 years — and which maps in its school textbooks show as part of “Israel”?

For that matter, why should the Palestinians recognize an Israel that refuses to accept international law, submit to U.N. resolutions or readmit the Palestinians wrongfully expelled from their homes in 1948 and barred from returning ever since?

If none of these questions are easy to answer, why are such demands being made of the Palestinians? And why is nothing demanded of Israel in turn?

Orwell was right. It is much easier to recycle meaningless phrases than to ask — let alone to answer — difficult questions. But recycling these empty phrases serves a purpose. 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.

Actually, it asks even more. Israel wants the Palestinians, half of whom were driven from their homeland so that a Jewish state could be created in 1948, to recognize not merely that it exists (which is undeniable) but that it is “right” that it exists — that it was right for them to have been dispossessed of their homes, their property and their livelihoods so that a Jewish state could be created on their land. The Palestinians are not the world’s first dispossessed people, but they are the first to be asked to legitimize what happened to them.

A just peace will require Israelis and Palestinians to reconcile and recognize each other’s rights. It will not require that Palestinians give their moral seal of approval to the catastrophe that befell them. Meaningless at best, cynical and manipulative at worst, such a demand may suit Israel’s purposes, but it does not serve The Times or its readers.

And yet The Times consistently adopts Israel’s language and, hence, its point of view. For example, a recent article on Israel’s Palestinian minority referred to that minority not as “Palestinian” but as generically “Arab,” Israel’s official term for a population whose full political and human rights it refuses to recognize. To fail to acknowledge the living Palestinian presence inside Israel (and its enduring continuity with the rest of the Palestinian people) is to elide the history at the heart of the conflict — and to deny the legitimacy of Palestinian claims and rights.

This is exactly what Israel wants. Indeed, its demand that its “right to exist” be recognized 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.

In uncritically adopting Israel’s own fraught terminology — a form of verbal erasure designed to extend the physical destruction of Palestine — The Times is taking sides.

If the paper wants its readers to understand the nature of this conflict, however, it should not go on acting as though only one side has a story to tell.

Saree Makdisi, a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, writes frequently about the Middle East.

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times

Derek and anyone else who is so convinced that Israel has made an effort to a sttlement with the Palestinians needs to read the transcript of the discussion between former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami and Prof. Norman Finklestein . I beleive that 99.9% of Americans do not have a grasp of the facts relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Please refer to the link.

But is anyone still oblivious to the reason why? For the candidates, there seems nothing to discuss and nothing new to take a position on. The overwhelming majority of the House and Senate of the United States, the White House and the State Department, and most of all the Defense Department have all endorsed Israeli policies of unilateral action in the Occupied Territories. They have kept a blind eye to the following: 40 years of occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; building of illegal settlements; building of large settlement blocks surrounding Jerusalem on confiscated Arab Lands such as Jabal Abu Ghnaim; building of the wall that confiscates more land, water aquifers and cuts through Palestinian towns and villages(the wall when finished, will encircle the Palestinian in an Israeli sea); house demolitions to restrict the growth of cities and towns; targeted assassinations from the air; border closures and crossings; installing and keeping 754 road blocks in the West Bank alone to control the movement of the Palestinian population; destruction of Palestinian infrastructure; nightly raids on towns and villages and taking of prisoners for whom there is no hope of trial or release; refusing to negotiate with a legitimately elected Palestinian Government and now with a Saudi brokered unity government.

American Administrations ( except possibly the Carter Administration) have failed to have the will to confront the Israeli occupation (like they did with Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait with a swift coalition). They have supported Israeli violations of International law and protected Israel via more than 35 vetoes in the Security Council in favor of Israel. They have long made the decision quietly to allow Israel to take over the Occupied Territories. They have never taken seriously the Saudi Plan of March of 2003 when 22 Arab Nations pledged to make peace with Israel, normalize relations and open borders and trade on condition of Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 border.

This is a cruel and grave injustice constantly being perpetrated against the Palestinian People. The consequences of silent inaction and laissez faire policies are now becoming crystal clear. To use Condoleezza Rice’s metaphor of human reproduction, American foreign policy on Palestine has only been thus far a miscarriage.

http://pcapostate.blogspot.com/2006/06/its-jews-stupid.html

Sarah, is that the same Amir Taheri who told us that Iran was making their Jews wear yellow stars? The one who is represented by Benador Associates? That one?

Iranian born journalist Amir Taheri wrote an article recently that absolutely floored me. It was titled “IS ISRAEL THE PROBLEM?” He uses this question as a vehicle to examine the “realist” foreign policy assumptions of James Baker III that solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem would magically bring peace to the Mideast. Baker could have made the effort to learn about the region and discover the actual causes behind its atrophy and discontent. Baker decided to blame it all on Israel, not once but twice.

Here’s Taheri’s summary of conflicts that Baker ignored: “All told, in the past six decades, this region has witnessed no fewer than 22 full-scale wars over territory and resources, not one of them having anything to do with Israel and the Palestinians. And these international disputes, as I mentioned at the outset, are quite apart from the uninterrupted string of domestic clashes, military coups, acts of sectarian and ethnic vengeance, factional terrorism, and other internal conflicts that have characterized the greater Middle East, not infrequently attaining impressive heights of cruelty and despoliation. Nor is that the end of it. Underlying all of this are the unmoving facts, documented at length in the annual volumes of the Arab Human Development Report, of chronic instability, severe economic underachievement, social atrophy, and cultural backwardness. The greater Middle East is the only part of the world still largely untouched by the wave of positive change that followed the end of the cold war.
The notion that all of these problems can be waved away by “solving” the Arab-Israeli conflict is thus at best a delusion, at worst a recipe for maintaining today’s wider political, diplomatic, and social paralysis.”

http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=1757

After all, Senator Clinton had a front row seat through the 1990s as Israel tried to negotiate in good faith with an interlocutor who never even offered unequivocal recognition of Israel’s legitimacy. Today, the Palestinian leadership does not even hide its desire to destroy the Jewish state.

Though Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has consistently endorsed a two-state solution, the recent experiences in leaving Lebanon and Gaza have sobered many Israelis and others deeply committed to peace against making concessions unreciprocated by a partner credibly committed to peace. Clearly, Senator Clinton is wise enough to be among them.

When has Israel been the impediment to establishing a Palestinian state?

From 1948 to 1967, the West Bank was administered by Jordan, not Israel, and a Palestinian state could have been established at the stroke of a pen. After the Six-Day War, Israel offered to return the newly acquired territories to the Arabs in exchange for recognition and peace; the response was a thunderous no.

More recently, Yasir Arafat was offered a state in almost all the West Bank, Gaza and parts of Jerusalem by Ehud Barak and then more generously by Bill Clinton, and turned it down because the offer did not include the destruction of Israel by flooding it with returning refugees.

Currently, the Palestinians are ruled by a government that is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. What would the agenda be in the dialogue that Mr. Kristof urges on Israel, a timetable for Israel’s committing suicide?

Fair-minded observers know where the roadblock to peace in the Middle East is to be found, and it is not Israel.

Long live truth, justice, excellence, love, beauty, and compassion. Never live an essence of lies, injustice, depravity, indifference, ugliness, and cruelty called Israel. America, stop funding this abomination called Israel.