These words are being used as justification for collective punishment of the Palestinian people, funded by USA taxpayors from their own bankrupt nation existing on credit from Communist China. The same word phrases are also used by the mainstream media, all politicians except Ron Paul, and even our diplomats interchangeably, as though they mean the same thing. They do not.

"Recognizing Israel" or any other state is a formal legal and diplomatic act by one state with respect to another state. Why is this asked of Hamas? What's the purpose of such inappropriate language?

"Recognizing Israel's existence" appears OK. But what Israel? Israel has no constitution, no borders–what Israel, within what borders, is involved? Is it the 55 % of historical Palestine recommended for a Jewish state by the UN General Assembly in 1947? The 78 % of historical Palestine occupied by the Zionists in 1948? The 100 % percent of historical Palestine occupied by Israel since June 1967 and shown as "Israel" on maps in Israeli schoolbooks?

Demanding recognition of Israel's right to exist from Hamas (supported by Israel initially to divide and conquer the Palestinians) and Palestinians generally does not address diplomatic formalities or a simple acceptance of present realities. It calls for a moral judgment.

There is a big difference between "recognizing Israel's existence" and "recognizing Israel's right to exist." From a Palestinian perspective, the difference is in the same league as the difference between asking a Jew to acknowledge that the Holocaust happened and asking him to concede that the Holocaust was morally justified. For Palestinians to acknowledge the occurrence of the Nakba (the expulsion of the great majority of Palestinians from their homeland between 1947 and 1949) is one thing. For them to publicly concede that it was "right" for the Nakba to have happened would be something else, no? For the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, the Holocaust and the Nakba, respectively, represent catastrophes and injustices on an unimaginable scale that can neither be forgotten nor forgiven (though why they happened is much easier to explain is much easier to explain for the Nakba).

To demand that Palestinians recognize "Israel's right to exist" is to demand that a people who have been treated as subhumans unworthy of basic human rights publicly proclaim that they are subhumans. It would imply Palestinians' acceptance that they deserve what has been done and continues to be done to them. Even 19th-century US governments did not require the surviving native Americans to publicly proclaim the "rightness" of their ethnic cleansing by European colonists as a condition precedent to even discussing what sort of land reservation they might receive. Nor did native Americans have to live under economic blockade and threat of starvation until they shed whatever pride they had left and conceded the point.

Some believe that Yasser Arafat did concede the point in order to buy his ticket out of the wilderness of demonization and earn the right to be lectured directly by the Americans. But in fact, in his famous 1988 statement in Stockholm, he accepted "Israel's right to exist in peace and security." This language, significantly, addresses the conditions of existence of a state which, as a matter of fact, exists. It does not address the existential question of the "rightness" of the dispossession and dispersal of the Palestinian people from their homeland to make way for another people coming from abroad due to reasons going back in european history, reasons including the reasons for WW1 and its aftermath, which set the stage for WW2).

The original conception of the phrase "Israel's right to exist" and of its use as an excuse for not talking with any Palestinian leaders who still stood up for the rights of their people are attributed to former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It is highly likely that those countries that still employ this phrase do so in full awareness of what it entails, morally and psychologically, for the Palestinian people.

However, many people of goodwill and decent values may well be taken in by the surface simplicity of the words, "Israel's right to exist," and believe that they constitute a reasonable demand. And if the "right to exist" is reasonable, then refusing to accept it must represent perversity, rather than Palestinians' deeply felt need to cling to their self-respect and dignity as full-fledged human beings. That this need is deeply felt is evidenced by polls showing that the percentage of the Palestinian population that approves of Hamas's refusal to bow to this demand substantially exceeds the percentage that voted for Hamas in January 2006.

Those who recognize the critical importance of Israeli-Palestinian peace for the sanity of the whole world and truly seek a decent future for both peoples must recognize that the demand that Hamas recognize "Israel's right to exist" is unreasonable, immoral, and impossible to meet. Then, they must insist that this roadblock to peace be removed, the economic siege of the Palestinian territories be lifted, and the pursuit of peace with some measure of justice be resumed with the urgency it deserves.

Saying that Israel has a right to exist IS saying that the Jewish people are a people, and have the right to self-govern, and in mutually accepted borders within geographic Israel.

It is NOT saying that persecution is right. It is only saying that the other is a valid community.

My sense is that the reason that Hamas is unwilling to make that statement is that it gives permanence to some Israel, that the idea that at some point Israel will cease to be a Jewish state, and instead morph into a temporarily "democratic" state, followed by an Islamic state.

Their presence originates in Islam, in mosques, and although their attractive to many because of their resistance (and terror), that is a secondary reference to them, a reference that is shared by many groups from the left, to the nationalist, to the pan-Arab, to the Shia (who can stick it to Israel better?)

You are following the logic of the increasing rant, Charles, and calling it the logic of reason.

Rants are exciting, and like a car going full speed forward, imagines that its forward motion is all that is occurring. But, a pedestrian or a rodent run over, or the exhaust, or air displacement, knows that the moving forward of the car is just the artificial part, the adrenaline.

One should note that the Likud charter defines the state of Israel as being between the Jordan River and the Mediterranian sea. – According to an article in the International Herald Tribune.

The article had first said that the charter defined Israel on both sides of the Jordan. The IHT printed this correction on 9/20/2006:

"A front-page article Sept.12 … misstated a provision of the charter of the Líkud party in Israel regarding Israel's borders. The charter defines the Jordan River as the eastern border of Israel and does not call for an Israel on both banks of the Jordan, though some early participants and leaders in the party took that position."

:)