On Fri, 17 May 2002, Nathan Newman wrote:
> The "existence" of Israel derives from the military support of Britain and
> the United States, who reserved the right to draw the map of the Middle
> East. That's all....leaving Biblical myths aside.
>
> No- the existence of Israel derives from a vote of the United Nations, as
> part of the "mandate" system established at its founding. In that sense,
> Israel is one of the only countries whose existence is NOT derived from a
> specific military campaign, secession or unilateral carving out of colonial
> empires.
The League of Nations Mandate and the UN vote are important but not sufficient. We should face facts. Every country that exists in the world today has its origins in arbitrariness and crime. It was true of the US; it was true of Israel; it is true of every state in the Middle East today; and it will be true of the Palestinian state.
The true basis of the legitimacy of a nation state is the strength of the feeling of national identity of its people and the recognition by the international community that the political facts of such identity is sufficient to merit a state. Everything else is stories peoples tell themselves to sustain said feeling of national identity.
The interesting thing about the league of nation mandate is that is it probably the only lasting result that institution ever had. It, and the UN vote -- which was almost the only lasting result it had until the cold war was over -- are the two acts of international law, both unprecedented in their time, that alone prevented Israel from being classed as a colony -- which would have rendered it irredeemably illegitimate in international law once decolonialization began.
The irony is that Israel is thus the *only* state in the world whose basis of legitimacy, the recognition of its nationhood by the international community, was explicitly expressed, not once but twice, in terms of international law. And now it pretends that international law is some kind of conspiracy against it, or a mirage no state needs to mind, and couldn't possibly be the basis of a Palestinian state. On this count, zionism is deeply deeply in bad faith. It complains that it is treated as a uniquely moral state? It is uniquely moral -- it owes its very existence to the feelings of international morality that were behind both votes.
Michael