On the face of it, the Hamas refusal to recognise Israel seems perverse: plainly Israel “exists.” Tel Aviv is a large modern city that shows no sign of sliding into the sea. To us in the west, this posture has the taint of ideological backwardness. Hamas, however, is neither stuck in the past nor unable “to do politics.” What it is doing is identifying a key failure of the Israeli-Palestinian political process since the Oslo accords were signed in 1993—which is the omission of any clear outline of Palestinian rights.
What Hamas is saying in refusing to recognise Israel is that while the west understands, and indeed feels, the narrative of the Jews, there has been no similar recognition of the sufferings undergone by the Palestinians in and since 1948, when villages were destroyed, many were killed and thousands fled to the refugee camps, where those who survive remain. (I recently met one in the Sabra and Shatila camp in Lebanon. This proud woman still kept her father’s seal of office as mayor of his village from the time of the founding of Israel.)
Hamas believes that recognition of this Palestinian narrative should take the form of an affirmation of the Palestinian rights to a state based on Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian lands conquered in 1967. It may surprise readers that this is not already the case: we recognise the right of Israel to a state within secure borders, and it might seem obvious that we have also outlined Palestinian rights to a state shaped on the lines of 1967. In fact, we have not. UN resolution 242 refers to withdrawal from lands conquered in 1967. But Israel successfully lobbied to have the word “the” dropped from the resolution’s sentence “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from (the) territories occupied in the recent conflict.” Israel interprets this to mean that the amount of land from which they withdraw is for them to decide in negotiations with the Palestinians.
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