Israel's "right" to exist

A commenter on my last post draws attention to the political platform of the Israeli Likud party, likely winners of next week’s legislative elections. According to information on the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) website (which I assume reflects the current position), Likud still opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Recall that when the Palestinians in the occupied territories elected Hamas to power in January 2006, Israel and its Western allies instituted a boycott against the territories on the basis that, amongst other pretexts, one cannot enter into dialogue with a group – Hamas - that doesn’t recognise the “right” of Israel to exist. That boycott turned into a blockade, condemned by leading aid agencies, which created a humanitarian disaster in the Gaza strip, with children becoming malnourished and people dying from lack of medical treatment. All because Hamas’ alleged extremism rendered it persona non grata at the high table of international diplomacy.

Put aside the fact that Hamas has long accepted the reality of Israel’s existence, dismissing the idea of doing otherwise as “infantile”. Put aside the fact that for Palestinians to go further than merely accepting Israel’s existence - for them to say that Israel has the “right” to exist - would mean them accepting that it was “right” for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to have been subjected to the brutal ethnic cleansing operation that brought the creation of the Israeli state on the ashes of the former Palestinian homeland.

Put all that aside and just consider the sheer, rampant hypocrisy. Israeli leaders (not just Likud) have consistently denied Palestine's "right to exist" as an equal state alongside Israel, not just in word but - crucially, given the vast power-imbalance - in deed. Despite this, no supporter of Palestinian national rights would argue that the Palestinians should refuse to negotiate and agree a peaceful settlement with the elected Israeli government. This illustrates pretty clearly, I think, which side of this debate has a genuine interest in peace and which side clings to flimsy excuses to avoid it.

Its worth saying something else about the "right to exist". Israel does not have the right to exist, and neither does Palestine. Things do not have rights, people have rights. My laptop, my biro, my tea cup, do not have rights. They, like states, have uses which they either do or do not serve successfully.

Jews and Arabs have the equal right as human beings to live in peace and security and with full self-determination. Whatever set-up you have in former Mandate Palestine - a Jewish and an Arab state side by side, a single democratic state for both peoples – is only justified in so far as it serves the purpose of safeguarding those human rights. The current set-up – an Israeli state that confers racial privilege on its Jewish over its Arab inhabitants, with the rest of the Palestinians either locked into dungeon-like conditions in modern day Indian reservations, or exiled altogether – has no justification in terms of any recognisable concept of “rights”.

Those who talk about Israel’s “right” to exist have forgotten a principle – that states are entirely subordinate to human rights – which has been understood by democrats for centuries.

Over two hundred years ago, the American founding fathers, when articulating the fundamental principles of democracy, said that:

"We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying it's foundation on such principles and organising it's powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." [my emphasis]

According to these principles, it is quite legitimate to consider the abolition of the state of Israel, if that is what “shall seem most likely to effect [the] safety and happiness” of the Jews and Arabs of the region. There is no “right” for a state to persist in circumstances where it presents an obstacle to the honouring of basic human rights. As it happens, I don’t support calls for the abolition of the state of Israel. But the principles at work here need to be understood.

The idea that a state has the "right to exist" directly contradicts the principles set forth by the early democrats in their struggles against the monarchical tyrannies of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The man who led the intellectual counter-charge against democracy, Edmund Burke, said:

"The occupation of the hairdresser or of a working tallow-chandler cannot be a matter of honour to any person...Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression if such as they ... are permitted to rule" (Simon Schama's "History of Britain III", pg 43)

Consider the value-system set out here by Burke. The danger of the state oppressing the population must be balanced against the danger of the population oppressing the state.

Those who reject negotiations with Hamas to help end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on the basis that Hamas rejects Israel's "right" to exist, are - in moral terms - taking the same backward, anti-democratic position as Edmund Burke two-hundred years ago, when he defended the old monarchies of Europe against the threat of the “swinish multitude”. The rights of people are subordinated to the alleged "rights" of the state. The right of the Palestinians for their desperate situation to be resolved, so they can live decent lives free from hunger, poverty and violence, is subordinated to the "right" of the Israeli state to exist in whatever form it chooses, whatever the human cost, and to have that "right" affirmed by its victims. Until the Palestinians bow down before the fake "rights" of the Israeli state, their actual rights will continue to be denied to them.

Israel likes to present itself as a bulwark of enlightened Western democracy, resisting the advances of the swarthy Islamic hordes. In reality, the Israeli state, and those who would see Palestinian lives sacrificed on the alter of its “right” to exist, are the moral equivalent of the pre-Enlightenment reactionaries of monarchical 18th century Europe. The barbarism of Israel’s recent massacres in Gaza is partially an outcome of the perverse morality that subordinates the rights of human beings to the “rights” of a state.