Does Israel Have A Right To Exist? By Mark Goldman

OpEdNews.com

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_mark_a___061130_does_israel_have_a_r.htm


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November 30, 2006

Does Israel Have A Right To Exist?

By Mark Goldman

The simple answer to this question is "No." Israel does not have a right to exist. At least not a moral right. But then again neither does the United States have a right to exist. No country has a right to exist except to the extent to which you can identify some universal value that gives a nation the right to exist, and even then only to the extent that you can verify that that nation qualifies as having such a right under your universal value system. http://www.counterpunch.org/cook11302006.html

Let me suggest such a value system: No government or nation has a right to exist unless that government and its people are striving to adhere to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights http://www.gpln.com/udhr.html No government or nation has a right to exist unless that government and its people are willing to announce to the world that they are striving to fulfill the promise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and can demonstrate according to some reasonable standard that that's what they are consciously doing http://www.gpln.com/legitimategovernment.pdf

Israel became a nation with the support of many countries, but in becoming a country Israel acquired land that was already occupied by people living there... people who had no say in whether or not they wanted to give up their homes, their livelihood and their land. The only right Israel had was the right of power... power granted them by the United States and others for the sake of expediency.
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And what of the United States? By what right does our country exist? By right of genocide. The difference between the United States and Israel is that much of the world sympathizes with the plight of the Palestinian people. Many identify with them because they share a common religion, so many people around the world are not disinterested. This makes victory or genocide not so easy to accomplish. Here you have a fight on your hands.

It was easier for our country to exterminate the people who occupied the continental United States because the indigenous natives who lived here had no powerful allies and they themselves lacked sufficient technology to defend themselves. Our ancestors justified their behavior by calling Indians savages. But they were not savages. We were the savages. We broke every agreement we ever made with them. We did every dishonorable thing one group of people could do to another. We had no moral right.

Authors Website: http://www.gpln.com

Authors Bio: Mark A. Goldman is an activist and author. Email: mark@gpln.com

Nations exist by dint of their ability to maintain their existence. And this article is a ridiculous piece of shit.

Something about power coming out of the barrell of a gun...

As I see it, it's filled with generic and simplistic sloganeering. And it totally ignores the fact that most land in most nations was achieved through violence. Btw, the Soviet Union, for instance makes the U.S. look like pikers when it comes to genocide to create/preserve a nation.

that's a line of reasoning i'll let you own.

do you. Human history is violent. Anyone who can't recognize that, is living in bizarro world. Does that mean I endorse violence? Of course not, but I do realize that you have to look forward and figure out how to solve problems without the violence of the past. This article does nothing towards achieving that end.

it's here.

you're the one who started down the road of comparing barbarities -- as though this barbarous act is less evil than that barbarous act by virtue of the numbers the slaughtered.

Anytime a single ethnic group occupies a desireable piece of land, they probably aquired it through violence to others or allowing them to live in exchange for adapting the occupying culture. It is an unfortunate fact.

The Native Americans certainly have a claim on this land that's at least as strong as that which the Palestinians have on the territory in the Levant ceded as a Jewish homeland by the UN in 1948 and then expanded by the Israelis in subsequent wars. But, does that give the Potomac tribe the right to remove the people of Washington, DC and the surrounding area?

Does one extermination or unjust removal justify another? For how long? How many genocidal cycles are permitted? Forever, ad infinitum by that reasoning.

No, of course not. At some point there has to be an accomodation with political, military and economic reality. Once a group has occupied an area, and there is no means short of genocide to remove them, well, possession as they say is 9/10ths of the law.

Does that now give the settlers in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank a right to hold onto their gains? No. They'll move, and by means short of war, if America insists on it. The power of the purse is one of the greatest forces in the world. Let's exercise that option, since everything else seems to have failed.

on some one else -- then that someone else has the right to resist that ad nauseum.

Colonization, especially white european colonization of non-white european lands, is the greatest crime against humanity committed in the past 500 years. These stupid, asinine concepts are being floated out there to pander to white prejudices, and to lend pseudo-moral justification for the existence of Israel.

that argument is, to echo Cali, is that human migrations around the world have always displaced the previous occupants. It is tragic and I am not justifying massacres and generation ranging wars, but observe history. Here are some examples
Germanic migrations into Western Europe
Indo-European migration into the northern part of the Indian subcontinent
The Bantu migration pushing the Khoisan and pygmies to the peripheries of the African continent

History is important to know but many of these things happened in the past and one must deal with reality: Israel as a country is not going to go away and that fact must be kept in mind

But rationalizations sure as hell should.

If a group of people want a moral justification to commit atrocities in the present, should they merely need to point a finger at "Indo European migrations," or "Bantu migrations," or anything else along those lines?
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Consider the following satire:

Hey! Don't criticize THIS GENOCIDE, the GERMANS did it, the HUTU did it, the TURKS did it, the BRITISH did it, didn't they all do it? And why should anyone stop ME from doing it? ... it is my DIVINE RIGHT to do so! it says so right here, in this book!!!

Pretty damn odious, huh?
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Your logic completely, and unabashedly sucks. It sucks because you are demanding that we all ignore history and NOT learn from it, all for the sake of the ambition of a small group of people who see no issue with colonization, displacement, and the soft genocide of a people who are essentially powerless in all this.

I am not advocating the elimination of Israel. I am advocating the elimination of this ugly callousness at the plight of the palestinians - a feature that appears generously in your post.

this author considers an appropriate morality, they have no right to exist.

Since they have no right to exist, causing them to cease to exist does not infringe upon their rights.

Fascinating. One short jump from this article to a reason to deny objections to genocide, if not actively countenance it. Perhaps if the ancestors of the Americans that interacted negatively with the previous owners of N. America had been able to document that the previous owners weren't living in accord with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the writer would have fewer problems with how they were treated. But perhaps I misconstrue what he said, and the writer wouldn't deny them individual rights.

Then, perhaps, the writer means that if a people isn't striving to implement what he considers an appropriate morality, they have no right to exist as a collective or a self-governing unit.

This might imply that while the individuals have a right to exist--after all, presumably even the pariahs of mankind are still members of mankind--that they can be either redistributed to prevent collective action on their part, or at the very least they can be dominated and made into some sort of protectorate of a 'better nation'. Forced redistribution was, of course, a commonplace in Assyria, under the Ottomans, and, of course, under Ivan IV ('the Terrible'). And having nations subjugate other nations and people's for their--the subjugated folk's--own good, well, that's also a commonplace. But at least we can properly, and apparently morally, deny them collective rights and support their individual rights--as guaranteed by their betters.

Perhaps the writer means something that his words don't actually entail, given plausible assumptions. But for that the reader bears no responsibility.

Sad to say, but that really is the basic criteria in international law for the recognition of a state. The state of Israel established itself as an effective government over a delimited territory and should be recognized by other states.

I think that's important because the "right to exist" debate is a two edged sword. On the one side, enemies of Israel try to deligitimize it by holding it to a higher standard for recognition than international law requires. And supporters of Israel argue for its special right to exist as a haven for the survivors of the holocaust.

Both approaches are ludicrous. Israel's right -- and it's a right to recognition, not existence -- is no more or less special than any other state's.

That said, Israel, like other states, has obligations, including the obligation to recognize the universal human rights of the Palestinians, to work toward peace in its region, and to return territory illegally taken during the 1967 war.

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The existence of modern states is not a theological debate, nor was Israel founded on theological premises.

Your post is just plain creepy.

What about the whole question of inanimate things such as countries or corporations having rights?

That whole concept is creepy isn't it. Don't people, and perhaps other living things, have rights?

Maybe it's just me and the way I choose to look at things. The animals in this country have more rights than some people do in other places in the world.

Wouldn't it be right to question why that is?

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...of Israel along these moral lines makes perfect sense, you fucking creep.

in the form of name calling, I see. Read the rules. It is not allowed.

Why did Chaim Weizmann not want to establish the Jewish Nation in, say, Ethiopia? Because that would be Idolatry, he told Lord Balfour.

I mean, ignoring for a moment or two the sheer arrogance of presuming to carve out a nation without consulting the locals, why would this theological argument be a valid justification for placing Israel in Palestine?

but Israel's founders, like Weitzman, were largely distinctly secular in their beliefs. Their emphasis was on a culturally Jewish state, and arose out of the persecution of Jews in other countries. Claiming that Israel was founded primarily on a religious basis is historically completely inaccurate, and of course, the land he rejected was not in Ethiopia. It was Uganda.

Author lacks gravitas; vanity article.

Lithos
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