Israel & the "Right to Exist"
I liked this piece in The Boston Review taking up the whole ”colonialist settler state” fracas. Short answer is, of course Israel was a colonialist project. In fact, suggesting it wasn’t amounts to gaslighting.
To which I add, “So what?” Colonialist projects are ubiquitous. The U.S. was one. It’s hard to boycott yourself. More to the point is the “apartheid” label. That has currency in international politics, given the history with South Africa. The myriad, technical differences between Israel and South Africa don’t matter. “Apartheid” is close enough to count.
All that notwithstanding, the debate over Israel’s “right to exist” strikes me as beside the point. Israel is a fact. The settlements have been called “facts on the ground,” but settlements can and have been uprooted. Israel is not going to be uprooted. We can hope for some kind of reconfiguration of the Jewish state that entails an accommodation with Palestinians. I’m back to the traditional two-state solution position myself. YMMV, as mine has.
I support Israel’s survival as a state, as I would most other states, since the alternative especially in the case of Israel is a) mass lethal violence that b) threatens world peace. The status quo is also violence that threatens world peace. Only our own government can remedy begin to untie this knot.
We could speak of legal rights and moral rights. In the case of nations, there is little in the way of a controlling, higher-level legal authority, so no nation has a real “right to exist.” Some, like Israel, are strong enough to fend off liquidation. Some like Ukraine are less so. The context is important. We could imagine Israel being at existential risk if it was attacked simultaneously by all its neighbors and adversaries, though it enjoys nuclear deterrence and the protection of the U.S., so that would be highly unlikely. So the “right to exist” is meaningless.
In the matter of moral rights, this matters for politics, and when the balance tilts against a nation, that diminishes its power. The constant invocation of October 7 by those at pains to defend Israel smacks of desperation. Israel’s massacres in Gaza, not to mention the rising calls for ethnic cleansing by its political leaders, have more than offset the moral assets resulting from October 7th. Israel has squandered any moral advantage it might have had. That’s why I say it is losing the war. Sure it has a right to exist, but only as a pariah state after its Pyrrhic victory, until it concedes to the Palestinians their own state. That at a minimum will mean rebuilding Gaza and extracting the Jewish settlers from the West Bank.
In principle I agree, and being human could quibble over some minor points. I’m at the point of pessimism where I’d support any solution that brings equity (I’m despairing for justice) and both parties could live with. Am inclusive one-state respective of all citizens is a romantic desire but there’s no pathway to it. In some ways similar applies to an equitable two-state. A confederacy model could be a half-way house solution that may in the future move onto a more inclusive formation, but again, how do we get there? https://ipconfederation.org/
Good points Max. I am with you on this 100 percent. Having been to So Africa during apartheid I can say the similarities are striking. Not just in the de facto and de jure discrimination, but also in the mindset of many Israeli and certainly AmericanJews who view the Palestinians as sub humans, or as an inferior race. The settler colonial descriptor is accurate as it is for the US and several other world powers. But many on the Left have landed on the term as their quick and dirty way to characterize something much more complicated. It's the the same way lefty Tankies have landed on the phrase "surrogate war" to describe what is in fact a unilateral Russian invasion. In their little heads they believe if the say the phrase enough repeatedly they really dont have to engage in any real analysis. The same way the Left still refers to all Cubans who leave Cuba as "gusanos" or worms. Labeling them as such pre-empts and replaces any discussion of WHY these people -- many who had been Communists for years-- are bailing out. One last note, I do think the term "genocide" in terms of the Palestinians is way off base. They are suffering inhuman collective punishment, indiscriminate bombing and forced displacement. It is a horror. But it is not erasue of a race or an ethnicity as true genocide means. Throwing these terms around without much thought only weakens the real impact of what is going on. One not need worry about the endgame in Gaza cuz there isn;t gonna be one for some time to come and it is not going to include any sort of real Palestinian state. Indeed, I suspect the next three phases of the war are: an intifada on the west bank, escalation on the northern front, and the pushing of SOME Pals into the Egyptian Sinai.