The Rhetorical Trap: State Legitimacy and the Burden of Existence

The demand that critics of Israel first affirm its “right to exist” before their arguments may be heard is, as the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said once noted, a formula previously unknown in international or customary law (Leary, 2024). No other state on earth is subjected to this specific precondition. France does not require it. Germany does not require it. China does not require it. The United States — built on the genocide of indigenous peoples and sustained by the labour of the enslaved — has never once demanded that its critics first affirm its sacred right to exist before they are permitted to speak. The phrase is not a legal concept. Instead, it is a political instrument deployed to pre-empt debate, to conflate criticism of a state apparatus with a desire for the destruction of a people.

Does Israel have a right to exist? Does any country have a right to exist? Does existence bring responsibility? And does the neglect of that responsibility remove a country’s right to exist? These are real questions, with bodies buried beneath them. They demand we look directly at the machinery of state power, strip away the mythology that protects it, and ask what, exactly, gives it the right to operate while the people it governs bleed.

The Myth of State Rights

States do not possess an inherent, moral right to exist. Only people possess rights. A state is an instrumental apparatus — a bureaucracy, a military, a set of laws, a flag, a monopoly on violence — whose legitimacy is derived entirely from its capacity to protect and represent the people under its authority. When a state fundamentally violates this responsibility, whether through sustained occupation, mass atrocity, ethnic cleansing, or genocide, it forfeits its moral legitimacy. The question of its continued existence in its current form becomes not only permissible but necessary.

States possess no original, moral rights. Whatever standing they have is drawn from the rights and interests of the people they serve (March, 2025). The assertion that a state has a right to exist is categorically different from the assertion that the people living within it have rights to security, culture, and life. The state is not the people. The state is a tool. And tools can be broken, replaced, or redesigned when they fail in their purpose.

States come into and pass out of existence constantly. The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Rhodesia, apartheid South Africa, all ceased to exist. In most of these cases, no wrong was committed against the state itself by its dissolution. The people survived; the regime did not. This distinction is critical: to question the right of a specific state apparatus to continue in its current form is not to call for the annihilation of a people (March, 2025). It is to question the machinery, not the lives.

The phrase “right to exist” is used asymmetrically and selectively. It conflates the dissolution of a political regime with the destruction of a people, making it a near-perfect rhetorical trap: deny Israel’s “right to exist” and risk being accused of denying Jews the right to live; accept it, and risk endorsing whatever interpretation the phrase’s users choose to attach to it at any given moment (Leary, 2024). It is a loyalty oath disguised as a question. It demands that before you are allowed to point out the blood on the floor, you must first swear allegiance to the knife.

This rhetorical manoeuvre is particularly insidious because it preys on historical trauma. By linking the survival of the state apparatus to the survival of the Jewish people, it weaponises the memory of the Holocaust to shield a modern nation-state from accountability — a phenomenon Norman Finkelstein has extensively critiqued as the instrumentalisation of Jewish suffering for political immunity (Finkelstein, 2000). It suggests that any structural change to the state, any move toward true democratic equality, is a precursor to annihilation. This is a profound manipulation of history, one that serves the interests of the powerful while silencing the oppressed.

The Asymmetry of Existence

The “right to exist” collapses under the weight of its own hypocrisy the moment it is applied to the Palestinians. How is it that a state apparatus is granted an inviolable right to exist, while the indigenous people it displaced are systematically denied that exact same right? How is it that a country should have the right to exist, but the Palestinian people do not?

This asymmetry is the core ideological function of the phrase. As Steven Salaita has argued: “I am happy, eager even, to affirm the right of Jewish people to live in peace and security, wherever that may be, a right all humans deserve in no particular order of worthiness. But I won’t ratify Israel’s bloody founding or its devotion to racial supremacy. Ultimately, when Zionists demand that you affirm Israel’s right to exist, what they really seek is affirmation of Palestinian nonexistence” (Salaita, 2019). To grant the state an absolute right to exist in its current ethnonationalist form is to retroactively legitimise the ethnic cleansing required to create it, and to validate the ongoing dispossession required to maintain it.

The denial of Palestinian existence has deep historical roots in Israeli statecraft. It was famously articulated by Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1969 when she declared: “There was no such thing as Palestinians... It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist” (The New York Times, 1972). If the Palestinians existed as a distinct people with a right to self-determination, the moral architecture of the state would fracture. And so, they had to be defined out of existence — not killed, necessarily, but erased from the category of peoples who count.

The demand to recognise Israel’s “right to exist” is therefore a demand to accept a hierarchy of human worth. It insists that the political structures of the coloniser possess a sacred, untouchable status, while the physical lives, homes, and national identity of the colonised are entirely disposable. It asks the displaced to endorse their own displacement, the occupied to validate their occupier, and the dead to sign off on the killing.

This is the fundamental anxiety of the settler-colonial project. The settler state knows, on some level, that its foundations are built on theft. It knows that the land was not empty. Consequently, it requires constant, obsessive validation from the outside world, and most perversely, from the very people it dispossessed. The Nakba, in 1948, was a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing, detailed in military blueprints like Plan Dalet, designed to ensure a demographic majority for the new state (Pappé, 2006). The destruction of those 400 villages was the deliberate erasure of a society. To demand that the descendants of those expelled affirm the “right to exist” of the state that expelled them is an act of profound cruelty. It is a demand that they participate in their own erasure.

The Symmetry of Self-Determination

Self-determination is either universal or it is a mechanism of supremacy. If Israel has a right to exist as the expression of Jewish self-determination, then by the exact same logic, Palestine has a right to exist as the expression of Palestinian self-determination (Shama 2025).

The denial of Palestinian statehood while demanding the recognition of Israeli statehood is a legal contradiction and a moral obscenity. The right to self-determination is a fundamental principle of international law, enshrined in Article 1(2) of the UN Charter (United Nations 1945). To argue that Jewish people require a sovereign state for their security and cultural expression, while simultaneously denying that same necessity to the Palestinian people, is to establish a hierarchy of human worth dressed up as geopolitics. It is to say, quite literally, that one people’s safety requires another people’s permanent subjugation. Both peoples possess an equal claim to self-determination, independence, and sovereignty (Shama 2025).

Subscribe to Notes From Plague Island and join our growing community of readers and thinkers.

The international community, for all its flaws, has increasingly recognised this reality. As of September 2025, 157 of the 193 UN member states — over 81 percent — recognise the State of Palestine (Al Jazeera 2025). The world has spoken. It is only the powerful, primarily the United States and its closest allies, who refuse to listen. They cling to a dying vision where international law is not a universal standard, but a weapon to be wielded against enemies and ignored when it inconveniences the geopolitical interests of the empire’s final form.

This refusal is more than diplomatic inertia; it is an active complicity in the ongoing denial of rights. By blocking Palestinian membership in international bodies and repeatedly vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that demand accountability or a ceasefire (UN News 2024; PBS 2025), these powerful states ensure that the asymmetry of existence is maintained. They provide the diplomatic cover necessary for the continued expansion of settlements and the entrenchment of the occupation, all while mouthing platitudes about a “two-state solution” that they actively work to render impossible. And when that occupation is resisted — a right explicitly recognised by UN General Assembly Resolution 3103 as “legitimate and in full accordance with the principles of international law” (UN General Assembly 1973) — the resistance is immediately branded as terrorism, ensuring that the violence of the occupier is framed as “security” while the violence of the occupied is framed as an existential threat. The symmetry of self-determination is the one thing the current order cannot tolerate, because true symmetry would mean the end of supremacy.

The “Other Arab States” Retort

The assertion that “there are other Arab states for the Palestinians, but only one Jewish state” is historically illiterate, unscrupulous, and relies on a racist conflation of distinct identities.

It relies on the false premise that all Arabs are interchangeable; that a Palestinian from Jaffa is the same as an Egyptian from Cairo or a Lebanese from Beirut, that their languages, cultures, histories, and identities are a single undifferentiated mass. The Arabisation of the Levant was a linguistic and cultural process that occurred over centuries, not a mass replacement of indigenous populations (Decolonize Palestine, n.d.). Palestinians possess a distinct national identity, history, dialect, cuisine, and cultural heritage tied specifically to the land of historic Palestine, a consciousness that long predates the establishment of Israel (Khalidi, 1997). Suggesting they should simply move to another Arab country is akin to suggesting that the Irish could simply move to England because both speak English and share a landmass. It is an argument that could only be made by someone who does not regard the people in question as equivalent.

This argument also ignores the brutal reality of the Palestinian experience in neighbouring Arab states. Arab governments have frequently treated Palestinian refugees as political pawns, denying them basic civil rights, citizenship, and the right to work. In Lebanon, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remain stateless, barred from dozens of professions including medicine, law, and engineering, and confined to overcrowded camps where the state has prohibited expansion, forcing residents into illegal and unsafe construction (Human Rights Watch 2002). In Kuwait, tens of thousands of long-term Palestinian residents were expelled after the 1991 Gulf War. In Egypt, rights were progressively stripped after the 1978 peace treaty with Israel (Human Rights Watch, 2002). The existence of other Arab states has not provided security or self-determination for Palestinians; it has often resulted in further marginalisation, exploitation, and suffering.

Finally, the “only one Jewish state” argument is an explicit defence of ethnonationalism. It claims that the necessity of maintaining a demographic majority for one specific ethnic or religious group justifies the permanent dispossession, occupation, and denial of rights to another group living in the same territory. This logic is fundamentally incompatible with modern democratic principles and human rights. If accepted as a universal standard, it would justify every ethnonationalist project in history: every forced population transfer, every act of ethnic cleansing ever carried out in the name of demographic purity. It is the logic of the ethnostate, one that inevitably leads to apartheid and atrocity.

The insistence on a demographic majority requires a constant, violent policing of boundaries, both physical and legal. It requires laws that discriminate based on ethnicity, such as the Nation-State Law of 2018, which explicitly states that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people” (Knesset, 2018). It requires a system of control that ensures the subjugated population can never challenge the supremacy of the dominant group. That is not democracy; it is ethnocracy, maintained by force.

Sovereignty as Responsibility

A state’s authority is not divine or inherent. It is granted by the consent of the governed in exchange for the protection of their fundamental rights and security. The philosopher John Locke argued explicitly that when a government turns against its own people, or when it systematically violates their fundamental rights, it forfeits its legitimacy and the people have a right to alter or abolish it (Locke, 1689). A government that perpetually subjugates a population under its control has broken the foundational bargain upon which its authority rests.

The state is a means, not an end. It exists to serve human beings. When it ceases to do so — when it becomes the primary instrument of terror against those it governs — its justification evaporates.

This is not a philosophical position, but an internationally adopted norm. At the 2005 UN World Summit, all member states unanimously endorsed the principle that sovereignty is not a license for absolute power, but a responsibility. The first pillar of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) establishes that each individual state has the responsibility to protect its population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity (United Nations General Assembly, 2005). When a state manifestly fails in this responsibility, the international community has not only the right but the obligation to respond.

The R2P doctrine reframes sovereignty entirely: it is not a shield behind which a state may do as it pleases, but a conditional grant that depends on the fulfilment of duties to the governed. When a state exercises military and administrative control over a population — as Israel does over millions of Palestinians — it assumes responsibility for their welfare. Occupation is an exercise of power that carries with it the full weight of legal and moral obligation. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice issued a historic advisory opinion declaring Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful, and that the state bears responsibility for wrongful acts committed under the occupation (International Court of Justice, 2024).

There is a painful and necessary cynicism to be maintained here. For powerful states and their allies, international law often functions as a selective instrument which is applied rigorously to adversaries, but ignored entirely when inconvenient. The ICJ, the ICC, UN resolutions: these mechanisms exist, but their enforcement depends on political will that powerful states routinely withhold. The moral framework of responsibility, however, does not dissolve because enforcement is obstructed. The law’s impotence does not make the crime disappear. The fact that a murderer is not arrested does not mean the murder did not happen.

The failure of the international community to enforce these norms does not invalidate them just exposes the hypocrisy of the global order. When powerful nations supply the weapons used to commit atrocities — ignoring repeated calls from human rights organisations for a comprehensive arms embargo (Amnesty International, 2024a) — while simultaneously preaching about human rights, they are actively dismantling the law. They are demonstrating that the rules-based international order is a fiction, a set of guidelines that apply only to the weak.

The Forfeiture of Legitimacy

When a state commits mass atrocities against a population under its control, it shatters the social contract and violates the foundational premise of R2P. In doing so, it destroys the very moral foundation upon which its claim to legitimacy rests. Following its investigation into the assault on Gaza, Amnesty International concluded that Israel has committed acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention (Amnesty International 2024b). The genocide scholar Omer Bartov has explicitly warned that Israel’s conduct is destroying the moral foundations of the Israeli state itself. “When the state decides that it’s not going to be a normal state, it’s not going to have a constitution, it’s not going to define its borders... then its nature changes,” he writes (Gell, 2026).

When a state loses its legitimacy, the demand is not for the destruction of the people, but for the dismantling of the structures of supremacy and violence. The transition from apartheid South Africa to a multiracial constitutional democracy is the clearest modern precedent: the apartheid state ceased to exist; the people — all of them — did not. A new, more just state was constituted in its place, enshrined in the 1996 Constitution (UN Press Release, 1996).

The white South Africans who were told that equality would mean their annihilation discovered, as they always do, that the apocalypse they feared was simply the end of their privilege, not the end of their lives. The settler colonial anxiety that frames any loss of supremacy as an existential threat is a powerful political tool, but it is a lie. Equality is not genocide. The dismantling of an apartheid system is not the destruction of a people; it is the liberation of all people trapped within it, including the oppressors who have tied their own humanity to the subjugation of others.

This transformation requires a profound reckoning with the past. It requires acknowledging the Nakba as an ongoing process of dispossession that must be halted and reversed. It requires a commitment to justice that goes beyond political compromise, a justice that addresses the root causes of the conflict: the denial of Palestinian rights and the structural inequality of the state. It requires the state to finally answer the question of its own legitimacy equality instead of violence.

The Refusal of Indifference

The “right to exist” is a phrase that has done enormous damage. It has been used to silence, deflect, and launder atrocity. It has made the simple act of bearing witness to suffering into a political act requiring pre-approval. It has demanded that the critic first curtsy before the state before being permitted to speak about what the state does.

The only absolute right to exist belongs to human beings. Israelis have it. Palestinians have it. No state has it — not Israel, not the United States, not any of them. States earn their continued existence through the quality of their conduct toward the people they govern. When they fail catastrophically and deliberately in that conduct, they lose both their credibility and their claim to moral legitimacy.

The question is not whether any state should be violently dismantled — a framing weaponised to shut down all serious analysis. The question is whether a state apparatus built on occupation, dispossession, and the systematic subjugation of a people can claim any moral right to perpetuate itself in that form. The answer is no.

What replaces it is the harder question, and the more honest one. But there is hope in that honesty. Every colonial regime in history has believed itself permanent, and every one of them has ended. Not because the powerful chose justice, but because systems built on the denial of humanity carry within them the seeds of their own collapse.

The moral rot of these systems is structural. It is patient and terminal. When a state relies on the permanent subjugation of millions to maintain its demographic purity, it gouges its own democratic institutions. It transforms its citizens into wardens. It makes violence the only language it can speak. But this violence is not a sign of strength; it is the desperate flailing of a system that knows it cannot survive equality. The end of such regimes is rarely pretty, and it is often violent, but it is inevitable. The arc of history does not bend toward justice on its own; it is bent by the refusal of ordinary people to accept the intolerable.

Or support us with a one-off tip → Buy Me a Coffee

References

Al Jazeera (2025) ‘Which are the 150+ countries that have recognised Palestine as of 2025?’, Al Jazeera, 23 September. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/23/which-are-the-150-countries-that-have-recognised-palestine-as-of-2025 [Accessed: 05 May 2026].

Amnesty International (2024a) ‘Global: Governments’ brazen flouting of Arms Trade Treaty rules leading to devastating loss of life’, 19 August. Available at: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/08/global-governments-brazen-flouting-of-arms-trade-treaty-rules-leading-to-devastating-loss-of-life/ [Accessed: 06 May 2026].

Amnesty International (2024b) ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza. Available at: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/ [Accessed: 05 May 2026].

Decolonize Palestine (n.d.) Myth: Israel (or any other state) has a right to exist. Available at: https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/israel-or-any-other-state-has-a-right-to-exist/ [Accessed: 05 May 2026].

Decolonize Palestine (n.d.) Myth: Palestinians are Arabs that arrived in the 7th century. Available at: https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/palestinians-are-arabs-that-arrived-in-the-7th-century/ [Accessed: 05 May 2026].

Finkelstein, N. G. (2000) The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. London: Verso.

Gell, A. (2026) ‘What went wrong in Israel? A genocide scholar examines ‘what Zionism became’‘, The Guardian, 21 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/21/omer-bartov-israel-zionism-genocide [Accessed: 06 May 2026].

Hamid, S. (2026) ‘Does Israel Have a “Right” to Exist?’, Wisdom of Crowds, 25 March. Available at:

Does Israel Have a "Right" to Exist?

[Accessed: 04 May 2026].

Human Rights Watch (2002) Treatment and Rights in Arab Host States. Available at: https://www.hrw.org/legacy/campaigns/israel/return/arab-rtr.htm [Accessed: 05 May 2026].

Institute for Middle East Understanding (n.d.) Quick Facts: The Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe). Available at: https://imeu.org/resources/resources/quick-facts-the-palestinian-nakba-catastrophe/142 [Accessed: 06 May 2026].

International Court of Justice (2024) Summary of the Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024. Available at: https://www.icj-cij.org/node/204176 [Accessed: 06 May 2026].

Khalidi, R. (1997) Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press.

Knesset (2018) Basic Law: Israel – The Nation State of the Jewish People. Available at: https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/documents/BasicLawsPDF/BasicLawNationState.pdf [Accessed: 05 May 2026].

Leary, J. P. (2024) ‘Israel’s “Right to Exist” Is a Rhetorical Trap’, The New Republic, 3 January. Available at: https://newrepublic.com/article/177768/israel-right-to-exist-rhetorical-trap [Accessed: 06 May 2026].

Locke, J. (1689) Two Treatises of Government. London: Awnsham Churchill.

March, A. F. (2025) ‘What exactly does it mean to say a state has a right to exist?’, Aeon, 24 February. Available at: https://aeon.co/essays/what-exactly-does-it-mean-to-say-a-state-has-a-right-to-exist [Accessed: 04 May 2026].

Pappé, I. (2006) The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld Publications.

PBS (2025) ‘U.S. again vetoes UN Security Council resolution demanding Gaza ceasefire’, 18 September. Available at: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-again-vetoes-un-security-council-resolution-demanding-gaza-ceasefire-hostage-release [Accessed: 06 May 2026].

Salaita, S. (2019) ‘How to answer the question, “Do you recognize Israel’s right to exist?”’, Mondoweiss, 10 December. Available at: https://mondoweiss.net/2019/12/how-to-answer-the-question-do-you-recognize-israels-right-to-exist/[Accessed: 04 May 2026].

Shama, A. (2025) ‘Palestinians deserve a state now for the same reasons Jews did in 1948’, The Hill, 20 August. Available at: https://thehill.com/opinion/international/5459576-palestinians-deserve-a-state-now-for-the-same-reasons-jews-did-in-1948/ [Accessed: 05 May 2026].

The New York Times (1972) ‘A talk with Golda Meir’, The New York Times, 27 August. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1972/08/27/archives/a-talk-with-golda-meir.html [Accessed: 04 May 2026].

UN News (2024) ‘United States vetoes Gaza ceasefire resolution at Security Council’, 20 November. Available at: https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/11/1157216 [Accessed: 05 May 2026].

UN General Assembly (1973) Basic principles of the legal status of the combatants struggling against colonial and alien domination and racist régimes, A/RES/3103. Available at: https://www.refworld.org/legal/resolution/unga/1973/en/12693[Accessed: 07 May 2026].

UN Press Release (1996) ‘Signing of South Africa’s New Constitution is Another Chapter in Transition from Apartheid to Democracy’, 10 December. Available at: https://press.un.org/en/1996/19961210.sgsm6127.html [Accessed: 04 May 2026].

United Nations (1945) Charter of the United Nations. Available at: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/chapter-1[Accessed: 06 May 2026].

United Nations General Assembly (2005) 2005 World Summit Outcome Document, A/RES/60/1. Available at: https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/generalassembly/docs/globalcompact/A_RES_60_1.pdf[Accessed: 06 May 2026].