I’ve never considered in any detail whether Israel has a “right to exist.” I don’t see the phrase anywhere in this blog, either pro or con, and my website uses it just once in reference to Israel. In connection with another project, though, I’ve been asked to clarify my views. So although it’s not an issue that interests me particularly, and although I’m not fully versed in everything that’s relevant, and although as usual I don’t have time to go into a lot of detail, here’s how I would begin answering the question.
At a general level, since my leanings are more anarchist than nationalist, I don’t believe any state has a right to exist. States are structural mechanisms allowing groups of elites to control a larger population by establishing a monopoly on the use of force within specified borders. What makes states “legitimate” is that they establish this structure according to internationally recognized rules created by other states that have already done the same thing and have agreed among themselves that statehood is the desired level of manageable political organization. Once a group becomes a legitimate state, it has the right to use force to prevent internal groups from establishing their own smaller states, in a process that legitimizes the rights of some groups and disadvantages others.
As a matter of political philosophy, I don’t believe any group has a “right” to do this, even in alleged democracies where elite-dominated electorates formally approve what is done in their name. The mechanisms used to enforce this system, from international military alliances to international law to a globalized economy, become dominant through a combination of force, threats, and increasingly sophisticated ideological measures rather than through any truly democratic process. Since I am opposed to this system whether it benefits Israel or Palestine or Saudi Arabia or the United States, arguments about the right to exist as a state seem to me beside the point. I don’t care what flag flies overhead, anywhere. We would be better off without them.
I know this doesn’t really answer the usual question about Israel’s right to exist. As typically posed, it assumes the legitimacy of the international framework in which statehood is the norm. If this is accepted for the sake of discussion, the question of Israel’s right to exist becomes a legal one. And as I understand it, Israel does have that right under international law, stemming from the 1947 United Nations partition plan establishing the states of Israel and Palestine in the old British Mandate.
That Palestine never became a state would not, it seems to me, eliminate Israel’s legal status, and so far as I know legitimate international bodies accept Israel’s statehood despite arguments that the UN plan was itself illegitimate. Even if that plan was an unjust political compromise forced on the Arab world by the colonial powers, it does not become illegitimate any more than countless other injustices that have become institutionalized over time. As I’ve written about extensively in other contexts, law has less to do with justice than with rules and power.
Still, defenders of Israel’s right to exist are inconsistent and dishonest when they point to the UN partition plan but endorse Israel’s refusal to abide by international law since 1948. Israel’s refusal to allow the return of Palestinian refugees, required under international law, is just the longest-standing example. More recently is international law relating to the post-1967 occupation. A few years ago the World Court ruled that the Separation Wall is illegal where it’s built on Palestinian land instead of along the border, but construction continues as more Palestinian land is stolen. Using scarcely credible legal justifications accepted by almost no one else, including in many cases the US, Israel shrugs off as irrelevant International law related to water access, home demolitions, settlement construction, and on and on. But even though Israel’s continuing occupation of Palestinian territory is probably fully illegal under international law, I don’t think a case can be made under ordinary standards that Israel itself has no legal right to exist.
This question ordinarily comes up in connection with whether Israel should allow a Palestinian state whose government does not formally recognize Israel’s right to exist. That debate seems to me a red herring, especially given Israel’s refusal to allow a viable Palestinian state more than two decades after the Palestinian Liberation Organization accepted a two-state solution and when even Hamas has been willing to go along with a long-term truce. National states exist when their power over their territory is endorsed by international law. It doesn’t matter whether neighboring states “recognize” them. All that should matter is whether neighboring states agree to halt hostilities once basic requirements of justice are met.
As readers of this blog know, I don’t believe Israel has come close to meeting what justice requires. Increasingly, I don’t believe it can ever do so without altering its fundamental underlying assumptions. So what interests me most is not whether Israel has a right to exist but whether Israel should continue to subordinate democracy , equality, and human rights to its formal character as a Jewish state. Do states have the right to prefer one group over another, or do they only have the power? Can a state that refuses to constitutionalize full equality be considered a democracy? Can a Jewish state that occupies Palestinian land decade after decade retain much that is recognizably Jewish to anyone other than right-wing nationalists and ultra-orthodox sectarians? These questions, more existential than legal, are what’s on my mind.
Here’s the sentence from the article I mentioned in the first paragraph where I once used the phrase “right to exist.” It makes as much sense to me now as it did when I wrote it in 1983: “Support for Israel’s right to exist does not mean knee-jerk support for every policy enforced by a government bent on committing national suicide by refusing to face reality.”
There is no “right of return” embodied in international law. This is an outrageous lie.
Arabs are just as guilty of having a nationalist political system lead and controlled by the elite as any nation in the world. Why would we allow their government to gain power if they will wreak even worse tragedies on human rights?
Rethink your political thought – if you’re looking for equality, there’s a double standard here.
I am still unable to see what right the UN had to decide Israel was to be formed on Palestinian land. If the western Indians started taking back territories, would Americans be whining and crying about their unjust treatment as the Israelis have? It doesn’t make any sense that this is even an issue. I think if any state should bear the burden of giving the Jewish people a country of their own, it should be Germany.
Not only is there no “right of return”, no where else in the world are descendants of refugees considered refugees.
Actually Joel, there is a right of return for refugees. The UN resolution 194 that deals with it was formed specifically to deal with the palestinians cleansed from their homeland, and was written on the advice of the UN representative in Palestine Count Folke Bernadotte. Refugees under international law are granted 3 options:repatriatriation (ie right of return)compensation, or assimmilation into the accepting country. Which choice they make is theirs, and no one elses.What is interesting is the claim that Jews have a right to Palestine based on 2000 years of wandering in the wilderness, a sort of God given right of return, as well as a Law of Return that grants citizenship to any Jew who wants it, but with the very next breath refuses the Palestinians the same claims.Furthermore a law enacted in 1951, specifically prohibited Palestinians from returning, such law creating absentee owners whose property could now be “legally” appropriated by Israel.
No other country demands recognition of its right to exist as a precondition to negotiations. That Israel does is a testament to the flimsy legal and moral foundation of this “right”.