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STATES DON’T HAVE A RIGHT TO EXIST. PEOPLE DO.  
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Peter Beinart
January 27, 2025
New York Times
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_ If America’s leaders prioritized the lives of all those who live
between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, it would become
clear that asking if Israel has a right to exist is the wrong
question. _

Amit Elkayam for The New York Times,

 

In today’s Washington, which seethes with partisan acrimony,
Democrats and Republicans at least agree on this: Israel has a right
to exist. This right has been affirmed by the Republican House
speaker, Mike Johnson
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and his Democratic antagonist, the House minority leader, Hakeem
Jeffries
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by the Biden administration’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken
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successor, Marco Rubio
[[link removed]]; by Donald
Trump’s new secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth
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and by the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer
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In 2023, the House affirmed Israel’s right to exist by a vote
[[link removed]] of 412-1.

This is not the way Washington politicians generally talk about other
countries. They usually start with the rights of individuals, and then
ask how well a given state represents the people under its control. If
America’s leaders prioritized the lives of all those who live
between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, it would become
clear that asking if Israel has a right to exist is the wrong
question. The better question is: Does Israel, as a Jewish state,
adequately protect the rights of all the individuals under its
dominion?

The answer is no.

Consider this scenario: If Scotland legally seceded, or Britons
abolished the monarchy, the United Kingdom would no longer be united
nor a kingdom. Britain as we know it would cease to exist. A different
state would replace it. Mr. Rubio, Mr. Schumer and their colleagues
would accept this transformation as legitimate because they believe
that states should be based on the consent of the governed.

America’s leaders make this point most emphatically when discussing
America’s foes. They often call for replacing oppressive regimes
with states that better meet liberal democratic norms. In 2017, John
Bolton, who later became a national security adviser in the first
Trump administration, argued
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“the declared policy of the United States should be the overthrow of
the mullahs’ regime in Tehran.” In 2020, Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo called
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People’s Republic of China a “Marxist-Leninist regime” with a
“bankrupt totalitarian ideology.”These U.S. officials were urging
these countries not just to replace one particular leader but to
change their political system — thus, in essence, reconstituting the
state. In the case of the People’s Republic of China, which
signifies Communist Party dominance, or the Islamic Republic of Iran,
which denotes clerical rule, this would most likely require changing
the country’s official name.

In 2020, Secretary Pompeo declared in a speech
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America’s founders believed that “government exists not to
diminish or cancel the individual’s rights at the whims of those in
power, but to secure them.” Do states that deny individual rights
have a “right to exist” in their current form? The implication of
Mr. Pompeo’s words is that they do not.

What if we talked about Israel that way? Roughly half the people under
Israeli control are Palestinian. Most of those — the residents of
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — cannot become citizens of the
state that wields life-or-death power over them. Israel wielded this
power in Gaza even before Hamas invaded on Oct. 7, 2023, since it
controlled the Strip’s airspace, coastline, population registry and
most of its land crossings, thus turning Gaza into what Human Rights
Watch called “an open-air prison
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Even the minority of Palestinians under Israeli control who hold
Israeli citizenship — sometimes called “Israeli Arabs” — lack
legal equality. The Jewish National Fund, which has stated
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obligations are “to the Jewish people” and that it does not work
“for the benefit of all citizens of the state,” holds almost half
the seats on the governmental body
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allocates most of Israel’s land.

Last month, Mr. Blinken promised
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the United States would help Syrians build an “inclusive,
nonsectarian” state. The Israel that exists today manifestly fails
that test.

Still, for most of the leaders of the organized American Jewish
community, a nonsectarian and inclusive country on this land is
unthinkable. Jews are rightly outraged when Iranian leaders call for
wiping Israel off the map. But there is a crucial difference between a
state ceasing to exist because it is invaded by its neighbors and a
state ceasing to exist because it adopts a more representative form of
government.

American Jewish leaders don’t just insist on Israel’s right to
exist. They insist on its right to exist as a Jewish state. They cling
to the idea that it can be both Jewish and democratic despite the
basic contradiction between legal supremacy for one ethno-religious
group and the democratic principle of equality under the law.

The belief that a Jewish state has unconditional value —
irrespective of its impact on the people who live within it —
isn’t contrary just to the way America’s leaders talk about other
countries. It’s also contrary to Jewish tradition. Jewish tradition
does not view states as possessing rights, but views them with deep
suspicion. In the Bible, the Israelite elders ask the Prophet Samuel
to appoint a king to rule over them. God tells Samuel to grant the
elders’ wish but also warn that their ruler will commit terrible
abuses. “The day will come,” Samuel tells
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out because of the king whom you yourselves have chosen.”

The implication is clear: Kingdoms — or, in modern parlance, states
— are not sacrosanct. They are mere instruments, which can either
protect life or destroy it. “I emphatically deny that a state might
have any intrinsic value at all,” wrote
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Israeli social critic Yeshayahu Leibowitz in 1975. Mr. Leibowitz was
not an anarchist. But, though he considered himself a Zionist, he
insisted that states — including the Jewish one — be judged on
their treatment of the human beings under their control. States
don’t have a right to exist. People do.

Some of the Bible’s greatest heroes — Moses and Mordechai among
others — risk their lives by refusing to treat despotic rulers as
divine. In refusing to worship state power, they reject idolatry, a
prohibition so central to Judaism that, in the Talmud, Rabbi
Yochanan called [[link removed]] it
the very definition of being a Jew.

Today, however, this form of idolatry — worship of the state —
seems to suffuse mainstream American Jewish life. It is dangerous to
venerate any political entity. But it’s especially dangerous to
venerate one that classifies people as legal superiors or inferiors
based on their tribe. When America’s most influential Jewish groups,
like American leaders, insist again and again that Israel has a right
to exist, they are effectively saying there is nothing Israel can do
— no amount of harm it can inflict upon the people within its domain
— that would require rethinking the character of the state.

They have done so even as Israel’s human-rights abuses have grown
ever more blatant. For almost 16 years, since Benjamin Netanyahu
returned to power in 2009, Israel has been ruled by leaders
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preventing Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from
establishing their own country, thus consigning them to live as
permanent noncitizens, without basic rights, under Israeli rule. In
2021, Israel’s own leading human rights organization,
B’Tselem, charged
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with practicing apartheid. The United Nations Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported
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attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank and
East Jerusalem in 2024 than in any year since it began keeping track
almost 20 years ago.

Yet American Jewish leaders — and American politicians — continue
to insist it is illegitimate, even antisemitic, to question the
validity of a Jewish state. We have made Israel our altar. Mr.
Leibowitz’s fear has come true: “When nation, country and state
are presented as absolute values, anything goes.”

American Jewish leaders often say a Jewish state is essential to
protecting Jewish lives. Jews cannot be safe unless Jews rule. I
understand why many American Jews, who as a general rule believe that
states should not discriminate based on religion, ethnicity or race,
make an exception for Israel. It’s a response to our traumatic
history as a people. But global antisemitism notwithstanding, diaspora
Jews — who stake our safety on the principle of legal equality —
are far safer than Jews in Israel.

This is not a coincidence. Countries in which everyone has a voice in
government tend to be safer for everyone. A 2010 study
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ethnic conflict around the world since World War II found that ethnic
groups that were excluded from state power were three times more
likely to take up arms as those that enjoyed representation in
government.

You can see this dynamic even in Israel itself. Every day, Israeli
Jews place themselves in Palestinian hands when they’re at their
most vulnerable: on the operating table. Palestinian citizens of
Israel make up
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20 percent of its doctors, 30 percent of its nurses and 60 percent of
its pharmacists.

Why do Israeli Jews find Palestinian citizens so much less threatening
than Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza? In large measure, because
Palestinian citizens can vote in Israeli elections. So, although they
face severe discrimination, they at least have some peaceful and
lawful methods for making their voices heard. Compare that with
Palestinians in Gaza, or the West Bank, who have no legal way to
influence the state that bombs and imprisons them.

When you deny people basic rights, you subject them to tremendous
violence. And, sooner or later, that violence endangers everyone. In
1956, a 3-year-old named Ziyad al-Nakhalah saw Israeli soldiers murder
his father in the Gazan city of Khan Younis. Almost 70 years later, he
heads Hamas’s smaller but equally militant rival, Islamic Jihad.

On Oct. 7, Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters killed about 1,200 people
in Israel and abducted about 240 others. Israel has responded to that
massacre with an assault on Gaza that the British medical journal The
Lancet estimates
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killed more than 60,000 people, and destroyed most of the
Strip’s hospitals
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Gaza’s destruction serves as a horrifying illustration of Israel’s
failure to protect the lives and dignity of all the people who fall
under its authority.

The failure to protect the lives of Palestinians in Gaza ultimately
endangers Jews. In this war, Israel has already killed more than one
hundred times as many Palestinians in Gaza as it did in the massacre
that took the life of Mr. al-Nakhalah’s father. How many 3-year-olds
will still be seeking revenge seven decades from now?

As Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic
security service, warned
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before the current war in Gaza, “If we continue to dish out
humiliation and despair, the popularity of Hamas will grow. And if we
manage to push Hamas from power, we’ll get Al Qaeda. And after Al
Qaeda, ISIS, and after ISIS, God only knows.”

Yet in the name of Jewish safety, American Jewish organizations appear
to countenance virtually anything Israel does to Palestinians, even a
war that both Amnesty International
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the eminent Israeli-born Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov now consider
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What Jewish leaders and American politicians can’t countenance is
equality between Palestinians and Jews — because that would violate
Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

_[PETER BEINART (@PeterBeinart [[link removed]]) is
a contributing Opinion writer, a professor at the Newmark School of
Journalism [[link removed]] at the City University
of New York, an editor at large of Jewish Currents
[[link removed]] and the writer of The Beinart Notebook
[[link removed]], a weekly newsletter. This essay
is adapted from his forthcoming book “Being Jewish After the
Destruction of Gaza
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* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Gaza
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* zionism
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* anti-Semitism
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* Jewish State
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* Jewish settlements
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* one-state solution
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* Two-state Solution
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* U.S.-Israel relations
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* Israeli politics
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* Jewish community
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* American Jewish community
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* theocracy
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