“Does Israel Have The Right To Exist?” is a Stupid and Misleading Question
How asking if Israel “has a right to exist” derails real conversations about justice, history, and human dignity.
In a world shaped by broken treaties, imperial borders, and centuries of conquest, the question isn’t whether a state has a “right to exist”—it’s why we keep pretending that’s even the right question.
“Does Israel have a right to exist?”
That question gets thrown around like it’s the moral trump card in every conversation about Palestinian liberation.
Say no: suddenly you're branded antisemitic.
Say yes: you’re expected to accept everything that has come with its existence—military occupation, apartheid policies, the mass displacement of Palestinians—as somehow justified by default.
It’s 2025. We’re not drafting borders in the clouds and waiting for God to stamp them with divine approval. No state has a “right” to exist. States exist—or they don’t—because of power, war, colonization, military coups, imperial alliances, ethnic cleansing, economic coercion, and carefully crafted intentions of history.
Let’s be clear: people have a right to exist, cultures have a right to flourish, and communities have a right to dignity, autonomy, and safety. But states are not sacred beings. They are human constructions that are born from negotiations, violence, displacement, and sometimes, pure happenstance. The United States doesn’t have some celestial right to exist. Neither does Russia. Neither does China. Neither does Israel.
The idea that Israel’s “right to exist” is somehow beyond question is intellectually lazy and politically loaded. Because the real function of that phrase is to silence dissent, moralize power, and cast criticism as existential threat. It’s a linguistic trapdoor, and falling through it means you end up debating whether Palestinians are even allowed to mourn their own dispossession without being labeled dangerous.
We’ve been gaslit into confusing statehood with moral legitimacy. But those two things are not the same. And they never have been.
The Existential Red Herring
The question itself is a relic of political theater that shifts the focus from the lived realities of people to the abstract sanctity of states. No government was handed a cosmic permission slip to exist. States exist because they have the power to do so, not because they possess some inherent, metaphysical “right” granted by history, morality, or international law.
▣⎯ Why the Question Is Flawed
States Aren’t Sacred: No political entity has a divine or universal “right” to exist. The world map is a graveyard of states that once were and are no longer. The notion that Israel, or any state, is uniquely entitled to existence is a political myth, not a moral axiom.
People, Not States, Hold Rights: International law and moral philosophy center rights on individuals and communities, not governments. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn’t say, “Every state has a right to eternal life.” It says people have the right to life, liberty, and security.
History Is Written by Power: Most states were forged through violence, displacement, and the exercise of raw power. Their existence is a fact, not a moral endorsement.
It’s a Distraction: The “right to exist” question is wielded to silence criticism, delegitimize demands for justice, and deflect attention from the real issues: dispossession, occupation, and the denial of rights to actual human beings.
▣⎯ What the Question Really Does
Shifts the Conversation: It reframes debates about justice, equality, and rights into debates about the sanctity of borders and flags.
Demands Uncritical Allegiance: By insisting that one must affirm a state’s “right to exist” before engaging in any critique, the question acts as a loyalty test, not a genuine inquiry.
Erases the Oppressed: It glosses over the histories and rights of those displaced or marginalized by the creation and maintenance of the state in question—most notably, Palestinians in the case of Israel.
▣⎯ The Questions That Actually Matter
Do all people living between the river and the sea—Israeli, Palestinian, Druze, Bedouin, and others—have the right to live in dignity, safety, and self-determination?
Whose rights are being upheld, and whose are being trampled, in the current political reality?
How do we build a future where justice isn’t reserved for the powerful, but shared by everyone?
The Fantasy of Innocent Origins
If states earned their right to exist by virtue of justice or legality, we’d be living in an entirely different world. But we don’t. The borders we recognize today are mostly the legacies of empire. Lines drawn by imperialist cartographers in smoke-filled backrooms, inked in the blood of the colonized. And Israel is no exception.
The Zionist project didn’t begin as a grassroots effort to coexist in harmony. It began as a European colonial project rooted in the idea that a land “without a people” could be remade for a people without a land. That lie—the denial of Palestinian existence—has always been the cornerstone of the story.
And in 1948, with the blessing of imperial powers, the state of Israel was created through what Palestinians call the Nakba: the catastrophe. Over 700,000 Palestinians expelled and hundreds of villages wiped from the map.
If we’re talking “legal” rights to exist, let’s not pretend that the post-WWII international order was some neutral arbiter of justice. The United Nations of 1948 was a Eurocentric boys’ club barely out of its colonial adolescence. Their legitimacy doesn’t spring from some higher moral ground. It comes from who had the guns and who didn’t.
Meanwhile, those who do have legal rights to exist are the Indigenous with rights inscribed in treaties signed in good faith—only to be betrayed and erased. Native American nations in the United States—sovereign tribes with binding treaties that have been broken over and over again. The U.S. government signed more than 500 treaties with Native nations. And it broke or violated almost all of them.
Where is the global hand-wringing over their right to exist? Why are we expected to accept Israel’s statehood as sacrosanct while ignoring every nation destroyed in the name of Manifest Destiny?
The logic is selective because the system is rigged. And the people asking whether Israel has a right to exist never seem to ask whether the people it displaced do.
“Right to Exist” Is Just Imperial PR
This entire framing—of states as morally entitled to permanence—is imperial branding. It’s the geopolitical version of divine right monarchy: “We’re here because we deserve to be here.”
It’s a shield. A way to silence criticism, even as that state commits open-air imprisonment, apartheid, and indiscriminate bombardment. It’s a way to position any resistance as an existential threat. No matter how peaceful, how justified, how desperate.
It’s why Palestinians are constantly expected to prove they’re not antisemitic when they protest their own occupation.
It’s why calls for basic dignity are reframed as “terrorism.”
It’s why the demand for liberation is twisted into a genocidal fantasy by those too comfortable with the status quo.
No other modern state has to constantly demand recognition of its “right to exist” because no other modern state is founded on so blatant a contradiction: a “democratic” state premised on ethnic superiority, maintained through military domination, and undergirded by the machinery of apartheid.
And let’s not forget: saying “Israel does not have a right to exist” is not the same as saying Israelis do not have a right to live. No one’s denying the right of Jewish people to safety, cultural expression, and belonging. In fact, many of us who are critical of the Israeli state are calling for a future where both Jews and Palestinians can live in true safety—not through ethnostates or colonial frameworks, but through justice and shared humanity.
The conflation of those two ideas—statehood and survival—is the real danger here.
The Real Question: What Kind of Future Do We Actually Want?
Here’s the truth that makes apologists squirm: a truly moral framework would require dismantling all systems of oppression, even the ones with slick PR and Western backing.
That includes apartheid, colonial occupation, and a state that can only define itself through exclusion.
If your vision of Jewish safety requires the permanent subjugation of another people, then your vision is broken. If your understanding of peace requires silence from the oppressed, then your peace is a lie. If your belief in a state’s “right to exist” means bulldozing the homes of those who were there before it, then you’re not defending existence—you’re defending erasure.
So instead of asking, “Does Israel have a right to exist?” we should be asking:
What are we willing to accept in the name of statehood?
Whose suffering are we willing to justify to preserve a national narrative?
What would it mean to center human rights over historical myth?
What would a future look like where safety doesn’t come at the expense of someone else’s freedom?
States Don’t Deserve Rights—People Do
If we want to talk about rights, let’s talk about the right of Palestinians to return to their homes. The right to live without checkpoints, walls, and military incursions. The right to mourn their dead without being called “terrorists.” The right to exist with dignity, autonomy, and freedom.
Let’s talk about the right of Jewish people to live safely, too—without being used as shields by a state that weaponizes their history to justify oppression.
And let’s stop pretending that the lines on a map are more sacred than the people crushed beneath them.
No, Israel doesn’t have a right to exist. But neither does any other state built through violence and maintained through domination. You want to build something that lasts then build it on justice, equality, and on shared power—not stolen land.
Until then, stop asking the wrong questions and start demanding better answers. Because in the end, the real question isn’t whether a state has a right to exist. It’s whether we’re brave enough to imagine a world where we don’t need states to erase people in order to justify their own survival.
“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This postulate was composed and signed by men whose own opportunity to be signatories rested on conduct plainly violating what they proclaimed to be self-evident, but their abusive misconduct doesn’t make it false. In fact it is self-evident: the main word is “just,” and what other exercise of governmental powers would qualify as just? If read, Israel is doing the exact opposite of securing rights for many inhabitants of the territory it controls, it overtly denies them even any opportunity to consent, they do dissent, and it exercises only unjust powers. Israel therefore lacks any right to exist. Now Israel is not distinguishable from many other states in denying self-evident rights, including the United States, but that absence of distinction merely signifies that many other states also forfeit their right to exist, although it is still worth considering whether Israel’s forfeiture is more flagrant. As a practical matter, we must endure injustices that we are unable to change. But our endurance means that they are injustices, we are under no obligation to be silent in the face of injustice, and in fact we are obligated, if we can speak without excess peril, to proclaim that it is injustice. Of course I am merely agreeing with you.
This is truth, unadulterated, unbiased truth. The Jewish people populating Israel are, in many cases, descendants of European Jews who were seeking a Jewish homeland. The political decision in 1948 established the “Partition” which led to war in the area in which three quarters of a million Palestinians were displaced, removed, violently from their centuries-old homeland. Just as in what is now the United States where hundreds of thousands of indigenous people were displaced, murdered, and disappeared. We as a country are still displacing indigenous people and Israel is doing the same. My question is: Why can’t the nations of the world do for the Palestinians what they did in 1948… carve out a Palestinian homeland? White people have been drawing borders for centuries so why stop now?