What Is The Basis For The Statement That "Israel Has A Right To Exist"?

Not claiming they do not. So, do not jump me. I'm just pondering the meaning of the phrase. Not making an argument pro or con.

Just want to know what everyone means when they say, 'Israel has a right to exist". You hear it all the time. You really hear about it when someone suggests that the country has no such implicit right.

By what virtue does Israel have a "right" to exist as a political entity? A God given, innalienable right? A right created by historical land claims? A right confered by their superior firepower and past conquest? A right based on the unique historical circumstances of its formation?

What exactly are people speaking of when they use that phrase?

I realized I really do now know for sure. Seems kind of like a buzzword at this point. Repeated endlessly without thought of what it actually means.

The vote that carved out a teeny-tiny, militarily indefensible postage stamp of land for the Jews, and gave all the rest of Palestine to the Arabs. THAT mandate.

Why do we never hear about the Arab side of partition?

Actually, they did far more than successfully defend it, didn't they?

on their existence.

Like any other entity, they will not voluntarily cease to exist. Like any other entity, they will fight to survive. And as they are the 600-pound gorilla in that neighborhood, they can make it stick.

Wow. So big and scary and powerful a renegade group of TERRORISTS (I'm sorry, is Hezbollah an organization of Quakers?) can BOMB THEIR CITIES.

Yeah, that's one mighty gorilla. So mighty that EVERY citizen has to have military training. So strong that their streets are patrolled with Uzis. So mighty that their people sleep regularly in air raid shelters. Yeah, they really have control of things in that neighborhood.

It bugs me when Democrats think exactly like George Bush.

I support Israel. Sorry if I wasn't clear.

country's right to exist. I support Israel's existance, so don't jump on me for supposedly wanting to see Israel destroyed. But it would be nice to see every country in the region have the same right to exist.

Including a Palestinian nation.

any other ME country's right to exist. Even the Palestinians can have one whenever they want. It just can't include every inch of territory that they desire. They, or at least their leaders,are a sort of a "no bread is better than half a loaf" bunch.

Clearly Lebanon can only exist if they kowtow to Israel and destroy their own resistance momement. But that won't happen because Israel has proven the need for a resistance movement in Lebanon.

The Palestinians can have a nation as long as they stop asking for one and allow themselves to be shut up on tiny little reservations out in the desert, after Israel takes all the fertile land and the water access.

Hezbollah resisting? Israel had no presence in Lebanon.

Your grasp of the facts and your keen logic underwhelm me.

No country has a right to exist. Countries for the most part are there because violence was used to define some territory as a country. Before they succeed they were terrorists. Once they succeed in seizing the territory, the same violence is no longer terror. That is nonsense.

and detonating on Greyhound and Amtrak, you'd be okay with that?

I sure would understand why they were doing it. Land taken by force, what's left of the tribes living on reservations. Treated as if their way of life was a joke. No that wouldn't piss me off at all.

"pull themselves up by their bootstraps" (casinos) the freakin government steps in and tries to take that from them too.

and return it to the Native American population, or send them a check for rent?

and I have Native American friends. I have worked for Native American causes and firmly believe that this is their land. So look before you leap smartass, not everyone judges the quality of their life by what they "own".

But the solution would not be to bomb the hell out of Native American Reservations.

And anyone who wants can march in, kill all the people and take the land? Like in Darfur, say?

Israelis deserve to live in peace, as do all other people. So, it is wrong for people to march in and kill them.

No country deserves to exist. No country can rightly use the notion that it's territory, that it seized, deserves to exist, and so it's populations lives are more valuable than the lives of people in other territories, that other people seized, and that it can then justify killing of innocents based on the notion that the country deserves to exist.

screw Iraq's sovereignty...that country has no right to exist, eh?

???

...at the history of Zionism and the founding of the state of Israel. Israel's "right to exist" is taken as a given by most Americans, but most Americans are woefully ill informed about how Israel came to exist. Most would vigorously dispute that right if Zionists had attempted to exercise it in the U.S. rather than in the Palestine Mandate, I suspect.

The reasons for not looking at it in this way do involve racism, I believe.

I take it you've offered to give up any claim you have to live here and are giving back any property you own to the tribes that still exist, right?

The US arose through natural conquest of the West or purchase from others who had conquered it. It wasn't given to the US from the outside.

Also the Native Americans did not claim land titles, they had no concept of land ownership. They also had unclaimed land to retreat to.

seen it many times today, oddly enough from many different posters.

that the UN partition of Palestine was wrong, but that its okay for a group to take land from another by force (which means, I guess, that you're okay with Israel holding Gaza and other lands occupied post-partition.

By the way, I'm sure that the Native Americans were happy as hell with how they were treated.

:sarcasm:

Do you think it would be instructive for most folks to actually look at the history of the founding of Pakistan?

Assume that most Americans would vigorously dispute that right if people had attempted to create Pakistan in the U.S. From that assumption, what conclusions do you reach?

I won't insult you by offering a glib answer. The partition of India DID result in two separate, sovereign nations, neither of which has occupied and subjegated the other ever since, and other than the imposed partition itself there are very few similarities with the modern Palestinian situation or even with the partition of the Palestine Mandate (recall that zionist jews owned only a small percentage of the land they were awarded by the partition, and that the displaced arab Palestinians had no implicit responsibility to make reparations for the Holocaust). The partition of India did result in massive upheaval of the muslim and hindi populations and a great deal of sectarian violence. On the other hand, I don't believe that either the Pakistanis or Indians are debating the issue as vehemently as the Palestinians and Israelis-- their differences don't extend so far as whether either deserves statehood *as far as I'm aware,* but political matters on the subcontinent are not something I know much about. Since you raised the question, perhaps you can enlighten me.

Has strenuously questioned the right of Pakistan to exist, and a great deal of Pakistanmi policy and politics is aimed at thwarting this underlaying objective of Indian policy over the decades. India has certainly taken steps to diminish Pakistan: Bangladesh was onec East Pakistan, and its seperation onto a seperate nation was, while commenced in a civil war, sealed by invasion from India.

It is worth noting, too, that the partition of Pakistan out of India occured shortly before the partition of the Palestine Mandate. To say it was accompanoied by a great deal of sectarian violence is an understatement worth expanding on. There were wholesale massacres of people caught on the wrong side of the line, and processional massacres of those fleeing their homes. Hundreds of thousands were done to death in a matter of weeks, in the most bestial manners conceivable. The two new countries commenced immediately a major war in region of Kashmir, that has flared up on several subsequent occassions, and remains a live issue over which persons are daily tormented and killed.

The claim that Arabs were forced into "resititutions" for the Nazi crimes often surfaces, but is something it is probably not adviseable to bring up in discussing the Partition, because on close examination the circumstances are less favorable to the view than might be expected. The Arab Nationalist leadership of the time was quite tainted by voluntary association with the Nazis in the preceding decade. Arab Nationalist leadeship in Iraq openly sided with the Nazis during the war, and gave military expression to that affiliation with a rising against the English there in 1941 that received military support from both Germany and Italy. A similar plot contemplated in Egypt was quashed by the English. The paramount Arab Palestinian leader, The Grand Mufti al' Huseini, spent the war in Germany working hand in glove with the Nazis. While this falls far short of making the Arabs responsible for the Nazi crimes, it did rather cloud their political position after the war. The governments of Europe were in the hands of people who had been active in resistance to Nazi occupation, and were not inclined to look favoreably on elements who had in fact collaborated with them. Many Latin American governments had joined the Allied side in the war. Arab opposition to the Partition, and the establishment of Israel, was fatally ham-strung by much of their leadership having picked the wrong side of the Second World War.

...officially opposed Pakistani statehood. On the broader question I will continue to plead ignorance-- I simply cannot presume to have an informed opinion on the matter when I know so little about it. I was aware of the violence that accompanied the Indian partition, and to be frank, I am generally of the opinion that partition by an occupying or colonial power is a poor solution to the problem of ethnic differences, but tht is about as far as my understanding of that particular situation goes. I would probably prefer to say that Pakistan's existence is "unfortunate" under the present circumstances, but it seems clear that Pakistanis themselves have little interest in reunification, so even that opinion must be tempered by their right to determine their own fates.

Ity is at present more a "wink and a nod" sort of thing that everyone knows rather than an openly stated policy by the present government. The Hindu Nationalist party, though, is quite expliciton the question, and does not even recognize the right of Moslems to be Moslems if they ancestors ever were Hindu, let alone for Moslems to rule any portion of formerly Hindu land. It has in recent years been the government of India.

However, I did find this news story:


One wonders whether some Sikhs were driven out of their homes when Pakistan was created. For the first time since 1947, "such a procession" has been allowed to merely visit Pakistan. Apparently the government of Pakistan doesn't feel obligated to respect any hypothetical Sikh right of return.

It has been the cause of nearly as many wars as Palestine plus the source of a seemingly endless terror campaign.

It would be more accurate to phrase the question as "do the Jews have a right to return from wherever in the world they have been living for 2,000 years and establish a state based on racial and religious grounds and displace the people who have been living their for 2,000 years, just because the Torah says God says its their land?"

any of that. Nations like people either exist or they do not. Once they do exist, they struggle to maintain that existence. If they prevail, they continue to exist, if not, they're gone.

The question is whether Israel has a " right" to exist; its a legal question, essentially, under international law, or a moral question under precepts of morality.

You're observations are as if someone said "is it legal to kill someone" and you answered "beings struggle to remain alive until they die." Thats fine, sure they do, the question is whether I can kill someone. The phrase "Israel has a right to exist," if granted, implies that its neghbors would be morally or legally wrong to kill it.

eloquent explanation of what I wrote, further down thread. As far as the legal question goes; that's settled by the UN mandate, despite the Palestinians refusal to engage in the two state solution. Morally, is a whole nother kettle of fish. And what does it matter if its immoral to attack another country; that's certainly a frequent occurrance.

Not for so long as one nation can veto.

doesn't answer the moral questions. So what we have is that Israel exists legitimately by dint of the U.N. Mandate, and that as an existing country it is her task to continue existing. Whether Israel has a moral right to exist, doesn't matter in the current context.

That is why they are not the proper business of either political or legal institutions.

Nobody and nothing has a right to exist, because that existance could be taken away at a moment. But we'd like to believe that our existance is based on something more than the carapace of fate or the whims of an angry God. So we create these delusions that we all agree to believe in.

If we deny Israels right to exist, we know in part, that we open our own lands open to not existing either.

Or that's how I feel sometimes; i could be wrong.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

a country is not a person. It's a governmental entity. So the two issues aren't parallel.

If I had to give a reason why Israel has a right to exist, it would be the history of persecution of the Jewish people - that history of oppression at the hand of other governments makes it at least fair or something that Jewish people as a whole have a country they control and therefore where their citizenship can't be taken away and the government won't oppress and/or persecute them for being Jewish.

Did the Iroquoi nation have a right to exist? Because it certainly doesn't anymore.

If my bicycle is stolen, I don't get to take your bicycle because I deserve to have one.

No one gets moral credit that allows them to then commit immoral acts matching some quantity of morality vouchers that amount to what is owed to them.

Jewish people deserve to live in peace. Israeli citizens deserve to live in peace. Every person deserves to live in peace. No country deserves to exist.

The Confederacy, it appears, did not. Yet had they won the war they would today have the "right to exist."

The unusual thing about Israel is its artificial creation and the lack of acceptance by the displaced. The British drew lines in Africa and the Middle East, without regard to what nations might have arisen naturally. There are civil wars in Africa reflecting that, and the divisions in Iraq now.

It all goes back to the British thinking they could rule the world, really.

There is no other justification for their national "existence".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_UN_Partition_Plan

<snip>

Creation of the plan

The United Nations, the successor to the League of Nations, attempted to solve the dispute between the Jews and Arabs in Palestine. On May 15, 1947 the UN appointed a committee, the UNSCOP, composed of representatives from eleven states. To make the committee more neutral, none of the Great Powers were represented. After spending three months conducting hearings and general survey of the situation in Palestine, UNSCOP officially released its report on August 31. A majority of nations (Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay) recommended the creation of independent Arab and Jewish states, with Jerusalem to be placed under international administration. A minority (India, Iran, Yugoslavia) supported the creation of a single federal state containing both Jewish and Arab constituent states. Australia abstained.

<snip>

War is peace! :patriot: :sarcasm:

Which is to say: what's your point in posting that?

And this speaks to the second part of your post: "What exactly are people speaking of when they use that phrase? I realized I really do now know for sure. Seems kind of like a buzzword at this point. Repeated endlessly without thought of what it actually means."


I think the current meme, no doubt re-introduced by the current powers that be and their now infamous echo chamber and which touches very close to the religious entities who support Israel for biblical purposes, brings the argument into the realm of morality. It's a very Straussian concept, and it's the bases of our current foreign policy a la Bush & Co. (actually, Wolfowitz, Libby and Cheney are the likely suspects). In bringing in the issue of morality, ironically perhaps, Bush & Co. has moved this I/P/ME issue much further into the realm of religiosity than I think the US has ever been -- the US can no longer be an honest broker in this manner because we have viewed our relations with the ME now under Bush as Good v Evil. It is no surprise that this current foreign policy parallels the Machiavellian-Straussian philosophies now, considering the views of the neocons who have essentially defined our current policies for Bush.


Here are a couple of links I've perused when seeking more info on this matter:

http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=media_america_at_war_israeli_arab_conflict&JServSessionIdr004=xxjpo4idc1.app14b

PDF: Special Issue of ARI's Newsletter, Impact:

In Moral Defense of Israel

http://www.aynrand.org/site/DocServer/israel_sept_2002.pdf?docID=164

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:k6Duvd7SD-gJ:www.israelismoral.com/+david+allen+lewis+Israel+Has+A+Right+To+Exist&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=5


Also see:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=1716530

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=1734756&mesg_id=1734756

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=1724465&mesg_id=1724465

Edited to add one more link regarding Wolfowitz and foreign policy:


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/pentagon/interviews/mann.html

final edit for clarification to avoid, hopefully, misinterpretation

When someone says you have no right to exist, you begin to stipulate that you do. The fact is, the matter shouldn't even come up. But it does because Arab propaganda NEEDS hatred of Israel. You might want to spend a few moments of your precious time considering why. Start with the way oil profits are shared. Or not.

Edited to add -- I'm not speaking to whether Israel has a right, etc., much as the OP explained. I'm only speaking directly to the repeated phrase we are currently hearing and reading on MSM. I am not speaking to the argument of whether they have a right to exist or not. I'm attempting to bring to surface the currently repeated phrase.

It's this part I don't quite follow (although I'm also uncertain as to why my post struck such nerve) "Start with the way oil profits are shared. Or not." I knew some would be curious as to why I noted the issues of religiosity, but you attack me as if I'm saying Israel has no right to exist, which was never the intent of my post, nor did I ever say such thing.

Also edited to add that your response was extremely rude and uncalled for, IMO. You obviously didn't follow any of the details of my post.

...but not particularly compelling. The question of Israel's "right to exist" has much more to do with the rights of the Palestinian arabs who were forcibly removed from their land or who fled the terror campaigns of Haganah, Irgun, etc than it does with "arab propaganda." And what of Israeli rights to "settle" the occupied territories in direct violation of both U.N. resolutions and the Geneva Conventions-- both manifestations of international law? Is that more "arab propaganda?"

The only right any state or person possesses to existance is that which they can vindicate for themselves by their own exertions. However, we would all seem pretty well agreed on the right of any living entity, whether individual or collective, to defend itself and its existence from attack, though it is obvious no right can exist to succeed in such an effort.

As a legal question, Isarel exists rightfully through the decision of the United Nations on the proper disposition of the Palestine Mandate inherited from the old League of Nations. One may think its course was right or wrong, but there is no ground whatever from which to sensibly dispute that it was lawful. Under the United Nations Charter, all states have a right to be free of attack, and it could certainly be said that this Charter confers in a real sense a right to existence on all members of the organization.

First, there is a legitimate basis for rejecting the legitimacy of the UN mandate. The UN does a lot of things and fails to do a lot of things out of pure corrupt politics.

Saying "does Israel have a right to exist" is a spun shorthand way of asking another question, one which "begs the question" by slanting so that only one answer, "yes," appears to follow.

The moral and legal complications are all conveniently taken off the table.

As I stated it earlier, the question is not "does Israel have a right to exist," the question is rightly "do non-indigenous jews from around the world have a right to settle in an area of the world and displace its native population to establish a theocratic nation based on race in which non-jews are held in a condition of apartheid?"

That question addresses the issues. "does Israel have a right to exist" is an example of scholasticism akin to "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin," dealing as it does with an abstract "Israel" in a vacuum, as opposed to the theocratic apartheid state now in place in Palestine.

But there is no equivalent of a Supreme Court that has authority to rule an act of the United Nations is against international law, and so whether one agrees or not, what it does is the law, and lawful.

The United Nations was the sovereign authority over the Palestine Mandate, as the League of Nations had been before. England was simply a trustee and agent for administration. Again, one may feel that this was wronmg on some level or otehr, but it was lawful, and there is no grounds to dispute that it was lawful. The organization had a perfect right to dispose of its sovereignity in the manner it saw fit to do so, just as any may do with an aricle that is legally their own possession.

In Israel non-Jews are not held in a state of apartheid, though there is certainly some degree of discrimination against the Arab citizens of Israel. The people who fled the place during the war in which it was consolidated, and their descendants, are not citizens of Israel and never have been. Like any other state, Israel has the right to concoct its own laws of immigration, and let in whoever it pleases and exclude whoever it does not wish to incorporate into itself.

Israel exists because it fought its way into existence and continues to exist because it because it is able to enforce its existence. No nation has ever come into existance, or continued to exist, by any other means. As a legal nicety, Israel is a member of the United Nations, and enjoys whatever protections that organization's Charter may be construed to confer to a peaceable existance.

Israel is consistently defined by some as a colony that stole the land of Palestine, having no right to exist. Therefore, within the framework of justice, there is no room for Israel's permanent existence.

Israel can withdraw completely from the Occupied Terrorities and cede all of Jerusalem to a Palestinian state, but in the eyes of those who believe the above, that will still not be acceptable.

There is to be no Palestinian state living side by side next to Israel, but rather a Palestinian state in place of Israel.

This perception is, of course, not shared by many in the progressive community.

Or is it?

Basically why every state has the right to exist.

"By what virtue does Israel have a "right" to exist as a political entity? A God given, innalienable right? A right created by historical land claims? A right confered by their superior firepower and past conquest? A right based on the unique historical circumstances of its formation?"

Pretty much. Can't name a state that didn't start that way.

After every person who has Israeli nationality acquires dual nationality, it will be possible to dissolve Israel without violating part (1) of Article 15.

However, part (2) requires that Israeli nationals voluntarily surrender their Israeli nationality or that the action that deprives them of their Israeli nationality not be arbitrary.

other people's rights.

Most people don't deny that Mexico, say, has a right to exist. But there are many organizations that will say Israel shouldn't exist. Therefore, a defense of Israel has to start w/this basic right of existence that is an unstated assumption w/most countries.

A nation, to exist (whether it has a "right" to, or not) has to be able to sustain itself without outside help. Israel was created artificially and propped up artificially. I would say they just do not "exist" unless they can defend themselves on their own or avoid being attacked (through diplomacy) on their own.

It's not a question of a "right." Does Paraguay have a "right to exist" or, it attacked by Brazil and occupied, and it can do nothing or gain no allies for expelling them, they will become part of Brazil whether they have a right to a separate existence or not.

Did the Confederacy have a "right to exist?" Only if they could have defended themselves from the Union, on their own. Or with whatever help they could muster and keep going, on their own.

For example, if the U.K. required some outside assistance, then did the U.K. "not exist"?

:shrug:

I don't think the creation of Israel was very "nice" to the Palestinians and it was unfair in many ways. But unless you're using this to advocate a one-state solution, I don't really see what the point is today. Israel DOES exist, its people have a sense of nationhood, and they have a right to live in peace in the place they grew up and made their lives in.

And aren't ALL countries artificial to some extent? Plenty of people have mentioned the United States and Canada for having taken land that belonged to the Native Americans. There are plenty of far more recent examples, however.

Does Poland deserve to have the boundaries it does? Nearly half of present-day Poland was overwhelmingly German until the end of WW2, when the Soviets, wanting to keep their part of the Polish partition, lopped off a lot of Germany and gave it to Poland; that was collective punishment on the German people, ironic too because those parts of Eastern Germany had largely been a center of opposition to Hitler. That was also given to them by an outside power.

Does Greece deserve to exist? Actually, although it's not as well-known, Greece is perhaps the country whose establishment most closely approximates that of modern Israel. The areas currently comprising modern Greece weren't even mostly Greek 150 years ago - parts of it were, but it was largely an ethnic mosaic of Greeks, Slavs, Albanians, Turks, and Sephardic Jews; Athens was a small, largely Albanian town. The Greek people were scattered all over the empire, the bulk of them in Western Anatolia and most didn't even speak modern Greek - they either spoke unintelligible dialects or Turkish. Their "nationhood" came from a sense of ancient history and from a shared Greek Orthodox faith. Through actions of the great powers and through war, they managed to claim most of the territory currently held by Greece, expelling the rest and forging a modern Greek ethnicity.

So why single out Israel? What right does any nation have to exist?

I'm not condoning the current actions of the Israeli government. And although I think a two-state solution is the best one, I think a one-state solution ought to be considered. But I feel no reason to start denying Israel's legitimacy when the aim should be to narrow differences and find a mutually-agreeable settlement. Denying one side's nationhood isn't going to help achieve that.