Netanyahu’s outlandish demand for recognition

[Jefferson23]

If a Palestinian state signs a peace treaty with Israel without recognizing Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, will it be licensed to do bad things?

By Amos Schocken | Feb. 27, 2014 | 11:03 PM

How did the demand for the Palestinians to recognize Israel as the Jewish state or as the nation-state of the Jewish people become Israel’s main demand? The prime minister answered this question at the end of January, at a conference of the Institute for National Security Studies, but his argument isn’t convincing.

He said the Palestinians had a “basic objection to any Jewish presence” – an objection that, early in the last century, “grew and resulted in the attacks in 1929 in Hebron and of course the great riots of 1936-1939.”

According to Netanyahu, “This struggle was against the very existence of the Jewish state, against Zionism or any geographic expression of it, any State of Israel in any border. The conflict is not over these territories; it is not about settlements, and it is not about a Palestinian state .... [T]his conflict has gone on because of one reason: the stubborn opposition to recognize the Jewish state, the nation-state of the Jewish people.”

Indeed, the struggle was against the establishment of a Jewish state. It is beyond the scope of this article to ask if it was justified for the Jews to push aside Arab workers – for example, with “Hebrew labor,” or by the General Federation of Hebrew Laborers in the Land of Israel, and in countless other ways. It is beyond our scope to ask if there was a connection between this pushing aside and the Arabs’ refusal to agree to a Jewish state.

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