On March 13 2009, in a speech commemorating the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, Hizbullah secretary-general Hasan Nasrallah had this to say about the prospect of recognizing Israel:
“Today, and tomorrow, and after one year, and one hundred years, and one thousand years, until the Hour of Judgment, we and our children and our grandchildren and our people? as long as we are Hizbullah, we will not recognize Israel. What is Israel? Israel is a plundering entity, an illegal and illegitimate state, a racist, belligerent, terrorist state. By what standard can a human being, Muslim or Arab, recognize an entity of this kind, and come and say, simply: “Yes, this is Israel,” while three quarters of it or more has been given to foreigners brought from all corners of the world, and while the people who are in the right, who are the legitimate ones, the people of the land and the holy places, the Palestinians ? Muslims and Christians ? have to let go, and leave, and surrender, and submit!”
اليوم وغدأ وبعد سنة وبعد مئة وبعد ألف سنة، إلى قيام الساعة ، نحن وأولادنا وأحفادنا وأجيالنا ، طالما نحن حزب الله لا يمكن أن نعترف بإسرائيل. ماذا يعني إسرائيل، إسرائيل كيان غاصب ودولة غير قانونية وغير شرعية، دولة عنصرية ودولة معتدية ودولة إرهابية، بأي معيار يمكن لإنسان مسلم أو عربي أنّ يعترف بكيان من هذا النوع وأن يأتي ببساطة ويقول نعم هذه هي إسرائيل وثلاثة أرباعها أو أكثر أعطوه لشذاذ آفاق جيء بهم من كل أنحاء الدنيا، أمّا أصحاب الحق الشرعيون وأهل الأرض وأهل الديار وأهل المقدسات من الشعب الفلسطيني مسلمين ومسيحيين هؤلاء يجب أن يتركوا وأن يخرجوا وأن يستسلموا وأن يخضعوا!
Israel was created by a world body just reeling from a bloody and destructive conflict. Only three years after the closing days of the Second World War, the victorious nations who shaped the decision making at the UN saw fit to create a homeland for the Jewish people by displacing another people who have lived there for generations.
Israel was created by nations who fly the banners of freedom and justice, while at the same time masking their own history of inflicting death and destruction on weaker people and steeling their resources. While the French fought for their liberation from the Nazis, they were simultaneously colonizing and robbing the resources of many weaker nations around the world including Algeria who was deprived of its own independence decades after the French liberated their homeland from “evil”. The evil that they subsequently brought to south East Asia and the resulting genocide of the Vietnamese people, later to be handed over to their allies, the Americans. England, the bastion of democracy, with its own history rich with colonialism and slaughter of weaker people as in India and many other nations. The US, Russia, and other rich nations who shared the victory against the Nazi “evil” while engaging in their own campaigns against weaker nations for their own national and economic interests.
These were the nations that created Israel.
The right and legitimacy of these Nations whose own history is filled with colonial and imperial endeavors can not be accepted as an icon of truth and legality. What these nations created is a reflection of our history during these times and must be reordered. The same reorder that took place after the fall of the USSR and the resulting resurrection of the original and true states like Czech and Slovakia, Armenia and many others. With the similar political transformation taking shape in some of the other nations that shaped our history post WW2, the illegitimate realities they created also need to be corrected.
The people who live in Israel today have a right to remain in the land that history has shaped for them during the past 60 years. Also, the people who were driven out by the same history have a right to return and live in this land. The natural reorder of history is the only way Israel will become legitimate.
In the natural reorder, perhaps all the German civilians expelled from Czechoslovakia and Danzig should be given the right to return, along with the Mizrahi Jews to Baghdad, Damascus, etc. Postwar population swaps and abandonment of inconvenient “territorial rights,” helped prevent another world war and often made sense in the break up of empires.
You’re right to condemn the U.N., but for the wrong reason. It established the UNRWA, the only refugee program to be concerned with a single people, and one that gives the unprecedented guarantee of refugee status and services to all future generations. This arrangement has blocked resettlement and assimilation in host countries (which in every other case the UN High Commission calls for), and created a sickly dependency resulting in rampant joblessness and otherwise unsustainably high birthrates. But the cruelest aspect of the UNRWA was it’s making of a promise it will never be able to fulfill: the right of return, and thus perpetuating the poisonous habit of identity building through historical grievance. Granted Israel played the same game but notice that instead of viewing its Mizrahi refugees as historical errors but as opportunities it’s built a reasonably strong state and cohesive identity.
There were plenty of nationalisms beside Zionism that arose in the wake of imperial break up. And the Palestinian question isn’t that different from all the other reorderings of the 1940s, except for the UNRWA and intransigent Arab neighbors who have held them hostage. Any successful future will entail forgetting some indignities, on all sides.