Hamas, grow up!

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Abu Marzouk, who was part of the Hamas delegation in Moscow, said today "I gave the Russian officials a white sheet and I asked them to draw me a map of the Israel they want me to recognize and nobody was able to draw the map."

Evidently, Abu Marzouk needs to know a man's contours—how fat he is—before that man is granted a right to life.

But rights originate from the institution of their entitlement, which here is the U.N., an institution which Palestine gladly recognizes when it suits them. That entitling of Israel has been clearly validated by the community of nations during the past half century. Hamas doesn't have standing to contest Israel's entitlement. Indeed, the notion of "right to exist" is a Rylean “category mistake” (and, arguably, pathological); right to recognition of one's dignity or right to respect for one's given existence is what people should concern themselves about. (I would argue for intrinsic values of being well as the best grounding for others’ claims about human agency as the basis of human rights.)

But to Hamas deputy political leader Moussa Abu Marzouk, "It means a negation of the Palestinian people and their rights and their property, of Jerusalem and the holy sites, as well as negation of their right of return. Therefore the recognition of Israel is not on the agenda" (Reuters, 3/04/06).

Look, Marzouk, Israelites created Jerusalem, and the Dome of the Rock (to which Palestinians have always had access, under Israeli occupation) sits atop Israel's Temple Mount, while Muhammad never saw the capitol of Islam as the Mediterranean coast. The "Palestinian people" is a modern novelty of TransJordians in light of Jewish settlement success prior to the re-institution of Israel—a novelty which Israel accepted at the beginning: Modern Israel stipulated a 2-state solution, as did the U.S., but the Arab world rather immediately declared war—actually, in effect, rejecting the whole idea of a U.N. order. And the Soviet-exploiting Arabs lost to the North Atlantic alliance supporting Israel, which demands Palestinian right of statehood ("land for peace," etc.) vis-à-vis a barrier that's easily removed, but remains forced on Israel by the pathology of Arab suicide bombers.

So it goes. On the other hand, Israel may properly assert that “the international community granted political sovereignty in Palestine to the Jewish people,” they have no right to expect respect for the mythical notion that “God promised the land to [a] patriarch.” In fact, tribes had inhabited that land for centuries before the nomads from the Mesopotamia arrived; and centuries before a few of those tribes were consolidated under a political conception of one god. If anything,
the Jews are most ancestrally Palestinians.

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August 29

Aha! Hamas is beginning to grow up.