Members of 'Follow the Women' (FTW) organization ride their bicycles accross Huwwara checkpoint on their way to the West Bank city of Nablus. (Rami Swidan, Maan Images)

There is today a huge Jewish population in Palestine whose rights as human beings must be recognised, but why should anyone anywhere be compelled to recognise the "right to exist" of a particular state formation? What's being demanded here is ideological conformity: support for the right of the Jewish state to exist, in perpetuity, in Palestine, regardless of what that fact entails for others (or indeed for the welfare of Jews).

For Palestinians, recognising Israel's right to exist -- as opposed to the fact of its existence -- is tantamount to an historical seal of approval on the Nakba. Those who refuse to certify as legitimate a national project built on dispossession and ethnic supremacy are condemned as "anti-Semites" or, if they are Jews, as "self-haters". The allegations rest on a false conflation of Israel and "the Jews", one propagated by Zionists, who use it to exempt the Jewish state from the requirements of international standards of human decency.

Israel is "Jewish" in a sense that no existing state is Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist. Though these religions are privileged in various states, none of those states claims to be the sole global representative of the faith; none grants citizenship to people solely because of their religion (without regard to place of birth or residence).

Maintaining a Jewish state in Palestine means maintaining a sizeable Jewish majority population which enjoys privileged access to land, work and civic rights.

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The founders of Israel were secularists; they saw Jewishness as a national rather than religious identity. Many were atheists and contemptuous of rabbinical culture. Like MA Jinnah, the secular Muslim founder of Pakistan, they would be shocked and dismayed if they could see the influence obscurantist religious sects now wield in the polities they established.

From the beginning, the notion that the State of Israel could be both "Jewish" and "democratic" was unsustainable, and was seen as such by significant numbers of diaspora Jews.

Indeed, it's important to remember that anti-Zionism was a Jewish ideology long before it was anything else. But in the wake of the Holocaust, and with the evolution of big power politics in the Middle East, Zionism came to dominate the diaspora. And the truth of the Nakba was shrouded beneath the myth of Israel's "David versus Goliath" struggle for survival against irrationally hostile Arabs.

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