About Jewishness

Jewish marriage in Jaffa, 1899

Hey, these guys didn't just drop out of the sky in 1948, you know?
They had a history. A 4,000 year history.

The right to exist is said to be an attribute of the sovereign state, although the concept is virtually nonexistent in international law. An essay on nationalism by nineteenth century French philosopher Ernest Renan helped popularize the phrase. Contemporary international relations scholarship has paid very little attention to the "right to exist" as a theoretical concept and the idea itself is underdeveloped. It has featured prominently in the Arab-Israeli dispute since 1967. Following the Six Day War, the Israeli parliament unanimously passed a resolution that offered to return the Arab territories Israel had just conquered in exchange for "peace and recognition of its right to exist." The right to exist of a de facto state may be balanced against another state's right to territorial integrity. Proponents of the right to exist trace it back to the "right of existence," said to be a fundamental right of states recognized by writers on international law for hundreds of years, charges that the right is "ahistorical.", while Noam Chomsky argues that states other than Israel do not claim this right.

Israel
Since 1967, the phrase "right to exist" has most commonly referred to Israel. The Israeli Knesset passed a resolution passed immediately after the Six-Day War of June 1967 in which Jerusalem offered to return the recently conquered territory in exchange for "peace and recognition of its right to exist." This resolution was passed unanimously and even Menachem Begin, who would later criticize this formulation, voted for it. Egyptian spokesman Mohammed H. el-Zayyat responded that Cairo had accepted Israel's right to exist since the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli armistice in 1949. He added that this did not imply recognition of Israel. In November, Egypt accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242, which implied acceptance of Israel's right to exist. At the same time, President Nasser urged Arafat and other Palestinian leaders to reject the resolution. "You must be our irresponsible arm," he said.
Upon assuming the premiership in 1977, Begin spoke as follows:
“Our right to exist--have you ever heard of such a thing? Would it enter the mind of any Briton or Frenchman, Belgian or Dutchman, Hungarian or Bulgarian, Russian or American, to request for its people recognition of its right to exist? Mr. Speaker: We were granted our right to exist by the God of our fathers at the glimmer of the dawn of human civilization four thousand years ago. Hence, the Jewish people have an historic, eternal and inalienable right to exist in this land, Eretz Israel, the land of our forefathers. We need nobody's recognition in asserting this inalienable right. And for this inalienable right, which has been sanctified in Jewish blood from generation to generation, we have paid a price unexampled in the annals of nations. Mr. Speaker: From the Knesset of Israel, I say to the world, our very existence per se is our right to exist!”
In 2009 Prime Minister Ehud Olmert demanded the Palestinian Authority's acceptance of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. The Knesset plenum gave initial approval in May 2009 to a bill criminalising the public denial of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, with a penalty of up to a year in prison.

Criticism
According to Noam Chomsky, the term "right to exist" is unique to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: "No state has a right to exist, and no one demands such a right....In an effort to prevent negotiations and a diplomatic settlement, the U.S. and Israel insisted on raising the barrier to something that nobody’s going to accept....[ Palestinians are] not going to accept...the legitimacy of their dispossession." John V. Whitbeck argued that Israel's insistence on a right to exist forces Palestinians to provide a moral justification for their own suffering.

Palestinian state
An independent Arab Palestinian state has a legal right to exist under Resolution 181 of the United Nations of 29 November 1947. The existence of an Arab Palestinian State was declared on November 15, 1988. It has achieved Diplomatic recognition by 96 countries, exactly half the members of the United Nations. Following the Oslo accords and 2006 Palestinian elections, the Palestinian National Authority government is split in de-facto civil war between Hamas and PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization). It is estimated that 5,000,000 of the 9,395,000 to 11 million Palestinian Arabs are currently stateless people.
The Peel Commission recommended the establishment of an Arab state cooexistent with a Jewish state within the borders of the British Mandate for Palestine. In 1947 UNSCOP concluded
(a) Although sharply divided by political issues, the peoples of Palestine are sufficiently advanced to govern themselves independently.
(b) The Arab and Jewish peoples, after more than a quarter of a century of tutelage under the Mandate, both seek a means of effective expression for their national aspirations.
(c) It is highly unlikely that any arrangement which would fail to envisage independence at a reasonably early date would find the slightest welcome among either Arabs or Jews.
UN General Assembly Resolution 181 states "Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem, set forth in Part III of this Plan, shall come into existence in Palestine two months after the evacuation of the armed forces of the mandatory Power has been completed but in any case not later than 1 October 1948"
In a speech in June 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama said "Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's."
On June 14 2009, Binyamin Netanyahu, accepted an eventual Palestinian state which must “clearly and unambiguously recognise Israel as the state of the Jewish people”, meaning that Palestinian refugees must be settled outside of Israel’s borders, since resettlement within Israel would undermine its existence as . The Palestinian state must be “demilitarised, namely, without an army, without control of its airspace, and with effective security measures to prevent weapons smuggling into the territory”. The state would not be allowed to forge military pacts with other countries. Other “positions” included Israel's need for “defensible borders” and Jerusalem would remain as the united capital of Israel.