The Israeli government has hammered on Israel’s “right to exist,” and the phrase has been taken up across the world's media. Recently Israel added the condition to any peace deal with the Palestinian Authority that the Palestinians affirmatively recognize Israel’s right to exist, something that has not been a part of previous negotiations. To some this would seem rather basic, merely an expression of acceptance that Israel is a sovereign nation, in place, sharing the rights that any sovereign nation enjoys. But in truth, this is a slippery phrase. No nation possesses a “right to exist”; the concept does not exist in modern international law. The closest thing in international law is the principle of “territorial integrity,” which means that nations may not promote secessionism in their neighbors, such as Russia has done by its recent takeover of Crimea and its continuing activity against Ukraine. What this amounts to is that all sovereign nations enjoy a right not to be attacked with the intent to alter their physical existence. So far so good.
But the issue in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has its own unique character. What it means to many Israelis, in particular the settler movement and their supporters, is not just that Israel should not be attacked, but that Israel has an a priori right to exist, meaning that Israel has the right to exist as a nation-state in preference of to any other type of nation state in the same physical space. This claim is rooted, of course, in the Zionist notion that God gave that land to the Jews. Apart from the fact that the Bible does not say that—it says that God gave the land to “Abraham and his seed,” which would actually include the Palestinians—the notion of any a priori right of a given type of nation-state to exist is nonsense. The existence of every nation is contingent on the way it treats its people. Americans should feel this acutely, as the existence of the United States itself is a result of the British home country treating the colonists as inferior, a convenient source of tax revenue with no need for inclusion in parliament. We know what happened.
Israel wants the world to accept that Jews (as defined by Israel’s Orthodox Rabbinate, itself a prime example of religious discrimination—against non-Orthodox Jews!) have a superior right over anyone else to the area variously called the “Nation of Israel,” “the Holy Land,” “Judea and Samaria,” and “Palestine.” The names alone reveal the nature of the core issue: religious belief masquerading as law.
For any group to claim an inherent ethnic superiority in any fashion is reprehensible. History has seen the like often enough. Just in the last two hundred years we have had two horrific examples: Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum. These were excuses for genocide, nothing more. Now we have the “right to exist.” Time to enforce the notion, much neglected in certain parts of the world, that “all men are created equal, [and] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Even Palestinians.