[Chris Alger]

Re-written with the cast changed (and pretending it's 1985), tell me if this makes any sense to you:

"Why are Americans so angry at the Soviet Union? There are two possible reasons.
Political: They accept the existence of a Soviet state but are angry with this or that Soviet policy.
Rejectionist: They abominate the very existence of the Soviet Union and want to destroy it.
Which is correct has many implications. If Americans only want changes in what the Soviet Union is doing (such as placing missiles in Cuba), then it is reasonable to ask the Soviet Union to alter those actions - and the main burden of resolving the conflict falls on the Soviet Union.
But if the Soviet Union's existence remains at issue, then it follows that the conflict will end only when the Americans finally and irrevocably accept the Soviet state. Seen this way, the main burden falls on the Americans.
If it's a routine political dispute, diplomacy and compromise are the way to make progress. But if the Americans reject the Soviet Union's very existence, diplomacy is useless, even counterproductive, and the Soviet Union needs to convince the Americans to give up on their aggressive intentions. More bluntly, the Soviet Union would then need to defeat the Americans."

Notice how Pipes differentiates only between the desire "to destroy" Israel and a "final and irrevocable acceptance" of Israel, with no possibility of any other altenative. Why are Palestinians the only people in the world called upon to accept the preposterous logic of this argument?

You can substitute the "United States" for the Soviet Union and "American Natives" for the Palestinians and the point is perhaps more obvious: peace does not require states and parties to first acknowledge the "final" and "irrevocable" nature of their respective constitutions, or the legitimacy of their respective "existence." To do so would imply the legitimacy of each side's version of events that gave rise to the need for negotiations about peace, which obviously means that no peace could ever be negotiated. Of course Palestinians will never recognize Israel's right to expel hundreds of thousands of them from their homes and seize their property, to terrorize and tyrannize them, while turning those that remain into second class citizens of an alien ethnocracy, not even having the right to own real property. Why should they? At the same time, if the Palestinians agree to compromise and accept a portion of their former homeland as their sovereign territory, and provide meaningful guarantees for the security of Israel inside it's boundries, then why shouldn't Israel agree regardless of what the Palestinians think of the legitimacy of the Jewish state?

To make it plainer, there is no need for the U.S. to acknowledge North Korea's "right to exist" in order for North Korea to negotiate with the US, just as there was no need for the U.S. to acknowledge the Soviet Union's right to exist to negotiate arms control and other issues of peace and security. Indeed, we can easily negotiate borders and armaments while being on record publicly as hoping that sometime in the distant future the Korea's are united, so that there is no more "North" Korea, or that Russia lets its various republics go and stops being a "Soviet" state. Having reservations about the legitmacy of or even denying the legitimacy of a state does not require perpetual war and genocide, as Pipes implies. (Or whatever it is that he means by "defeat the Palestinians"). This is the reason that a "right to exist" is not a term of art under international law and finds no discussion outside of anti-Arab Zionist propaganda: states don't have a "right to exist," they have a right to national sovereignty, secure borders and peace.

This whole non-issue is also another example of the racist double standard that with infects Israel partisans like Pipes. Although Israel demands that Palestinians unequivocally accept Israel's "right to exist," it refuses to reciprocate, or indeed even fathom the possibility of equal national rights to the land of the former Palestine.

The PLO has since the 1970's and officially in 1988 acknowledged Israel's right to live and remain in peace behind rational, secure borders. Every nation in the Arab League has effectively done the same. Yet Israel has never acknowledged any right of Palestinians to equal sovereignty in any part of the occupied territories or limited it's territorial claims to the occupied territories (Israel being the only state on earth without declared borders, raising the obvious question of the location of this country the Palestinians are supposed to accept). If Israel persists in refusing to recognize any right of Palestinians to a homeland of their own, then why should the Palestinians acknowledge the legitimacy of the state that displaced them from their homeland?

Similarly, Israel contends that the existence of any Palestinians who question Israel's right to exist -- by implication to displace indigenous people and turn them into refugees -- provides an insurmountable obstacle to peace. Yet the Palestinians must accept the existence of an Israeli government that accords them no rights and Israelis in high office that openly regard Palestinians as inferior beings deserving of being driven from their homes and cities to make way for their Jewish betters, a process that is likely to actually start with the commencement of the invasion of Iraq..

The argument reminds me of Colonels Korn and Cathcart in Catch-22, when they tell Yossarian that he can escape the insanity they've helped create for him if he agrees to "like us." In the case of Israel's 56-year-war to displace and subjugate the Palestinians, however, the insanity is real and unending.