In the latest Guardian opinion piece putting in question Israel's legitimacy as a state, Ahmad Samih Khalidi carries out an interesting pair of logical exercises.
In the first of these he employs a language of moral claims on behalf of the Palestinians while implicitly denying the comparable moral claims of the Israelis. Arguing that Palestinian statehood was not initially integral to Palestinian aspirations, Khalidi invokes the notion of 'return', seeing this as being 'about reversing the loss of Arab land and patrimony'; he goes on to refer to a Palestinian 'national cause' and to the 'moral rights' of Palestinians and to a claim based on 'their history'. This is certainly an appropriate - normative - language for the case of a people that is victim of a historical injustice. But the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict arises precisely because there are competing national and moral rights in play. And that fact gets no recognition in Khalidi's piece. If the Palestinians have a history connecting them with the land that is in dispute, so do the Jews; the Jews, too, are a people who suffered, within recent historical memory, a calamitous injustice that wiped out one third of their number, even if this was in Europe and not in Palestine; the Israeli Jews have a right to national self-determination and many of them were born in the country now called Israel. Does any of this produce even a trace of acknowledgement in Khalidi's article - that here then, also, is a set of normative considerations to be weighed? Not so as you'd notice.
In the second exercise, Khalidi suggests (towards the end of the piece) that it might be in the interests of the Palestinians to forget arguments from right and resort simply to the argument of force; 'its hard to see', he says, 'how Israel can win this struggle in the long term'. Maybe so. But force, in such contexts, has two sides. It's a game your opponents can also play.