Off the top of your head, can you tell me the last time you heard a top official in the Israeli or U.S. governments recognize Iran's right to exist?  How about Syria's?  The Sudan's?  Or for that matter Palestine's -- whether within its pre-1948 borders, its pre-1967 borders, or its mangled and entirely unsettled post-Madrid, post-Oslo, and post-Road Map boundaries?

Yet, here is Israel's Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, as profiled last July by the New York Times's Roger Cohen, explaining what "Her Jewish State" requires: "The West," Cohen relayed, "needs to tell Hamas, the Islamist movement battling Fatah for control of a Palestinian movement now split between Gaza and the West Bank, that it must not only recognize Israel's right to exist but also 'the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, which is not that obvious anymore'."

And here White House National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, commenting to ABC - TV on the former American President Jimmy Carter's imminent ten-day mission to the Middle East to meet with leaders of Hamas and hear what they're willing to place on the negotiating table: "Hamas really has a choice to make. They're trying now to have one foot in the terrorist camp and one foot in a political process. And if they want to move from terror to participation in the political process, what they need to do is very clear. And it's not just the U.S. government's position, it's the position of the whole international community. They need to recognize Israel's right to exist. They need to renounce terrorism and they need to accept the existing peace agreements that have been worked out between Israel and the Palestinians. This is not an unreasonable thing to expect if Hamas wants to participate in a process that is, after all, a negotiating process to try and move towards peace, two states, an Israeli state, a Palestinian state living side by side."

And here U.S. Representatives Howard L. Berman and Gary Ackerman, both Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and both scolding Carter over his mission: "Hamas has refused to renounce the use of violence, recognize Israel's right to exist and accept previous agreements between Israel and the Palestinians."

And here U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama, before a group of some 75 Jewish-American leaders in Philadelphia, where he expressed his "fundamental disagreement" with Carter as Carter met in Cairo with top representatives from Hamas: "We must not negotiate with a terrorist group intent on Israel's destruction. We should only sit down with Hamas if they renounce terrorism, recognize Israel's right to exist, and abide by past agreements." 

And here House Resolution 1110, introduced by Rep. Mark Kirk (R.-IL) with more than 25 co-sponsors, which not only "Condemns Hamas as a foreign terrorist organization responsible for the murders of 26 American citizens," but also "Calls on Hamas to renounce terrorism, fully disarm and recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state...."

And here Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, writing in the Los Angeles Times: "In 1975, the Ford administration defined conditions that Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization would have to meet in order to merit dialogue with the U.S. government, including renouncing terrorism and recognizing Israel's right to exist. Despite pleas from around the world to soften these terms, successive presidents -- including Carter -- held fast. After 13 years, the strategy worked; Arafat uttered the magic formula and the Reagan administration, in its waning days, opened a dialogue with the PLO. Carter's trip strengthens those who are urging Washington to ease its conditions for dialogue after just two years of effort."

And here David Welch, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, interviewed by National Public Radio: "We have a long-standing concern about Hamas even before the [January 2006] election. It was involved in terrorism. It's also very unclear as to whether Hamas is going to give anything on the issue of recognition of Israel or acceptance even of Israel's right to exist. And it fundamentally disagrees with the choices made by the PLO in the past to pursue peace with Israel. So it doesn't accept any of the agreements on the table -- including even the Arab League Initiative. So it's far from the Arab consensus in those respects and certainly not a partner in peace that we need to move ahead."

And here career mandarin Leslie Gelb in the Washington Post: "Presidents played cat-and-mouse games for more than a decade with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, urging him to recognize Israel's right to exist. He always promised to amend his organization's founding charter to accept the Jewish state, but in the end, both the United States and Israel effectively settled for his willingness to openly negotiate with Israel -- and fudged the question of the charter."

And here even Jimmy Carter himself, during his April 21 news conference at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, concluding nearly a week's worth of meetings in several Middle Eastern capitals: "Let me underscore the significance of the statement. It means that Hamas will not undermine Abbas' efforts to negotiate the agreement, and whatever position Hamas chooses to take on the agreement, Hamas will accept an agreement if the Palestinian people support it by a free vote. If the agreement calls for a two-state solution and the recognition of Israel and Palestine, Hamas will, in effect, accept Israel's right to exist in peace -- if the people agree on the plan."

And Jimmy Carter one more time, interviewed over CNN (the question put to Carter was, "Why did you meet with them?"): "The first thing I asked them to do was agree to accept Israel's right to exist and live in peace, if there was a peace agreement negotiated between the leaders of the Palestinians, Mahmoud Abbas, and the prime minister of Israel, provided it was submitted to the Palestinians later in a pre-vote -- which the Carter Center would be glad to monitor -- and the Palestinians approved it.  So that was one thing."

The point behind reproducing what excerpts I have -- and they could be expanded ad nauseam -- is that each of them illustrates one use of the phrase 'Israel's right to exist' -- and in Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's case, not only Israel's right to exist, but to exist as an ethno-religiously exclusive entity, that is to say, as a Jewish state. 

And all of this notwithstanding the fact that there is no such thing as a right to exist under international law.  It may indeed be affirmed that human beings possess rights (as for example those laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).  Also that the members of the United Nations should respect agreed-upon obligations to other states.  (Especially under Chapter I.)  But no state possesses a right to exist.  Look it up.  Either states do exist, and are recognized by other states as sovereign within their borders, and treated as subjects under international law.  Or states lack these attributes -- that is, aren't regarded by other states as subjects under international law.  But the notion that states possess the attribute, called right to exist, is quite a novel one.  Search high and low, it appears that this alleged right is affirmed of one and only one state in the modern world: Israel.

We can illustrate the systematic character of this point by examining the two tables immediately below.  (By the way: I'm refraining from making overly technical points. Though it's always possible to enter onto this turf too.)

Table A.  "All Sources," September 1, 2005 - March 31, 2008  

Table B.   New York Times, September 1, 2005 - March 31, 2008

Table A and Table B represent the results of Factiva and Nexis database searches conducted on April 10, 2008, under Factiva's "All Sources" category, and of the New York Times exclusively via Nexis, with no attempt to control for false matches or duplicate matches.  (For example, one single report listed more than one time by the database, hence counted this many extra times.  Although it would have been possible to eliminate all false matches from a relatively small number like the 120 and 158 reported by Nexis for the New York Times, large numbers such as 8,689 make it impractical to do this across the board.  Therefore, rather than becoming a factor that influences one result but not the other, I'm forced to live with whatever numbers the databases themselves turn up.) 

In a nutshell, these numbers show that when we ran searches of the databases for evidence of usage of the phrase ' ______ right to exist ' during the 31-month period, and we plugged-in no fewer than 29 different entities in place of the blank space (e.g., 'Israel's right to exist', 'Palestine's right to exist', and so on), basically the only country, people, or race in the world about whom a right to exist  is ever affirmed is Israel.  (The 29 search terms were: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Belarus, China, Cuba, France, Germany, Hamas, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Kosovo, the Kurds, Kurdistan, Lebanon, Libya, Myanmar (Burma), North Korea, Pakistan, Palestine, Palestinians, Sudan, Syria, Taiwan, Tibet, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.)

True enough, searching high-and-low via the Factiva database, we found 15 items that used the phrase 'Palestine's right to exist'.  (See below, where I'll reproduce them.)  But I regard these 15 as so rare (indeed, they occurred but once for every 579 times the phrase 'Israel's right to exist' did), their real status is closer to a statistical anomaly or glitsch in the data than evidence of usage.  And as the results from the New York Times shows, not even one other usage besides 'Israel's right to exist' could be found.  

There is an obvious reason why this is so -- and if you look over the ten examples with which I began, this reason is clear.  The affirmation or denial of Israel's alleged right to exist serves not to make an assertion about a state under international law.  Quite the contrary.  It serves above all as a propaganda construct, reflective of nothing real in the realm of international affairs (because were it real, the phrase would be used for all states universally, rather than uniquely for Israel alone), but reflective instead of the sheer power of the U.S. Government to buttress Israel in it rejection of any negotiated settlement of issues pertaining to the Israeli Occupied Palestinian Territories, thereby prolonging indefinitely the conflict over this land, so that Israel has as much time as it needs to keep encroaching onto Palestinian land while it forces the Palestinians off it. 

Earlier this year, John Pilger wrote ("Bringing down the new Berlin Walls," New Statesman, February 18, 2008):

Israel's and America's experiments in mass suffering nearly achieved it. There was First Rains, the code name for a terror of sonic booms that came every night and sent Gazan children mad. There was Summer Rains, which showered bombs and missiles on civilians, then extrajudicial executions, and finally a land invasion. Ehud Barak, the current Israeli defence minister, has tried every kind of blockade: the denial of electricity for water and sewage pumps, incubators and dialysis machines and the denial of fuel and food to a population of mostly malnourished children. This has been accompanied by the droning, insincere, incessant voices of western broadcasters and politicians, one merging with the other, platitude upon platitude, tribunes of the "international community" whose response is not to help, but to excuse an indisputably illegal occupation as "disputed" and damn a democratically elected Palestinian Authority as "Hamas militants" who "refuse to recognise Israel's right to exist" when it is Israel that demonstrably refuses to recognise the Palestinians' right to exist.

Thus affirmations of Israel's right to exist serves also as a kind of loyalty test and enforcement or disciplinary mechanism.  Very much like what we in the democratically piss-poor United States keep witnessing demanded of the Black Candidate, first with respect to the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, more recently and far more religiously with respect to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.  Except that in the case of the Black Candidate, the demand is made that he denounce and deny certain flesh-and-bone individuals, along with major elements of U.S. history and current reality -- a task to which he has proven himself more than capable.  Whereas in the case of the United States and Israel, nobody is really asked to affirm anything.  Instead, the United Sates and Israel simply pretend that soandso refuses to affirm Israel's right to exist.  Meanwhile, another decade passes.  And Israel creates that many more "facts on the ground." 

Oh, yes. -- I promised that I'd reproduce the Factiva database's examples of the phrase 'Palestine's right to exist' during the period from September 1, 2005 through March 31, 2008.  (Note that in this case, I've dropped one duplicate from the total.  So I'm reproducing 14 items below.)  

Tehran Times (Iran)
January 10, 2006
Democracy and double standards: The Palestinian exception
Stephen Zunes
............

The resolution begins by claiming that "the foundation for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was Palestinian recognition of Israel's right to exist and a solemn obligation to end terrorism and violence", ignoring the equally important foundation of Israeli recognition of Palestine's right to exist and for an Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian territories seized by Israel in the 1967 war.

Arab News (Saudi Arabia)
February 2, 2006
"Astounding hypocrisy"
Editorial
............
Israel has also yet to give concrete acknowledgement of the state of Palestine's right to exist, preferring instead to keep its people huddled in ghettos while Tel Aviv continues to steal their land.

The Christian Century (USA)
March 7, 2006

Dealing with Hamas

James M. Wall

............

From the Palestinian perspective, the question is not whether Hamas will recognize Israel's right to exist, but whether Israel will accept Palestine's right to exist as a state.

Australian Associated Press (AAP Newsfeed)
March 23, 2006

Fed: Australians divided over Israel and the Palestinians: poll
By Peter Jean
............
The head of the General Palestinian Delegation to Australia, Ali Kaza, said he was surprised the poll did not find more support for the Palestinian cause. "All the indications I have are that the majority of Australians support the rights of the Palestinians and the minority support Israel and the occupation of Palestine," he said. Mr Kaza said those surveyed should have been asked if they support Palestine's right to exist. "The question should be whether people think Palestine has a right to exist because Israel already exists," he said.

Palestinian Information Centre (Website)
March 30, 2006
Zahhar: US adopts criminal policies against peoples of the Middle East
(No Author Given) 
............
The US on Wednesday barred its diplomats from making contacts with members of the Hamas government. The US has been demanding that Hamas recognize the Israeli occupation even without Israel recognizing a Palestinian state or accepting Palestinian rights, including the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their ancestral homeland. Hamas said it would not recognize Israel as long as Israel refused to recognize Palestine's right to exist as a sovereign state.

Denver Post (USA)
July 28, 2006

Roots of Mideast dissension

Salam Al-Marayati
............
In order to find a way out of this morass, the U.S. must recognize that Palestine's right to exist is as crucial as Israel's right to exist. The Arab League offered Israel normalization of relations. But these peace proposals are not the focus of U.S. policy makers.

Michigan Daily (Univ. of Michigan, USA)
September 21, 2006
Another setback on the road to peace

Paul Abowd

............

Israel's persistent denial of Palestine's right to exist, either as a sovereign state or as a people, remains a root cause of resentment and violence in the region.

HedgeWorld News (USA)
December 14, 2006

Oil Pressure: Fallout from the Iraq Study Group Report

Janet Tavakoli (Tavakoli Structured Finance)

............

While some Palestinians do not recognize Israel's right to exist, some Israelis have not respected Palestine's right to borders, which suggests they do not recognize Palestine's right to exist, either.

The Nation (Kenya)
January 15, 2007
How About Palestine's Right to Exist?

Mohamed Hassan

The Nation (Kenya) [via COMTEX - All Africa Global Media, South Africa]
January 15, 2007
How About Palestine's Right to Exist?

by Mohamed Hassan

The Daily Trust (Nigeria) [via COMTEX - All Africa Global Media, South Africa]
March 23, 2007

Chiefs With a Double Agenda

Aisha Umar Yusuf

............

In the words of a Palestinian spokeswoman who was recently interviewed by the BBC, 'When did Israel ever recognise Palestine's right to exist?' Another American Mr Raff Ellis, author of the piece Ten commom myths about Arabs and Israel also raised this issue. He said Israel had never recognised Palestine's right to exist as an independent state, Israel had always been the attacker in all of its wars with Arabs and that all of its so-called peace offers were not geared towards any genuine peace, that was why they always failed.

St. Petersburg Times (USA) [Letter]
March 25, 2007
An overused charge
Arthur Hebert, Largo

In the Security Council, most of the vetoes cast by the United States dealt with the support of Israel, right or wrong. In the current General Assembly (which represents world opinion without any undemocratic vetoes) there were, according to Blumner, "22 anti-Israel resolutions" that won approval. That magic number merited for the assembly the ubiquitous label of anti-Semitism by Blumner. In our country, the label has been used so often by Zionists against those who support Palestine's right to exist that the cry of "anti-Semitism" is losing its force, as explained in the book The Politics of Anti-Semitism. Seymour Hersh, professor Norman Finkelstein, professor Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman and others condemn the political usage of that label. Blumner ignores the occupation of Palestine by Israel, "the only true democracy in the Middle East." Two-thirds of her column defends actions taken by the state of Israel. As for the word, "anti-Semitism," let us all use it judiciously and not in a punitive manner.

The Independent (U.K.)
August 22, 2007
Oi! Referee! That footballer's Palestinian!
Mark Steel

............

Even more annoying for the residents of Gaza, for over a year they've been under siege, the hospitals have run out of essential medicines, there's no electricity and hundreds of thousands are trapped there, unable to visit family or complete their education if it means leaving the occupied area. The justification offered often comes down to how Palestinian organisations refuse to recognise Israel's right to exist. Yet the Israelis seem so determined to refuse Palestine's right to exist that they won't even allow them a football team. So what will they allow?

The Jewish Chronicle (U.K.)
[Excerpting from Mark Steel, The Independent, August 22, 2007.]
August 31, 2007
What the Papers Said
WE HATED:

"THE ISRAELIS seem so determined to refuse Palestine's right to exist that they won't even allow them a football team...." 

"Principles of the Imperial New World Order," Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, ZNet, April 21, 2008

"Peace in the Middle East?" ZCom, April 25, 2008
"'Israel's Right to Exist'," ZCom, May 3, 2008