Reflections on the Delegitimization of Israel

Netanyahu's Inside Job

Reflections on the Delegitimization of Israel

by JOHN V. WHITBECK

Paris.

June 5 marked the 48th anniversary of the “preemptive” attack on Egypt with which Israel launched the fateful “Six-Day War” that permitted the Zionist movement to complete its conquest of historical Palestine.

As the “State of Palestine” (the legal designation for the 22% of historical Palestine conquered in 1967, which is now recognized as a state by 136 other states and the United Nations) enters its 49th year of an apparently perpetual occupation by the State of Israel, the Israeli government and its friends in the United States are mobilizing to fight a new war – a “Legitimacy War” against the “delegitimization” of “Israel”.

The quotation marks around “Israel” are intended to emphasize a fundamental point: When Israelis and their friends speak of the “delegitimization” of Israel or of Israel’s “right to exist”, they are not referring to the legitimacy or continued existence of any physical territory or of any group of people. They are referring to the legitimacy or continued existence of the particular ethno-religious-supremacist political system established in 1948 on the territory previously named Palestine, a territory in which the current population is roughly 50% Jewish and 50% Palestinian.

Why has “delegitimization” suddenly become such an existential threat to “Israel”?
Read more at: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/08/reflections-on-the-delegitimization-of-israel/