I’m surprised more pro-Israel advocates haven’t made the argument I’m about to make. It’s not a particularly complicated one. But it requires conceding things that most pro-Israel advocates would rather not concede, which I suppose is why they haven’t.
Tucker Carlson, in his viral exchange with The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, was asked whether he believed in Israel’s right to exist. Rather than answer, he questioned the premise. Where does that right come from? What does it even mean? His point was straightforward: if standards aren’t universally applied, they aren’t standards. They’re preferences. “I believe in human rights, not ethnic rights,” he said (which was an interesting admission from someone with Carlson’s pedigree).
On the narrow philosophical point, Tucker Carlson is correct. Individuals have rights. States do not, at least not in the same way. Individual human beings, because they are endowed by their creator, possess inalienable rights — rights that precede any government. States are instrumental. They are created by man to serve human ends.
The great Palestinian-American academic Edward Said dismissed the “right to exist” as “a formula hitherto unknown in international or customary law,” and he was right. The political theorist Andrew March, in a rigorous philosophical treatment, makes the case more precisely: states possess no original, moral rights. Whatever standing they have derives from the rights of the people they serve. Czechoslovakia dissolved. The Soviet Union dissolved. Nobody speaks of their “right to exist” having been violated. No wrong was committed against them. They ceased to exist, and it wasn’t an injustice. In contrast, violating a human being’s right to exist is always a violation (although in limited cases of capital crimes, that right can be usurped by the state).
And there’s an even simpler observation. As John Patrick Leary notes in The New Republic, Israel is the only country in the world to which the phrase is applied. No one asks you to affirm France’s right to exist before you’re allowed to criticize French foreign policy.
So if the question is whether Israel has a “right to exist” in the way that individuals have rights — the answer is no. But that’s true of every state, not just Israel. But it’s not necessarily that simple, and this is where Israel’s defenders might find themselves on stronger ground if they could only realize it.
Israel was founded relatively recently, and its existence — and specifically its right to exist as a majority Jewish state — has been contested from the start, and rightly so. Israel was founded on a profound injustice — the dispossession of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their land. This isn’t controversial among serious historians. Benny Morris, one of Israeli “new historians” who documented the expulsions, doesn’t deny them. He just thinks they were necessary. I find this morally abhorrent, but the underlying facts aren’t in dispute.
Israel was born in sin. The question is whether that sin justifies dissolving the state.
I don’t think it does. One injustice — Israel’s creation through ethnic cleansing — does not justify another: undoing Israel against the democratic wishes of its citizens. This is where I diverge with parts of the pro-Palestinian left. Peter Beinart draws a useful distinction between dissolving a country and transforming its political system. He doesn’t want to eliminate Israel any more than he wants to eliminate Myanmar or Cuba. He wants to dismantle the structures of Jewish supremacy. The question he asks is the right one: Does this state protect the rights of all individuals under its control? Obviously, in the case of Israel, the answer is a resounding no.
But conceding that doesn’t tell you what comes next. And more importantly, it doesn’t tell you how to get there without violating the very principle you’ve just invoked — namely, that rights belong to people.
It’s reasonable for Israeli Jews to want to retain a Jewish-majority state. That is what makes Israel Israel. It’s the only country most of them have ever known. The pro-Israel political theorist Michael Walzer would call this a “community of character“ — a political community forged through shared life that possesses a form of moral standing. As much as I dislike and disagree with Walzer’s claims of Gaza being a “just war,” his basic intuition — that collective self-determination means something real — isn’t so easily dismissed.
There is no justifiable way to undo Israel short of a majority of its residents freely voting, in a referendum, to fold the state into a broader binational arrangement incorporating both Jews and Palestinians. The genocide scholar Omer Bartov has articulated something like this vision: seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians sharing the land from the river to the sea. It’s an aspiration I both respect and long for. But Israeli Jews will never vote for it. They would have to be compelled into it, and that would be undemocratic. Therefore, I don’t see it as a live option or, importantly, a moral one.
Allen Buchanan, probably the most important political philosopher working on questions of secession and state dissolution, limits the case for unilateral dissolution to the most extreme circumstances — genocide, sustained mass atrocities — and even then, the presumption favors territorial integrity. The alternatives, he notes, tend toward catastrophic violence.
Now, Israel has committed what most scholars on the topic — Bartov among them — characterize as genocide against the Palestinian people. So perhaps Israel has, in fact, forfeited its own legitimacy. Bartov himself has said as much, warning that Israel’s conduct is destroying the moral foundations of the state.
But even if that’s true, it doesn’t resolve the problem of democracy. If Israel’s “right to exist” has been forfeited, how exactly do you dissolve it in a way that doesn’t override the democratic rights of Israeli individuals? You can’t, really. Not without compulsion. And if the whole point is that rights belong to people and not to states — which is where this argument started — then you can’t simply ignore the rights of seven million people because you’ve won a philosophical argument about the state they live in.
This is the paradox, and I don’t think there’s an obvious way out of it. The same principle that undermines Israel’s claim to a “right to exist” — that rights belong to persons, not to political arrangements — is also what protects the democratic agency of Israeli citizens. You can’t invoke the first half and discard the second.
So yes, I do think it’s worth asking whether Israel has a “right to exist” as a Jewish state, even if the rights language is a poor fit for states of any kind. Because even if Israel doesn’t have rights, Israeli voters do. Any transition to a different political arrangement — binational, confederal, whatever we want to call it — would have to be subject to some kind of democratic process to be legitimate. And there’s simply no way I can see in which this could conceivably happen.
Short of that, the only option is raw force. The political theorist David Polansky calls this a “power fantasy.” What body or party would force Israelis to dissolve their own state? No such body or party exists. And even if it did, forcing Israelis do to so would be unjust. And compounding one injustice (the founding of the Israeli state) with another (dissolving the Israeli state) is never a good path when it comes to the Middle East.
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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.
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.