The tape is here:
www2.lse.ac.uk...

Sad!

Go ahead, click on that link and weep. And then, please, encourage Sand to provide us all with refunds.

Enjoy your life.

I have to admit I don’t recall the 2008 offer, I probably ignored it or saw from the start there wasn’t really anything in it.

Olmert offered about 94% of the West Bank with about 5.7% trade-off land inside Israel. He also offered to internationalize Jerusalem with 5 Arab countries as co-managers of the city. That the Palestinians didn’t accept this offer is unbelievable. That people keep supporting their position after that is even more unbelievable.

The 2000 offer I certainly can understand the Palestinians rejected

Right, because it’s every day that a people who have never had a state are offered one. I’m sure some Kurds vomited when they heard.

More important is that not only was this offer rejected but the Palestinians launched a war against Israeli civilians just after the offer was made.

, the 2001 offer however was definitely interesting but as I recall it was sadly more of an academic game played by three politicians who each were lame ducks by this time, and there was no real chance of it being implemented.

It was killed by Barak because as the elections were approaching, the citizens of Israel thought he was insane to continue negotiating even as the Palestinians were launching suicide bombings attacks. The negotiations were conducted in good faith by Israel which offered far more than they had at Camp David. The Palestinians barely budged on any positions. It didn’t have to be academic.

But anyhow that is all by the by, the discussion here hinges on what should be acceptable for a nation to pin its claim to sovereignty over a piece of land on, and my argument is that the age in world history has passed where it was acceptable for a powerful nation to simply barge in and take over a piece of inhabited land and colonise it, and justify this action on the grounds that since the inhabitants were primitive the land therefore wasn’t sovereign, and they were in need of civilising anyway.

Zionism never made such a claim and never behaved that way. Once again, it did not “barge in.” Rather, Jews were already living there for 3000 years. Of the new;y arrived Jews, they arrived legally, purchased land legally and at exorbitant prices and proceeded to build impressive cities, economic infrastructure and to work the land. They never justified any of this on the basis of the local Arabs’ “primitiveness,” even if there were those who believed or who said so. In fact, there was never any intention of achieving anything other than a democracy where the local Arabs were voters. Even Jabotinsky believed this. You keep putting up straw men.

As I say Israel got its foot in the door just in time, and you know as well as I that had the Zionist project started 70, 50 or even just 30 years later it would never have been accepted internationally.

I’m not sure about that. If some group started to buy land somewhere in the world today, once those purchases would reach a critical mass and sufficient people would move to live there, there could very well be changes in the status of this land. Just as a minor but somewhat related example, consider that the 400,000 Muslims in Ontario, Canada tried to make that province with its 10 million citizens permit the Muslims to live under Sh’aria law.

And of course I know that you counter to this the point that the Zionist project wasn’t just a crude colonisation as in the case of Australia, but was an unique case of a real people with a true national identity and a real need of a home, coming home to the land of their birth and building a beacon of democracy among a rabble of corrupt despots, dictators and feuding tribesmen. It sounds so lovely and epical, and would be too if only the land hadn’t already been inhabited. That these local inhabitants had not clearly defined themselves as a political entity, had not declared themselves to be a state, in other words were not yet politically mature, doesn’t, in my opinion, constitute an excuse for ignoring their existence.

Their existence wasn’t ignored. Their existence could not be ignored because of their violence against the Jews and the resulting Jewish organization to combat these attacks. More important, as I have written already, the idea was to include the Arabs as voters in the new democracy that would be founded there. Over the decades of Arab violence and refusal on any kind of compromise, the Jewish position changed. However, even as the Jews declared their state, they specifically took the Arabs into account and called upon them to be citizens with freedom of religion and to those who live outside of Israel, to be good neighbors. Read the Declaration of Independence of 1948.

Whatever route you choose to legitimation for your new nation, the first question the modern international community will ask is, “Was there an indigenous population in place prior to the arrival of the members of the new nation? If so did the establishment of the new nation require the displacement of the indegenous people? If so, were the indigenous people informed and consulted regarding the plans, and what was their reaction?” The Balfour declaration, published at a time when the colonialist era still wasn’t over, and regarded as I understand it, as the primary document signalling an international acceptance of the legitimation of Israel, was quite clear about the condition for such acceptance: nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…

And nothing was done. Of course, neither Balfour nor the Zionists anticipated the decades of attacks culminating in a war launched not only by the local Arabs, but by their nationalized brethren, who were nationalized by precisely the same terms that created the Balfour Declaration and the assurances to the Jews about the Western part of Palestine.

Since I wasn’t writing history I cannot be modifying it either, but I get your point – without agreeing. The net result of the conflict was as described. You are naturally entitled to add your selected details, but I haven’t modified anything. 700,000 Arabic people left the area which was declared Israel in 1948, and did not do so (as so often proclaimed in the mythology) in some strategic ploy initiated by the Arab armies, but under fear of death and destruction from advancing Jewish forces. The expulsion was necessary to avoid Jews becoming a minority in the state they were creating and expanding at the same time. All academically respectable and honest historical accounts now agree on this point.

You are mistaken, there are still many historians which disagree with this version of history. It’s just that in the same way that Sand has filled a gap in people’s perceptions of the conflict that satisfies their desire to support the Palestinians, the same happened with the work of the so-called “New Historians.” We have a BBC and a PBS documentary sections on this site (search under “History Lesson”) where you will find refutation of the claims you are making. Certainly some Palestinians left because they feared the Jews and some were driven out by the Jews, but a substantial number, perhaps more than half left because they were led to fear by their own propaganda or because of encouragement from Arab armies. For example, whatever happened at Deir Yassin, we have footage on this site from a BBC documentary where the two men who were responsible for reporting it on Arab radio admit that they made a mistake in embellishing the horror of the event because it caused many Palestinian families to flee.

But this is still somewhat by the by because it’s not this road to legitimation which Schlomo Sand is questioning. Schlomo Sand is not questioning the absolute right of Israel to exist or he’d get out. Neither am I. I have lived in Israel for a period and don’t need convincing that there is a strong Jewish affiliation with the history and culture of the region. What I question is that this affilialation confers unquestionable rights of preference and supremacy in relation to another group of people whose claim to the right of a national existence in the region must by all non-mystical earthly accounts be at least as valid as the Israeli claim.

Good! That’s a fair question. However, it’s not the question he asks as much as he asks whether any right exists at all since the Jews are really the Jews. Just as you stated, when you read Sand, you walk away thinking about the Jews as a non-nation that made up nationhood and then proceeded to act just like European colonialists. While they were doing this, the real Jews, in the form of Muslim and some Christian Palestinians, were becoming the victims of these colonialist usurpers.

Excuse me while I vomit.

As I’ve already expressed in this discussion and in the post, this is not just bullshit but it’s propaganda and nothing else. He has a political viewpoint and it is the mirror to which he holds up the history he imagines.

More important is the suggestion, repeated by you, that the Jews who founded and support Israel believe in their “unquestionable rights of preference and supremacy in relation…[to the Palestinians].” This is patently untrue. Zionism did not come in with this philosophy and even though today there are pockets of Israeli society which espouse this view, there are also pockets that reject it vehemently to the point of supporting the view that the Palestinians have greater claim. Instead of promulgating this view, you would do well to recognize that when people are buying land and when their leading philosophers want to establish a country with their values but to do so as a functioning democracy where their values are up against those of their co-nationalists, the Arabs, their intentions do not reflect “unquestionable rights of preference and supremacy.” Not even close. In fact, even as the war of 1948 broke out, the Jews were a considerable minority relative to the Arabs and they were feeling intensely threatened for a long part of it.

It is that war which legitimized what happened. In fact, all you need to do is look at how the Arabs behaved during and after that war, where not a single living Jew remained in any Arab-conquered territory, to understand the nature of the 1948 War and to understand why Israel ended up with a desire to remove many of those Arabs who did not leave of their own volition.

That there has over millenia existed a ’special’ race of people for whom a special ‘chosen’ land has been divinely appointed, who fit together like hand and glove, and anybody who is not one of this special race but who, by accident of happening to be descended from great great grandparents who inhabited and farmed the land before the return of the specials, must now bow to the priorities of the specials, and define their possiblities for a national life within the ever shrinking boundaries proscribed unilaterally by the expanding needs and demands of the specials.

Um, dude, the people who created Israel were secular. They did not believe this “chosen” business or “divine appointment.” They certainly did not believe in the concept of “race” but rather of nationalism. The people who believe in the “chosen” people view of things are more plentiful now but were a tiny minority in 1948 and certainly in the decades preceding it. Zionism is and was a secular nationalist philosophy. Nothing more.

As for the second part where you create even more fanciful myth regarding “specials” and the “indigenous,” for the first thing, recognize that many of the “indigenous” were also new arrivals on the land – recent like the Jewish newcomers. Second, the whole notion of who is a Palestinian becomes distorted in 1949 because UNRWA declares that any family living in Palestine from 1946 on can claim refugee status. Between 100,000 to 200,000 people magically joined the rolls. However, even if every single Palestinian was born in Palestine to families there for centuries and even if every single Jew was a new arrival (you do know that Jerusalem was majority Jewish throughout the 1800s, right?), the outcome of the first half of the Twentieth Century has absolutely nothing do with a philosophy of supremacy and of “specialness.” Perhaps their vision came into conflict with the lives of the local Arabs, but it was the Arabs who believed themselves to be “special” and their violence to be just in the eyes of their god since no non-Muslim can control and live on Muslim land. The Zionists sought to accomplish their goal of Jewish statehood by legitimate and democratic means. They wanted to do it because they believed that as a nation they had a right to do so and because they had a need to do so. This had nothing to do with the Arabs. Consider that in the 1904 (it might be the 1906) Zionist Congress, the majority voted not to build the new Jewish state in Palestine. It took a minority walking out and threatening to divide the movement if the historic connection to the land of Israel was ignored, to overturn this vote and consider Palestine as the only possible home for the new Jewish state. If you are a group who believes in “specialness” which is connected to this land, how do you vote to build your country elsewhere?

You don’t.

Schlomo Sand argues the case much better than I ever could, and the curious thing is that his detractors agree that nothing he says is new or previously unknown. Yet I never discovered it in my two years in Israel Palestine.

Perhaps you were reading in all the wrong places? He’s the one who goes on and on about how the connection to the Khazars was hidden. What utter bullshit. We all knew of it and read it. It was a point of pride that an entire nation would convert since the Jews had no military or other form of power to elicit this conversion.

I was handed the Zionist myth and believed it.

I thought you just told me that all historians now accept the revised history. These historians have been coming out with books for 15-20 years now. How could you be “handed the Zionist myth?” You were hanging out in the wrong places. For a while Benny Morris was being taught in Israeli schools to schoolchildren. They had to make a law last year forbidding the teaching of the establishment of the state as a “naqba.” Where are all these conspiracies?

I’ll tell you where they are: at Tel Aviv University. That’s where the political science group has about 15 faculty members who represent strong leftist views.

But what the Zionists really knew I never heard about. It’s been an amazingly well kept secret, and all Schlomo Sand has done really is to rumble it.

Again, what are you talking about? Open the Encyclopedia Judaica and read about the Khazars. Read about the existing and foreign Jewish communities that existed. It’s in the ENCYCLOPEDIA. What conspiracy? Every review by every Jewish scholar that I’ve seen has commented that the supposed hidden secrets were information that was open and readily available.

That’s not only an enormous eye-opener for me, and all the other dupes like me, I’m sure in the long run it will serve the real interests of Israel. When I was in Israel/Palestine and asked Israelis where the Palestinians came from they mostly just evaded the question or said they didn’t know.

Maybe you hang around stupid people?

When I’m in Israel, I have very sophisticated conversations about these topics and people either really don’t know because they are ignorant, or they know extremely well and discuss those views openly.

Palestinians just said “Nowhere, we’ve always been here.” I understand this a lot better now thanks to Schlomo Sand.

I guess you’ve been talking to stupid Palestinians as well. Not all Palestinians have been there always, some immigrated during the 20th Century and some immigrated earlier. Some found it convenient to join the UNRWA rolls in 1949. We won’t even get into the question of the racial aspect of Arabs and their arrival in Palestine in the 7th Century, just as we won’t go into the ever-present Jewish communities in Tzfat (Safed), Tiberias, Jerusalem (the “east” part) and Hebron. And of course, when you ask Jews from Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya where they come from, they can also answer, “We’ve always been here.”

And by the way, you certainly seem assured about Sand’s book that you said above you hadn’t even read yet.

That you take Sand’s claim that the Palestinians are more Jewish than the Jews at face value really diminishes from your argument. In my previous post on this book, we considered that a joke. The Palestinians probably consider it a bigger joke, though it must give them great pleasure to see an Israeli, Jewish academic put this theory out there and garnering so much attention.

Now to your claims.

“Do you ask the Germans or the French to explain themselves this way?” Well, let’s take an artificially constructed thought experiment on these lines. Let’s imagine that a quarter of a million Britons who feel a strong affiliation to the Viking element in their past, begin to yearn for a return to their Scandinavian origins. So they pack their things and set sail for Denmark, move in, buy up land, begin to build, create political institutions, and eventually in an area in the West of Jutland succeed in establishing themselves as a regional majority, declare themselves to be a state, democratically founded on their ancient homeland,

So far, so good. Don’t forget to include the idea that in order for this to be comparable to Israel, the Denmark to which they move must be a sub-province of a province of a larger empire, not a state and not a place that has been perceived as a state for 2000 years. However, yes, the notion that a group would form, move in slowly, buy up land, eventually build up political institutions and eventually declare themselves a state is perfectly reasonable. I suspect that Israeli Arabs may do precisely such a thing in the next 20-30 years and people like Sand and you will then agree that this is desirable.

and any Danes, who happen to be living in the area the British Vikings have chosen for themselves and their nation, who protest and resist, they drive out by force of arms.

Now we’re modifying history. To be equivalent to the Israel narrative, you would have to structure it as follows:

“Not having any national or international political representation or movement of any significance, the local Scandinavians (they are not known as Danes yet) who happen to be living in the area the British Vikings have chosen for themselves and their nation, attack the British Vikings on an ongoing basis whenever the British Vikings buy land and try to erect structures on it to live in. Every few years, the majority local Scandinavians launch mass violent riots as well. These riots are illegal in and of themselves because the authorities frown upon violence and the land purchases made by the British Vikings are perfectly legal. In fact, their historic claim to this land is so obvious that both in the international diplomatic sphere and in that of the country mandated to control this territory, the land is slated to become a national home for the British Vikings.

Over time, as the British Vikings continue to buy up land and build up the infrastructure of a state, the local Scandinavians benefit economically and their population increases dramatically through emigration from other areas of the Scandinavian provinces to this one. Their use of violence, however, does not diminish or end and becomes a tactical tool for their leadership. As a consequence, when war breaks out in an effort to conquer the territory and drive out the British Vikings (as evidenced by the removal of every last Jew from Jordanian controlled territory in 1948-1949), the victorious British Vikings watch as many local Scandinavians flee and encourage others to join them so as to prevent continuation of violence in the future. Despite this, they permit one seventh as many local Scandinavians to remain as had left even as the other Scandinavians evict every British Viking from the land they control. ”

It would indeed be surprising if nobody, especially the Danes, expected them to explain what they think gives them the right to do this. They might then go to the United Nations and say “Look it’s like this: we’ve always had a Scandinavian yearning, we’ve kept our faith with Odin and Thor, we read the sagas of the Vikings and have kept and developed many of the good old Viking traditions like drinking and brawling, we understand and have revitalised runic script, and genticists have proved that we have strong racial links with the original inhabitants of this land. It’s not your place to determine how and where the Viking nation should define itself, we demand only that the UN recognise us and give us a seat and a vote at the Council. True, half a million Danes got displaced in the upheavals, and are now refugees, but there is plenty of room for them in Norway and Sweden, it shouldn’t be a problem for them to start a new life there. It is our right to defend ourselves against the Danish terrorists who are bent on destroying us by violent and undemocratic means.”

They could also point to the Viking Sea Scrolls. Yes.

And to the rest of what you wrote, they would add: “And of course, during the upheavals launched by the local Scandinavians in concert with several Scandinavian countries, one percent of our population was killed and five times as many were injured, numbers that are not reflected in the cost of life or limb to the local Scandinavians. More important, however, is that our little nation had to absorb approximately 15% more refugees from Scandinavian countries than local Scandinavian refugees who were created by this war that was imposed upon us. Despite the intense difficulty in absorbing so many refugees in such a short space of time, we did it. On this basis, it is difficult for us to see why the countries surrounding us, who were directly involved starting and fighting in the tragic war here, cannot absorb those refugees who are on their side. In terms of land alone, these countries control large multiples of the land we control. Norway and Sweden can certainly absorb them just as we absorbed our refugees.”

themiddle – the logic of your argument would, it seems to me, dictate that this scenario would have to be deemed acceptable by the world community, and the Viking nation welcomed into the UN. Of course you need not trouble yourself too much with this fantasy, because you know as well as I it could never happen, but just suppose it did.

I just did suppose it did. You just need to get the history down a little more accurately and everything makes much more sense, doesn’t it?

I do find your argument a little fascinating since – inadvertantly or otherwise – it does raise fundamental issues about what makes a nation ‘legitimate’ – indeed whether it is at all possible to legitimise a nation, and whether in fact the whole concept of ‘nationhood’ is not intrisically evil. A necessary evil some might say. But that’s why I say we have no choice but to invest authority on such issues in a democratic body of nations, and any nation which wishes to be considered legitimate will have to submit itself to the scrutiny of that body.

Yes, but we don’t ask that question of Lithuania or China or Zimbabwe or Iraq or Saudi Arabia, etc. Just of Israel. Modern Arab states such as Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have borders and nationalities determined around the same time as Israel’s. Yet they are not asked to prove their historic links to anything or asked to question their right to self-determination.

Your alternative is, when it comes down to it, that might is right, since as I have demonstrated, anybody can then, in principle, decide that they are a nation, and begin looking around for some land to move into and take over.

You most certainly didn’t prove that.

The Jews have a real historic link to this land. It’s not just claimed, it is factual. Jesus himself went to read the Torah at synagogue according to the New Testament. Jesus was, to remind you, a Jew. You don’t believe in the veracity of the New Testament? Okay, the Dead Sea Scrolls are real and they contain the same books as you will find in the Torah of the 13th Century Jew and the 21st Century Jew. The Temple Mount is real and as my photo at the top of this post shows, there are numerous examples of Jewish traditions which exist to this day representing the history of the Jewish people on this land. It’s not just an imaginary connection and it’s not just a desire by a bunch of people to move here. There are strong historical, religious and ideological links to this land, not to mention an ongoing presence, even if small at times, of Jews living on this land for 3000 years.

If they succeed then it’s just a question of holding on until enough time has gone by that ‘legitimacy’ becomes inevitable.

The legitimacy in this case was granted before the state was founded. The war of 1948, started by the other side, cemented the claim.

This is a luxury which I believe no longer can be afforded. The world is now a globality, we are confronted for the first time in history with the real finiteness of it, and we have created problems for ourselves which transcend the boundaries of the introverted interests of nationalism. Israel got its foot in the door just in time and got its legitimation from the UN and that is good enough for me at any rate.

Yes, the UN did say yes. However, your notion of globalization is a personal one, maybe shared by some leftists. Most French, Americans, British, Chinese, etc. would reject the idea of melding all countries into one big globe. Better yet, ask the Kurds, Tibetans and Chechnyans whether they agree with your premise.

But by the same stroke Palestine also got its legitimation.

Which they rejected.

That’s also good enough for me and remains good even if the Palestinians lack of sophistication and familiarity with the democratic ethos led them to take up indefensively intransigent positions, and behave in a very politically naive and destructive way in the intervening years.

Don’t be so condescending to the Palestinians. They and the other Arab states were simply unwilling to concede any land to the Jewish people. They had a different view of what the outcome should be and they have acted upon that belief for the many decades of this conflict. To suggest that their naivete has led to this self-destructiveness is simply condescension. Arafat knew what he was doing, as does Abbas, as did the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who had enough political acumen to go and ally his people with the Nazis.

You say you cannot turn the clock back when it suits you, yet there’s apparently no problem if the time span you want to turn it back extends over 2000 years. By your logic Israel lost a war with the Bar Kochba rebellion, so that’s it – they’re finished and no longer have any rights.

I didn’t create this rule, the UN did. The UNHCR is clear that refugees are only refugees in the first generation. Subsequent generations are not refugees. This claim does not apply to only one group of refugees in the entire world: the Palestinians. Instead of being under the auspices of the UNHCR, they are the only group to have their own UN body to care for them, the UNRWA with its ridiculous claim that refugee-hood lasts forever, regardless of which generation we’ve moved to.

By my logic, the Palestinians would do exactly what you describe in the British Viking scenario in order to establish their own state. That’s why I suspect that Israeli Arabs will do this in the not-too-distant future. This is why, in theory, the Palestinians can attempts to create a Palestine in Judea Samaria/West Bank and Gaza. In fact, Israel has offered them such a state and they’ve refused in 2000, 2001 and 2008.

If Israel wants to go it alone and argue its legitimacy within this archaic frame of reference, which nobody else can see the legitimacy of, then it should surrender its seat at the UN, and go it alone. But if it wants international recognition for its legitimacy, then it has to use the common modern frame of reference to define it, and has to acknowledge the existence and rights of the other people who were awarded national status in the same way at the same time, and respect them as equals.

But Israel has accepted UNSCR 242 and 338. It even accepted 181 once upon a time. It is the Palestinians who rejected 181, 194 and now are trying to do an end-run around 242 and 338 and claim that 181 and 194 are legitimate (even though they are General Assembly resolutions and therefore do not constitute international laws).

Israel has offered the Palestinians the right to have a state and even found solutions for Jerusalem such as internationalizing it (Olmert in 2008) or sharing it (Barak in 2001). The Palestinians have rejected all offers. The problem hasn’t been that that the Israelis won’t give the Palestinians “equality,” it’s that the Palestinians don’t want to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, they seek to change Israel’s demographics so that it becomes a “Palestine,” and they reject any sharing of Jerusalem that doesn’t give them sovereignty over its holy sites, particularly the Temple Mount.

Why are you putting the blame at Israel’s feet?

The world didn’t accept that Hitler began to redfine Poland and Czechoslovakia as provinces of the Third Reich, and won’t accept any Israeli attempt to engulf the West Bank as part of Greater Israel.

That may be true. But please, let’s not go to comparisons with Nazis. If Jordan hadn’t conquered the area they named “The West Bank,” and made it Jew-free, then perhaps we’d be having a different conversation about this land today.

Even though there might be very good reason to do so if Schlomo Sand is right, and the Palestinians are in fact more Jewish than the Jews by blood! Such is the democratic spirit of the UN – if the Palestinians want to become Jews and Israelis, then it must be on the basis of their own free will. Otherwise they should have the right to self determination as Palestinian muslims in their own land just as Israeli Jews should have the right to self determination as Israeli Jews in their own land. If I have understood him, this is the rationale Schlomo Sand wants to base his national rights on – very reasonably.

Just as Simon Schama mocks Sand, most serious scholars of Jewish history who have reviewed his book, consider it an inferior work colored by his politics. You seem like a fairly intelligent and reasonable person, perhaps you should do the same.

As for the issue of “hocus pocus” or whatever you’d like to call a nation that speaks in the same language as the people who lived there 2000 years ago and whose traditions and culture reflect life and faith in that physical space 2000 years earlier, it is not your place to define what constitutes “legitimacy for a modern, civic democratic state.” It is up to the Jewish nation which happens to have the same right of self-determination as any other people to determine that for itself.

Even if it’s hocus pocus, and even if 99% of the residents of the planet reject it, it is not your place, Sand’s place, the Palestinians’ place or anybody else’s to determine for the Jewish nation where and how it should define itself. Do you ask the Germans or the French to explain themselves this way? Do you ask the Saudis or the Iraqis? How about Canadians or Americans? Do you even ask the Kurds or the Palestinians?

When a Scottish person moves to the USA, acquires citizenship, makes a better living than most native Americans and then raises children there who call themselves “Americans,” do you challenge him or his children about their right to call themselves Americans? Do you challenge their country and its right to exist as a modern civic democracy? You don’t even think twice about it.

In some ways, this is the claim that Sand is trying to make about Israel today. Like the good former Matzpen member that he is, he’ll happily tell you he’s “Israeli” rather than “Jewish.” Except that the point is that the US can define itself as it does because it did go through some wars and because over time it established its meaning of nationhood. Its values are changing but they are rooted in its history, a history which the US reserves the right to share only with those people it allows to immigrate and to whom it grants the rights to live as citizens or residents. If Israel seeks to define itself by history that you and he consider “hocus pocus,” that still remains the right of the Israelis and the Jewish nation.

The issue, obviously, is that Jewish self-determination ends up in conflict over the same piece of land that Palestinian self-determination considers its own. However, that extremely challenging and potentially unresolvable conflicting claim has played itself out in wars, especially that of 1948, which was undeniably an existential war, in which one side attempted to find compromise and the other side – which didn’t – lost the war.

Critically, if I have to respond to issues you raise about 181 and 242, the side that agreed to compromise had also been buying land legally and had established democratic foundations for its hoped-for self-determination in its historic homeland.

In other words, a group that arrived in its yearned-for, ancient homeland, was seeking to achieve self-determination through democracy and legal means such as international agreements and the actual purchase of land, to achieve its goals. That they had to learn to defend themselves and then fight to win became part of the process because they had no choice. The sad history of UNGAR 181 and the 1948 War of Independence are perfect examples of this. Yet, it is precisely this process that has established Israel and given it its modern legitimacy. In fact, this is so clear that poor old Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim, and now Shlomo Zand, are doing their utmost to find ways to re-write history.

However, you can’t turn back the clock when it suits you because you’ve lost the war you started. You can’t say “I reject 181 or 194,” launch a war, and then 50 years after you’ve lost that war and numerous others, conveniently revert to what you rejected earlier. It’s not as if they’re asking for 181 and 194 because they’ve had a change of heart. It’s because they consider them effective weapons against Israel. As for 242, we have yet to see serious consideration of that resolution by the Palestinians. Read the papers from the past week and you’ll learn that they’re trying to get around 242. They are certainly not accepting 242 any time soon. They would love to resurrect 181 and 194 or have them become UNSC resolutions, but not because they view them as a ticket to peace. Rather, they are viewed as an effective weapon in a desire to hurt and possibly destroy the idea of an Israel defined by Jewish self-determination.

As for Israel “ignoring” 242, I would wager that if the Palestinians were serious tomorrow about a permanent peace along the lines of what Barak offered at Taba, it would pass both the government and a referendum inside Israel.

Happy Thanksgiving.