People only talk about Israel's "Right to Exist" because people keep trying to make it not exist. The people who use the term most often are not making some philosophical point, they're arguing that Israel does in fact exist, and like every other state that exists, will not willingly do things to extinguish itself or cease doing what it takes to continue securing it's existence, and that this is morally just.
The evidence suggests not. Israel has been a recognized entity by most of the world's nations since 1948. More recently Turkey, Egypt, Bahrain, Morocco, Jordan and the UAE have recognized it too.
The Peace of Westphalia came after the Thirty Years War killed more than eight million people. Hamas appears to have wanted a similar war. They got it.
Israel was founded as one of the many new states that came into existence with the fall of empires in the first half of the 20th century when, under the then-burgeoning notion of nationalism, people grabbed what they considered their ancestral territory and threw out or massacred others. This happened in horrendous manner in many parts of the world in the first half of the 20th century, and those states which managed to emerge in the wake of all of this were all born in sin ("sin" by the standards evoked in this article). For example, The Greeks and Armenian Christians, long indigenous to the Anatolian area, and massacred horribly by the Turks earlier in the 20th century, are wondering why their territory and many of their holy sites were taken over by Turks (who arrived in the area relatively recently to the indigenous population and threw over Constantinople in 1453 to make an empire--and event which goes unremarked upon in many circles, even as we deplore the Western takeover of the Americas in 1492). - (To date, Turkey refuses to acknowledge the Armenian Holocaust and is illegally occupying Cyprus). But all of this is by way of example. It does not exonerate Israel of any sins, but points out some of the complications involved in selectively assessing the history of the past century or so.
All of the new states that emerged in the 20th century received legitimacy by way of the main method for new-state-legitimizing: international recognition (which would not have been a issue for recognizing France which came into existence long before the modern era and took its legitimacy, as did all pre-modern states, from "being there"--if they were able to ward off the continuous, normative colonialism and imperialism that characterized international relations throughout history).
As for going forward: Reconstituting Israel (or any other state) without any religious or national supremacism would have to be a principle applied to all denizens. In other words, in the Middle East there could be no more Arab, Turkish, or Muslim supremacism (as Arabs, Muslims, and Turks were never the only people in the area and, contrary to what they think, treated others in their midst by what would be considered today second-class citizenship--and that was on a good day when there weren't worse travesties going on). So, among other anti-supremacist moves, a new Middle East would have to see the restoration of the magnificent church Agha Sophia (now turned into a Turkish mosque) to its original owner which never disappeared: the Greek Orthodox church and the Temple Mount would have to be restored to its original owner which never disappeared: Jews. Unfortunately, the Arabs, Muslims and Turks of the area do not recognize their own heavy supremacism.
I say all this as a person who has been heavily critical of Israel, especially over the past few years, and a supporter of international law (for all its flaws). But international law is universalistic in spirit--and it would require everyone to do what they are demanding of Israel (they don't). I have also been in what could be called the "progressivist fold" politically for many years--but my fellow progressivists, who claim to loathe imperialism, colonialism and supremacism, are awfully selective about who and what they choose to get upset for. I support a more comprehensivist approach: holding everyone accountable equally.
Your post-Ottoman take is useful, thanks. One conclusion might be to say that the Middle East looks today like the battleground it was for centuries until the Turks "won" and pushed most of the inter-ethnic conflicts under the surface. A "solution" might be to draw new lines, move peoples around to fill them (as was done in Eastern Europe after WWII), and enforce the result until everybody got used to it (or until the next great power failure or resurgence sets off a new round of fragmentation or consolidation). Unfortunately or fortunately, depending upon your view, there is no one to knock these heads together. And for all the ink spilled and anguish generated over this situation, it doesn't remotely matter as much to the great powers as does the flow of oil. The threat to that flow just might be the new fact that forces some (not necessarily good) kind of change to what has gotten to be a very entrenched dynamic.
"Unfortunately or fortunately, depending upon your view, there is no one to knock these heads together."
The great powers have always had the ability to do this, should they have wanted to. Even secondary powers, when openly acting in concert with a local ally, have been able to enforce significant territorial settlements, e.g. Britain, France, and Israel during the Suez crisis.
It's just that the overwhelming western ideology after WWII decided to treat conflict like forest fires - something to be suppressed at all costs, rather than as a painful but necessary part of the biosphere from time to time.
Strange that at the start of the Israel Hamas war, you rightly pushed for Israel's right to defend itself while supporting innocent palestinians, but now it seems like all you want to do is throw libels around like "ethnic cleansing," "genocide", "apartheid". Part of this essay reads like an overdone philosophy exercise where a professor asks students if they have a right to exist. The olther part of this essay reads as racism in the form of antizionism. It's possible to be a zionist and against Israeli hardliner rhetoric and military aspects that harm palestinians. It's possible to be pro palestinian without questioning Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. Just ask Palestinian American Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib (who lost family members in Israeli strikes and additionally knows all too well how Gaza is terrorized by Hamas)... Look around the middle east at the number of Muslim/Arab ethnostates that exist.... You wrote a book still in my wishlist that argues American power can be a force for good. It's weird that you don't have that similar positive vision for Israel. Almost as if your biases hold Israel to a higher standard than you would other states. A small country besieged by multiple annihilistic threats from near range. Adam Louis Klein writes:
"Constitutive denial, gaslighting, and willful blindness to antizionism have persisted for decades. Only in the 1970s—with voices like Jean Améry, Jacques Givet, or Patrick Moynihan’s speech at the United Nations opposing the “Zionism is Racism” libel—did glimpses of sustained attention and condemnation begin to emerge.
Multiple Arab states baking an endless genocidal war against Israel into their national identities—as in Baathism, Nasserism, or the PLO—is not normal. Endless Islamist warfare, placing anti-Jewish conspiracy theories at the center of imperial visions of total jihad, is not normal. Western antizionists drawing tens of thousands into the streets to destroy one small state is not normal.
Antizionism is a systemic, global, discriminatory phenomenon, so normalized that it has been rendered invisible.
It's time to radically break the silence, forever."
Israel’s right to exist comes from its ability to defend itself.
Let’s review the history. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah were founded in 930 BC.
Mohammad wrote his Koran a millennium later. That sent the Arabs swarming out of the desert to attack Christendom at both ends. The Arabs were beaten twice, first at the battle of Tours in 732 AD, then again at Lepanto in 1571.
The Arab failures led to the Turks taking over the Middle East, where they ruled from 1299 to 1922.
Note that last date: The Turks allied with the Germans in the first World War. When Turkey lost the war, England took over the Middle East until 1948. At that time, the Palestine Mandate was returned to the inhabitants. Arabs got 94% of the land and 100% of the oil. Jews got just 6% of the land. Yet even that sliver of desert wasteland was too much for the irredentist Arabs. They immediately attacked Israel, and many times thereafter: 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982. The Arabs lost every time. After their last defeat, the Arabs went to craven terrorism at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Unable to win at open war, the Arabs sank to slaughtering innocent civilians. Such evil has been perpetrated constantly since then. Most recently in October 7, 2023, Hamas slaughtered 1,200 people in Israel; civilians, including women, children, and foreign nationals. Over 250 were kidnapped into Gaza, and thousands were injured during the surprise attack on southern Israel.
Israel is the only humane, Western nation in the Middle East. Suppose you got a broken telegram saying that a loved one was “arrested in T…”
You would pray, fervently, that it was in Tel Aviv, and not Tehran. Yes, you would, though you were an atheist and an islamist apologist.
Shadi, this seems a bit of selective history reading to get here but I take your point.
We do have to work with what we have now. Ironically, taking territory from enemies (pretty classic behavior between states) seems to be the one rule that no one wants to apply to Israel. Even if the west sanctioned Israel's brutal formation to atone for it's antisemitism (while still being antisemitic enough to kick jews out of their own countries). Israel does exist now, and seems pretty determined to exist as a Jewish state. Ethic states are another rule we seem to want to pass off to history from our enlightened western towers.
All this selective judging makes me very unsure of how much to trust opinions like yours. It seems sentimental, not realistic. We have two groups who both claim the same dirt. Real foreign policy would work within that space, not pretend it isn't real, or that one side’s grievances don't matter because they currently hold a position of power.
So all that to say, you present a nice hypothetical but I sure don't know what your solution is, other than to say you're too big to choose a side outright, but you'd like the Jews to lose, or change their objectives, which they hold for very good reasons if a holocaust and war in '67 are to be remembered.
The phrase 'right to exist' was made to try and distinguish criticisms of Israel that are constructive from those made by people who want to see the state destroyed. There's obviously no point in making a given concession if the people demanding it actually just want to destroy the country no matter what. This is especially central in coming to a peace agreement with Palestinians, because the central contention of the Israeli Right (which, for what it's worth, I think is correct) is that in practice, literally any territorial compromise will just be used as a staging post for further attacks on Israel.
I think the phrasing is wrong and the question should be made more directly, but it's hard. For example, the question 'should Israel exist? would probably be overly restrictive, and exclude people who are willing to make peace but would ideally like there not to be an Israel. The best question would be 'are you willing to give up concrete political action, violent and non-violent, aimed at destroying the state of Israel if this specific list of demands is met [proceeds to enumerate]", but that is not feasible in ordinary interviews and debates. Language is hard.
Treating Israel's "right to exist" as if we were in a philosophy seminar ... let's cut through the crap.
Of course there is no such as "right to exist" for states. It is shorthand for "right for a community that has established itself as a state to defend itself".
So why is this formula deployed for Israel, and for Israel only? Because for many, Israel's establishment is a moral aberration, its destruction is a moral goal, and thus it doesn't have the moral right to defend itself.
And where does this unique distinction stem from? From the fact that Israel is the nation-state of the Jews. It was established specifically as a state where Jews are in the majority, where they are not a minority at the mercy of non-Jewish majorities, where they can, therefore, defend themselves. For too many, consciously or subconsciously, Jews being able to defend themselves, not being at the mercy of non-Jewish majorities, is anathema. Jews are supposed to be powerless when confronted with hatred, up to genocide. That's what defines them.
So the formula"Israel has the right to exist" is really saying "Jews have the right to defend themselves against genocide".
The problem is that this formula is not typically used by Israel's friends. It is almost always used as a throat-clearing, a preamble to "Israel can defend itself, BUT NOT LIKE THAT" ... without ever spelling out what the right way would be.
So please, spare us the philosophy. States exist to protect their citizens, which are almost always a majority ethnic or cultural group. This is what Israel's Jews do and will continue to do, with or without your permission, because its enemies are making the alternative all-too clear.
Weak sauce. The point is not whether the abstraction “Israel” has a right to exist, but whether Jews, the nation of Israel, have a right to exist. Living people have to exist somewhere, and the concept that Jews, alone, must, as a matter of morality, wander the earth and live at sufferance of strangers who will ultimately turn on them murderously, is profoundly irrational and only strengthens the case for an Israeli state powerful enough to guarantee the existence of that nation. Whatever argument for the necessity of exile for Jews, applies in spades to Palestinians, whose path of nationhood was not defined and determined by the Nakhba, but by the choices and actions into which their deranged “leadership” led them afterwards. Morality aside, this was a chosen path, the path of war instead of peace, from which there have been consequences, and that is all. If such exile is just and right for Jews, then it is just and right for anybody.
Tucker Carlson is absolutely wrong. Rights are attributed to individuals precisely so that governments can exist to protect them. It is the recognition of individual rights that gave rise to the revolutionary idea of rights-protecting states, and it is because Israel is such a state that it has a legitimate right to exist.
Israel was never “born in sin.” From its founding, it has functioned as a rights-protecting government capable of maintaining a first-world standard of living. In contrast, its neighbors, authoritarian regimes that routinely violate basic human rights, are the societies truly “born in sin,” with oppressive systems and appallingly low standards of living.
Any discussion that questions Israel’s right to exist instead of asking the same about Hamas or similar regimes is not a serious inquiry. It reflects either willful ignorance or something far more troubling. Individuals posing such questions have no place in serious political discourse in any professional capacity.
A fair hearing. Thank you for bringing up the fact that no other country has it’s right to exist questioned. And almost every country created in the past involved land disputes and war. If Mexico was developing nukes to take back the US because of what happened in the 1800s, I think we know what would happen. People who lost their land by any means have to create a new reality. Which is why the UN formed Israel post Holocaust in 1947.
Brave essay. If there are issues with it, I think the first would be that it combines a realist view of international relations with a normative view of politics (i.e., "democracy"). States don't have rights under this combination, but people have the right to self-determination. The problem is that such a two-level argument leads right to the contradiction that you point out. An alternative is to recognize that international relations has both and realist and a normative tradition, and that they have different things to say about this problem. Under the realist view, Israel has the same right to exist -- or fail to exist -- as any other actual or putative state. it's all a matter of power. But there is the second, more normative, "international law" tradition, under which states are moral actors. As such, they have a right to exist, but there are two catches: (1) their right to exist doesn't imply that other states don't have a right to exist (however threatening this might seem); and (2) their right to exist can be compromised by bad behavior (which gives the victims the right to suppress and punish this behavior, if they can). The second problem is that both your version of the argument and mine miss the register where the debate, at least in the United States, is really happening. Here, it really is a debate over who owns the aggrieved high ground, which side will be demonized, and how this total war-style conflict, which since 10/7/23 has been exported at the cultural and political level to the United States, will affect the electoral calculus. In this environment, the fine distinctions that you and I might wish to make (however differently) don't have much purchase.
You’re right that “the right to exist” is a philosophically awkward phrase—one that’s often weaponized by Ziophobes, including figures like Tucker Carlson.
In that piece, I examine Carlson’s interview with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and unpack the structure behind its seemingly “naive” questions. What presents itself as curiosity is, in practice, a selective demand: that Israel justify its legitimacy in ways no other state is ever required to do.
What gives Tucker Carlson the right to live in the United States? Does he possess Native American DNA? Can he trace his lineage to pre-colonial tribes? If not, should his citizenship be reconsidered? Should millions of Americans be told their presence is morally provisional?
Of course not. The very suggestion sounds absurd—because modern states do not derive legitimacy from DNA tests.
The United States derives its authority from sovereignty: a constitutional order, defined borders, laws governing citizenship and naturalization—and, ultimately, the capacity to defend itself. That’s not a philosophical abstraction; it’s how political legitimacy actually works.
Apply that same standard consistently, and the entire “right to exist” discourse collapses. It stops being a neutral inquiry and reveals itself for what it is: a selective demand imposed on one state—and one state alone.
This is great stuff Shadi. Interestingly, even though I think there is no 'right' for a state to exist, there is clearly, today at least, a desire to maintain almost all states' integrity and ability to exist. In some ways, I find the statement misleading. A whole host of international law now exists, and even began generations ago, to try and maintain the notion of a state's right not to be destroyed by outsiders and attempting to scaffold organisations to stop this event from occurring. It strikes me as almost Hobbesian in its efforts- create a big bad body to stop any individual actor from taking action into their own hands. Britain went to war to preserve Polish integrity officially in World War II, and the Gulf War began to save Kuwait from being gobbled up by Iraq. There is clearly a notion of a state's right not to be destroyed by its competitors and continually occupied. There is also clearly a presumption that the state can do what it wants without outside interference unless it begins to threaten other nations.
Despite many of the comments talking about the treaties of Westphalia, they don't really say much. Indeed, they're essentially derivative of the Treaty of Augsburg in 1555, so I wouldn't really go down that route. I do think with the creation of Israel, as beastly as it was, (although the New Historians, whom you reference, are not the only school of thought here), was also conducted in the context of the Holocaust. If we take Fanon and his ilk seriously with the reproduction of colonial violence, then we also have to do the same for those particular Jewish communities. I'm not saying it wasn't wrong, but it strikes me that Israel, in some circles, was the one state that could never be forgiven or understood for their misdeeds. Misdeeds, which in reality, every country has perpetrated towards sections of its host populations, if we are being honest.
I do think 'Israel has a right to exist' is now being used as a shorthand for Israel can do whatever it wants, which is tragic and an intellectually impoverished attempt to understand the situation. If it were up to me, we'd have slapped sanctions on them and genuinely considered utilising R2P norms to stop them from what they're doing. It's clearly a genocide, and even though sovereign states have rights, they also have responsibilities. Rights by the way, don't always have to be enforced for them to be rights- this is precisely why Bentham felt they were 'nonsense upon stilts'.
Clearly, there are sections of many populations and the Arab World who see Israel as a colonial creation that needs to be either severely weakened or broken entirely. This is also increasingly true here. Sadly, Israel's actions make that logic more likely to be acted out than otherwise and in the long-term, I believe they've created a great deal of moral danger in the region and the state itself. So, as you point out, the question is not should Israel exist, it is 'should we police Israel's behaviour. Even if democratically chosen, I find the current discourse of event sickening and would propose to put a stop to it, even if it meant international forces being stationed there. A bit like the federal occupation of the South during Reconstruction, which, if it had gone on longer, may have ultimately succeeded.
I think Beinart could reply by saying (1) Israel extends from the river to the sea, (2) all permanent residents of Israel are owed citizenship so all Palestinians should be made citizens (this would not be subject to a vote of those who are currently granted such rights, any more than women's suffrage can be justly denied where men wouldn't vote for it). If (1) and (2) imply the end of Israel so be it (even as Beinart thinks a single democratic state would represent the continuation of Israel). I take it that this article assumes (1) to be false?
you're right. There is no such thing as tight to exist. A state either exists or it does not. But you seem unaware that a "Palestinian" state by the same token doesn't have a "right" to exist either. They tried drowing the Yahudi into the sea in 1948-49. They lost (without US aid to Yahudi). Wars have consequences, they could have accepted Peel Commission guidelines which granted the Yahudi a tiny slice of land.
Hamid’s argument is impeccable in a political theory seminar way. But in ordinary political discourse, saying “Israel has a right to exist” is a useful piece of shorthand – moral shorthand. Saying Israel has a right to exist just means that abolishing it by force, against the will of the people living there, would be unjust.
And there’s a political tone-deafness here. He’s “surprised” more pro-Israel advocates don’t adopt this stance. But let’s say you’re arguing with someone who says: “Israel is illegitimate, it has no right to exist.” What are you supposed to say? “Well, no state has a right to exist, but …” ? Rhetorically this is a non-starter.
Hamid acts in good faith – he wants to help! But how will “no state has a right to exist” help?Context matters - in this case, lots of people saying you don't have a right to exist. A better tack might be: “Israel has a right to exist, and so would a Palestinian state, if it recognizes Israel’s.”
Joe Biden said: “Until the region says unequivocally, they acknowledge the right of Israel to exist as an independent Jewish state there will be no peace.” As Dean Acheson might have put it: sometimes you have to speak in terms clearer than rigorous political theory.
People only talk about Israel's "Right to Exist" because people keep trying to make it not exist. The people who use the term most often are not making some philosophical point, they're arguing that Israel does in fact exist, and like every other state that exists, will not willingly do things to extinguish itself or cease doing what it takes to continue securing it's existence, and that this is morally just.
Exactly. Of course it has a right to exist. That's what the Peace of Westphalia is about.
Good one. Do you reckon the Palestinians know about the Peace of Westphalia?
The evidence suggests not. Israel has been a recognized entity by most of the world's nations since 1948. More recently Turkey, Egypt, Bahrain, Morocco, Jordan and the UAE have recognized it too.
The Peace of Westphalia came after the Thirty Years War killed more than eight million people. Hamas appears to have wanted a similar war. They got it.
Oops, I meant do you reckon Begin and his droogs in Irgun knew about it?
Oh, and Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, Iran and Lebanon would too like to know about this idea of the sovereign state.
Syria and Lebanon would both be much better off if Iran hadn’t spent the last 40 years using them as staging grounds.
Israel was founded as one of the many new states that came into existence with the fall of empires in the first half of the 20th century when, under the then-burgeoning notion of nationalism, people grabbed what they considered their ancestral territory and threw out or massacred others. This happened in horrendous manner in many parts of the world in the first half of the 20th century, and those states which managed to emerge in the wake of all of this were all born in sin ("sin" by the standards evoked in this article). For example, The Greeks and Armenian Christians, long indigenous to the Anatolian area, and massacred horribly by the Turks earlier in the 20th century, are wondering why their territory and many of their holy sites were taken over by Turks (who arrived in the area relatively recently to the indigenous population and threw over Constantinople in 1453 to make an empire--and event which goes unremarked upon in many circles, even as we deplore the Western takeover of the Americas in 1492). - (To date, Turkey refuses to acknowledge the Armenian Holocaust and is illegally occupying Cyprus). But all of this is by way of example. It does not exonerate Israel of any sins, but points out some of the complications involved in selectively assessing the history of the past century or so.
All of the new states that emerged in the 20th century received legitimacy by way of the main method for new-state-legitimizing: international recognition (which would not have been a issue for recognizing France which came into existence long before the modern era and took its legitimacy, as did all pre-modern states, from "being there"--if they were able to ward off the continuous, normative colonialism and imperialism that characterized international relations throughout history).
As for going forward: Reconstituting Israel (or any other state) without any religious or national supremacism would have to be a principle applied to all denizens. In other words, in the Middle East there could be no more Arab, Turkish, or Muslim supremacism (as Arabs, Muslims, and Turks were never the only people in the area and, contrary to what they think, treated others in their midst by what would be considered today second-class citizenship--and that was on a good day when there weren't worse travesties going on). So, among other anti-supremacist moves, a new Middle East would have to see the restoration of the magnificent church Agha Sophia (now turned into a Turkish mosque) to its original owner which never disappeared: the Greek Orthodox church and the Temple Mount would have to be restored to its original owner which never disappeared: Jews. Unfortunately, the Arabs, Muslims and Turks of the area do not recognize their own heavy supremacism.
I say all this as a person who has been heavily critical of Israel, especially over the past few years, and a supporter of international law (for all its flaws). But international law is universalistic in spirit--and it would require everyone to do what they are demanding of Israel (they don't). I have also been in what could be called the "progressivist fold" politically for many years--but my fellow progressivists, who claim to loathe imperialism, colonialism and supremacism, are awfully selective about who and what they choose to get upset for. I support a more comprehensivist approach: holding everyone accountable equally.
Your post-Ottoman take is useful, thanks. One conclusion might be to say that the Middle East looks today like the battleground it was for centuries until the Turks "won" and pushed most of the inter-ethnic conflicts under the surface. A "solution" might be to draw new lines, move peoples around to fill them (as was done in Eastern Europe after WWII), and enforce the result until everybody got used to it (or until the next great power failure or resurgence sets off a new round of fragmentation or consolidation). Unfortunately or fortunately, depending upon your view, there is no one to knock these heads together. And for all the ink spilled and anguish generated over this situation, it doesn't remotely matter as much to the great powers as does the flow of oil. The threat to that flow just might be the new fact that forces some (not necessarily good) kind of change to what has gotten to be a very entrenched dynamic.
"Unfortunately or fortunately, depending upon your view, there is no one to knock these heads together."
The great powers have always had the ability to do this, should they have wanted to. Even secondary powers, when openly acting in concert with a local ally, have been able to enforce significant territorial settlements, e.g. Britain, France, and Israel during the Suez crisis.
It's just that the overwhelming western ideology after WWII decided to treat conflict like forest fires - something to be suppressed at all costs, rather than as a painful but necessary part of the biosphere from time to time.
Strange that at the start of the Israel Hamas war, you rightly pushed for Israel's right to defend itself while supporting innocent palestinians, but now it seems like all you want to do is throw libels around like "ethnic cleansing," "genocide", "apartheid". Part of this essay reads like an overdone philosophy exercise where a professor asks students if they have a right to exist. The olther part of this essay reads as racism in the form of antizionism. It's possible to be a zionist and against Israeli hardliner rhetoric and military aspects that harm palestinians. It's possible to be pro palestinian without questioning Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. Just ask Palestinian American Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib (who lost family members in Israeli strikes and additionally knows all too well how Gaza is terrorized by Hamas)... Look around the middle east at the number of Muslim/Arab ethnostates that exist.... You wrote a book still in my wishlist that argues American power can be a force for good. It's weird that you don't have that similar positive vision for Israel. Almost as if your biases hold Israel to a higher standard than you would other states. A small country besieged by multiple annihilistic threats from near range. Adam Louis Klein writes:
"Constitutive denial, gaslighting, and willful blindness to antizionism have persisted for decades. Only in the 1970s—with voices like Jean Améry, Jacques Givet, or Patrick Moynihan’s speech at the United Nations opposing the “Zionism is Racism” libel—did glimpses of sustained attention and condemnation begin to emerge.
Multiple Arab states baking an endless genocidal war against Israel into their national identities—as in Baathism, Nasserism, or the PLO—is not normal. Endless Islamist warfare, placing anti-Jewish conspiracy theories at the center of imperial visions of total jihad, is not normal. Western antizionists drawing tens of thousands into the streets to destroy one small state is not normal.
Antizionism is a systemic, global, discriminatory phenomenon, so normalized that it has been rendered invisible.
It's time to radically break the silence, forever."
Israel’s right to exist comes from its ability to defend itself.
Let’s review the history. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah were founded in 930 BC.
Mohammad wrote his Koran a millennium later. That sent the Arabs swarming out of the desert to attack Christendom at both ends. The Arabs were beaten twice, first at the battle of Tours in 732 AD, then again at Lepanto in 1571.
The Arab failures led to the Turks taking over the Middle East, where they ruled from 1299 to 1922.
Note that last date: The Turks allied with the Germans in the first World War. When Turkey lost the war, England took over the Middle East until 1948. At that time, the Palestine Mandate was returned to the inhabitants. Arabs got 94% of the land and 100% of the oil. Jews got just 6% of the land. Yet even that sliver of desert wasteland was too much for the irredentist Arabs. They immediately attacked Israel, and many times thereafter: 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982. The Arabs lost every time. After their last defeat, the Arabs went to craven terrorism at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Unable to win at open war, the Arabs sank to slaughtering innocent civilians. Such evil has been perpetrated constantly since then. Most recently in October 7, 2023, Hamas slaughtered 1,200 people in Israel; civilians, including women, children, and foreign nationals. Over 250 were kidnapped into Gaza, and thousands were injured during the surprise attack on southern Israel.
Israel is the only humane, Western nation in the Middle East. Suppose you got a broken telegram saying that a loved one was “arrested in T…”
You would pray, fervently, that it was in Tel Aviv, and not Tehran. Yes, you would, though you were an atheist and an islamist apologist.
Shadi, this seems a bit of selective history reading to get here but I take your point.
We do have to work with what we have now. Ironically, taking territory from enemies (pretty classic behavior between states) seems to be the one rule that no one wants to apply to Israel. Even if the west sanctioned Israel's brutal formation to atone for it's antisemitism (while still being antisemitic enough to kick jews out of their own countries). Israel does exist now, and seems pretty determined to exist as a Jewish state. Ethic states are another rule we seem to want to pass off to history from our enlightened western towers.
All this selective judging makes me very unsure of how much to trust opinions like yours. It seems sentimental, not realistic. We have two groups who both claim the same dirt. Real foreign policy would work within that space, not pretend it isn't real, or that one side’s grievances don't matter because they currently hold a position of power.
So all that to say, you present a nice hypothetical but I sure don't know what your solution is, other than to say you're too big to choose a side outright, but you'd like the Jews to lose, or change their objectives, which they hold for very good reasons if a holocaust and war in '67 are to be remembered.
The phrase 'right to exist' was made to try and distinguish criticisms of Israel that are constructive from those made by people who want to see the state destroyed. There's obviously no point in making a given concession if the people demanding it actually just want to destroy the country no matter what. This is especially central in coming to a peace agreement with Palestinians, because the central contention of the Israeli Right (which, for what it's worth, I think is correct) is that in practice, literally any territorial compromise will just be used as a staging post for further attacks on Israel.
I think the phrasing is wrong and the question should be made more directly, but it's hard. For example, the question 'should Israel exist? would probably be overly restrictive, and exclude people who are willing to make peace but would ideally like there not to be an Israel. The best question would be 'are you willing to give up concrete political action, violent and non-violent, aimed at destroying the state of Israel if this specific list of demands is met [proceeds to enumerate]", but that is not feasible in ordinary interviews and debates. Language is hard.
Treating Israel's "right to exist" as if we were in a philosophy seminar ... let's cut through the crap.
Of course there is no such as "right to exist" for states. It is shorthand for "right for a community that has established itself as a state to defend itself".
So why is this formula deployed for Israel, and for Israel only? Because for many, Israel's establishment is a moral aberration, its destruction is a moral goal, and thus it doesn't have the moral right to defend itself.
And where does this unique distinction stem from? From the fact that Israel is the nation-state of the Jews. It was established specifically as a state where Jews are in the majority, where they are not a minority at the mercy of non-Jewish majorities, where they can, therefore, defend themselves. For too many, consciously or subconsciously, Jews being able to defend themselves, not being at the mercy of non-Jewish majorities, is anathema. Jews are supposed to be powerless when confronted with hatred, up to genocide. That's what defines them.
So the formula"Israel has the right to exist" is really saying "Jews have the right to defend themselves against genocide".
The problem is that this formula is not typically used by Israel's friends. It is almost always used as a throat-clearing, a preamble to "Israel can defend itself, BUT NOT LIKE THAT" ... without ever spelling out what the right way would be.
So please, spare us the philosophy. States exist to protect their citizens, which are almost always a majority ethnic or cultural group. This is what Israel's Jews do and will continue to do, with or without your permission, because its enemies are making the alternative all-too clear.
Weak sauce. The point is not whether the abstraction “Israel” has a right to exist, but whether Jews, the nation of Israel, have a right to exist. Living people have to exist somewhere, and the concept that Jews, alone, must, as a matter of morality, wander the earth and live at sufferance of strangers who will ultimately turn on them murderously, is profoundly irrational and only strengthens the case for an Israeli state powerful enough to guarantee the existence of that nation. Whatever argument for the necessity of exile for Jews, applies in spades to Palestinians, whose path of nationhood was not defined and determined by the Nakhba, but by the choices and actions into which their deranged “leadership” led them afterwards. Morality aside, this was a chosen path, the path of war instead of peace, from which there have been consequences, and that is all. If such exile is just and right for Jews, then it is just and right for anybody.
Tucker Carlson is absolutely wrong. Rights are attributed to individuals precisely so that governments can exist to protect them. It is the recognition of individual rights that gave rise to the revolutionary idea of rights-protecting states, and it is because Israel is such a state that it has a legitimate right to exist.
Israel was never “born in sin.” From its founding, it has functioned as a rights-protecting government capable of maintaining a first-world standard of living. In contrast, its neighbors, authoritarian regimes that routinely violate basic human rights, are the societies truly “born in sin,” with oppressive systems and appallingly low standards of living.
Any discussion that questions Israel’s right to exist instead of asking the same about Hamas or similar regimes is not a serious inquiry. It reflects either willful ignorance or something far more troubling. Individuals posing such questions have no place in serious political discourse in any professional capacity.
A fair hearing. Thank you for bringing up the fact that no other country has it’s right to exist questioned. And almost every country created in the past involved land disputes and war. If Mexico was developing nukes to take back the US because of what happened in the 1800s, I think we know what would happen. People who lost their land by any means have to create a new reality. Which is why the UN formed Israel post Holocaust in 1947.
Brave essay. If there are issues with it, I think the first would be that it combines a realist view of international relations with a normative view of politics (i.e., "democracy"). States don't have rights under this combination, but people have the right to self-determination. The problem is that such a two-level argument leads right to the contradiction that you point out. An alternative is to recognize that international relations has both and realist and a normative tradition, and that they have different things to say about this problem. Under the realist view, Israel has the same right to exist -- or fail to exist -- as any other actual or putative state. it's all a matter of power. But there is the second, more normative, "international law" tradition, under which states are moral actors. As such, they have a right to exist, but there are two catches: (1) their right to exist doesn't imply that other states don't have a right to exist (however threatening this might seem); and (2) their right to exist can be compromised by bad behavior (which gives the victims the right to suppress and punish this behavior, if they can). The second problem is that both your version of the argument and mine miss the register where the debate, at least in the United States, is really happening. Here, it really is a debate over who owns the aggrieved high ground, which side will be demonized, and how this total war-style conflict, which since 10/7/23 has been exported at the cultural and political level to the United States, will affect the electoral calculus. In this environment, the fine distinctions that you and I might wish to make (however differently) don't have much purchase.
You’re right that “the right to exist” is a philosophically awkward phrase—one that’s often weaponized by Ziophobes, including figures like Tucker Carlson.
The Tucker Carlson Test:
https://thedominant.substack.com/p/the-tucker-carlson-test
In that piece, I examine Carlson’s interview with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and unpack the structure behind its seemingly “naive” questions. What presents itself as curiosity is, in practice, a selective demand: that Israel justify its legitimacy in ways no other state is ever required to do.
What gives Tucker Carlson the right to live in the United States? Does he possess Native American DNA? Can he trace his lineage to pre-colonial tribes? If not, should his citizenship be reconsidered? Should millions of Americans be told their presence is morally provisional?
Of course not. The very suggestion sounds absurd—because modern states do not derive legitimacy from DNA tests.
The United States derives its authority from sovereignty: a constitutional order, defined borders, laws governing citizenship and naturalization—and, ultimately, the capacity to defend itself. That’s not a philosophical abstraction; it’s how political legitimacy actually works.
Apply that same standard consistently, and the entire “right to exist” discourse collapses. It stops being a neutral inquiry and reveals itself for what it is: a selective demand imposed on one state—and one state alone.
This is great stuff Shadi. Interestingly, even though I think there is no 'right' for a state to exist, there is clearly, today at least, a desire to maintain almost all states' integrity and ability to exist. In some ways, I find the statement misleading. A whole host of international law now exists, and even began generations ago, to try and maintain the notion of a state's right not to be destroyed by outsiders and attempting to scaffold organisations to stop this event from occurring. It strikes me as almost Hobbesian in its efforts- create a big bad body to stop any individual actor from taking action into their own hands. Britain went to war to preserve Polish integrity officially in World War II, and the Gulf War began to save Kuwait from being gobbled up by Iraq. There is clearly a notion of a state's right not to be destroyed by its competitors and continually occupied. There is also clearly a presumption that the state can do what it wants without outside interference unless it begins to threaten other nations.
Despite many of the comments talking about the treaties of Westphalia, they don't really say much. Indeed, they're essentially derivative of the Treaty of Augsburg in 1555, so I wouldn't really go down that route. I do think with the creation of Israel, as beastly as it was, (although the New Historians, whom you reference, are not the only school of thought here), was also conducted in the context of the Holocaust. If we take Fanon and his ilk seriously with the reproduction of colonial violence, then we also have to do the same for those particular Jewish communities. I'm not saying it wasn't wrong, but it strikes me that Israel, in some circles, was the one state that could never be forgiven or understood for their misdeeds. Misdeeds, which in reality, every country has perpetrated towards sections of its host populations, if we are being honest.
I do think 'Israel has a right to exist' is now being used as a shorthand for Israel can do whatever it wants, which is tragic and an intellectually impoverished attempt to understand the situation. If it were up to me, we'd have slapped sanctions on them and genuinely considered utilising R2P norms to stop them from what they're doing. It's clearly a genocide, and even though sovereign states have rights, they also have responsibilities. Rights by the way, don't always have to be enforced for them to be rights- this is precisely why Bentham felt they were 'nonsense upon stilts'.
Clearly, there are sections of many populations and the Arab World who see Israel as a colonial creation that needs to be either severely weakened or broken entirely. This is also increasingly true here. Sadly, Israel's actions make that logic more likely to be acted out than otherwise and in the long-term, I believe they've created a great deal of moral danger in the region and the state itself. So, as you point out, the question is not should Israel exist, it is 'should we police Israel's behaviour. Even if democratically chosen, I find the current discourse of event sickening and would propose to put a stop to it, even if it meant international forces being stationed there. A bit like the federal occupation of the South during Reconstruction, which, if it had gone on longer, may have ultimately succeeded.
I think Beinart could reply by saying (1) Israel extends from the river to the sea, (2) all permanent residents of Israel are owed citizenship so all Palestinians should be made citizens (this would not be subject to a vote of those who are currently granted such rights, any more than women's suffrage can be justly denied where men wouldn't vote for it). If (1) and (2) imply the end of Israel so be it (even as Beinart thinks a single democratic state would represent the continuation of Israel). I take it that this article assumes (1) to be false?
you're right. There is no such thing as tight to exist. A state either exists or it does not. But you seem unaware that a "Palestinian" state by the same token doesn't have a "right" to exist either. They tried drowing the Yahudi into the sea in 1948-49. They lost (without US aid to Yahudi). Wars have consequences, they could have accepted Peel Commission guidelines which granted the Yahudi a tiny slice of land.
Hamid’s argument is impeccable in a political theory seminar way. But in ordinary political discourse, saying “Israel has a right to exist” is a useful piece of shorthand – moral shorthand. Saying Israel has a right to exist just means that abolishing it by force, against the will of the people living there, would be unjust.
And there’s a political tone-deafness here. He’s “surprised” more pro-Israel advocates don’t adopt this stance. But let’s say you’re arguing with someone who says: “Israel is illegitimate, it has no right to exist.” What are you supposed to say? “Well, no state has a right to exist, but …” ? Rhetorically this is a non-starter.
Hamid acts in good faith – he wants to help! But how will “no state has a right to exist” help?Context matters - in this case, lots of people saying you don't have a right to exist. A better tack might be: “Israel has a right to exist, and so would a Palestinian state, if it recognizes Israel’s.”
Joe Biden said: “Until the region says unequivocally, they acknowledge the right of Israel to exist as an independent Jewish state there will be no peace.” As Dean Acheson might have put it: sometimes you have to speak in terms clearer than rigorous political theory.
if a Palestinian state failed to recognize Israel’s right to exist would that Palestinian state therefore lose it's right to exist?