A fierce debate broke out this week across the Atlantic that will be familiar to Americans, one that jousted over the hollow notion of Israel’s “right to exist.”
On the British political show Peston, its eponymous host Robert Peston asked far-left Green Party leader Zack Polanski directly: “Israel has a right to exist? Yes or no?”
Polanski, who is Jewish, replied, “I don’t believe any country has a right to exist. People have a right to exist,” then blamed “semantics” about state existence for part of what he called the Israel-Palestinian “mess.”
It was similar to questions that have been asked of many leftist politicians, including New York City’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a staunch critic of Israel and an advocate for the Palestinian cause.
Unlike Polanski, Mamdani had said “yes,” but demurred when asked “as a Jewish state.” An “equal one,” the mayor clarified.
More recently, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson took fierce issue with the “right to exist” phrase in an interview with The Economist, asking, skeptically: “What does that mean?”
The left-wing commentator Mehdi Hasan has repeatedly rejected the notion that Israel has a right to exist, and in a post on X he endorsed Polanski’s view: “People have a right to exist, not states.”
The trap is that Polanski’s literal point is defensible. But the politics built from it are often evasive of the more sinister beliefs that underpin too much of the opposition to Israel, which stretch well beyond robust criticism of a government.
Bad Law and Worse Politics
International law does not treat states as immortal persons with an existential entitlement.
The Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States describes statehood through a permanent population, defined territory, government, and capacity to enter relations with other states. Israel certainly meets those requirements.
The U.N. Charter protects states against the threat or use of force against their territorial integrity or political independence. And Israel certainly faces such threats, from its enemies, be they Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, or others.
But human rights law starts somewhere else: The International Covenant says rights derive from human dignity and that all peoples have the right of self-determination.
So the tidy answer is that Israel, like the U.S. or Britain or France, does not possess a mystical “right to exist.” Individuals have rights, not states.
The serious answer, however, is that Israelis have rights that become hollow if their collective self-government—a state as established under international law—can be treated as permanently provisional.
That is why Polanski’s remarks are both technically interesting and politically thin. He may dismiss the semantics as theater. But he’s a protagonist of it himself.
Israel Is Already Real
Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, after the end of the British Mandate, and the U.N. General Assembly admitted Israel as a member state almost a year later on May 11, 1949.
The U.N. resolution admitting Israel passed by 37 votes to 12, with nine abstentions. Today, Israel has broad diplomatic recognition, including ties with all five permanent members of the Security Council.
Israel is now a multi-party parliamentary democracy with independent institutions and the rule of law, even if, as the rights group Freedom House points out, there is political pressure on the judiciary and discrimination against Arab and other minorities.
There are two truths in that. Israel is a functioning and legitimate state whose citizens vote, litigate, protest and organize. But Israel’s state conduct can still be condemned, investigated, and constrained by other powers.
The phrase “right to exist” muddies that distinction by making Israeli sovereignty sound like a prize that must be earned anew every time the government there takes action that draw condemnation from other states or international bodies.
The legitimacy of a state does not by extension legitimate all of its actions.
Israel’s Founding Is No Exception
Modern Israel had a violent birth in 1948 after the Nazi horror of the Holocaust. It was established amid civil conflict, interstate war within the region, and the mass displacement of Palestinians in an event they remember as the Nakba.
None of that should be airbrushed by Israel and its supporters, nor should the causes and complexities be simplified by its critics.
But it also does not make Israel historically singular.
India and Pakistan, for example, were created by the Partition of India in 1947, a brutal event that saw about 15 million people cross the new borders. Death estimates range from 200,000 to 2 million.
Pakistan’s legitimacy is not generally argued from the death toll of partition, and India’s sovereignty is not normally put on trial because of the violence of its birth.
There are plenty of other examples in both recent and distant history. Israel shouldn’t get a cleaner history than everyone else, of course. But it shouldn’t get a uniquely impossible standard either.
The useful question isn’t whether 1948 was morally tidy. Plainly, it was not, and there are many unresolved questions about justice for the Palestinians who were displaced.
The better question is this: What rights do living people have now?
Palestinians Don’t Lose Rights When Israelis Keep Theirs
The strongest Palestinian case, despite the views of many of their Western advocates, is not that Israeli citizens should live under a permanent veto on sovereignty. It’s a simple truth that Palestinians possess their own right to self-determination.
The International Court of Justice said in its July 19, 2024, advisory opinion that Israeli policies violated the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and the prohibition on acquiring territory by force.
That finding is damning for the Israeli state, but not a license to fantasize about eliminating it. The same law that rejects conquest in the West Bank also rejects conquest of Israel.
The U.N. Charter’s ban on force is not an à la carte rule, and the ICJ summary shows self-determination is a legal right of a people, not just a slogan to be wielded by the geopolitically fashionable.
Government accountability belongs in the argument over what Israel does. It does not answer whether Israelis are entitled to maintain national self-government free from annihilation.
If you deny Israel’s supposed “right to exist,” you are really saying something else: Israelis, and so Jewish people, do not have the same right to self-determination as others.
Given the emphasis on Palestinian self-determination, the double standard is obvious.
The logic of Ukraine and Taiwan
We have other examples beyond the Palestinians where self-determination isn’t questioned in the Western world.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the U.N. General Assembly reaffirmed Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity and deplored Russia’s aggression as a violation of Article 2(4) of the Charter United Nations.
Nobody translated that into a metaphysical argument about the human rights of the Ukrainian state. The claim was simpler: Ukrainians have the right to preserve their self-government against conquest.
The same logic shadows Taiwan, where the Taiwan Relations Act treats any nonpeaceful effort to determine Taiwan’s future as a matter of grave concern and commits the United States to help Taiwan maintain a sufficient self-defense capability.
Washington’s position on Taiwan’s formal status is deliberately constrained, but the moral intuition is not obscured by that: Beijing’s power and desire doesn’t erase the claims of the people who live under Taiwan’s democracy.
This is where the Israel debate becomes most revealing. If Ukrainians may defend Ukraine and Taiwanese may resist forced absorption, Israelis may defend Israel against efforts to eliminate it, be they diplomatic or military in nature.
That sentence does not settle borders, settlements, Palestinian statehood or the conduct of any Israeli government. It merely removes the trapdoor into semantic hell that swallows so many in the debates around Israel.
A Clarifying Question
States do not have human rights, and no government deserves immunity from judgment.
But people have rights, peoples have self-determination, and citizens do not lose their claim to sovereignty because their state was born in violence or governed badly.
The “right to exist” question survives because it sounds legal while functioning as a loyalty test and, in some cases, a fig leaf for darker antisemitic feeling.
Retire the phrase, and the real issue sharpens: not whether Israel deserves existence, but whether Israelis, like every other people, may keep the Jewish state they already have. The answer to that question is clarifying about what the person really means.
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