Ahmad Samih Khalidi of St Antony's College, Oxford, advises that Washington and the international community should not press the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state:
[B]ehind what may appear an innocuous demand to accept Israel for what it deems itself to be lies an ideologically motivated attempt to force the Palestinians into an unprecedented repudiation of their history. Palestinians' recognition of Israel as a Jewish state implies the acknowledgment that the lands they lost in 1948 are a Jewish birthright. This runs contrary to the heart of the Palestinians' historical narrative and their sense of identity and belonging.
It invalidates the history of the Palestinians' century-old struggle and in effect demands that they should become Zionists; for the essence of Zionism lies in the belief that these lands are (and always were) the homeland of the Jewish people, and that the history of Jewish dispossession was rightfully rectified by the emergence of Israel in 1948.
There are two things wrong with this. First, recognition of Israel as a Jewish state does not at all entail acknowledging some original Jewish birthright or repudiating a narrative according to which the Palestinians have suffered a historical injustice. It involves accepting only that, as things now stand, Israelis as well as Palestinians have a right to national self-determination within the relevant territory. Second, the problem is to find a political solution to competing national claims within that territory, and not to validate the Palestinian narrative. As in a previous outing at the same venue, Khalidi seems to be insensible of the fact that this problem is the result of there being competing narratives - Palestinian and Jewish - to be justly accommodated. No accommodation will be possible if each side insists on the unconstrained validity of its own narrative and on any political resolution having to respect it. Better to find the political resolution and let narrative fidelity, or adaptation, take its course.
What makes Khalidi's position odder is that he seems to have accepted some of the political content of a recognition of Israel. He writes:
Despite their current split, the majority of Palestinians – including Hamas – have accepted the political reality of Israel. The Palestine Liberation Organisation has gone further in acknowledging Israel's right to live in peace within secure borders. The PLO has also accepted that the loss of 77% of the Palestinians' historic homeland within Israel's pre-1967 borders cannot be reversed by force. Even Hamas has indicated that it can accept long-term peaceful coexistence with Israel if it withdraws from the territories that it occupied in 1967.
Note the 'right to live in peace within secure borders' and 'long-term peaceful coexistence'. Yet non-recognition just the same. It leaves an ambiguity to be settled. If non-recognition were just part of a narrative, then no one could object. But is it also a residual claim - one to be revived at a later date? In any event, the diplomats and negotiators can leave narrative to go where it will; recognition in the legal and political senses is what will count.