Israel has has had plans for a “Greater Israel” for as long as Zionism has existed. It has not been able to fulfill it because there has never been any realistic ways to achieve it. If it could do it, it would do it today!
I often get asked if I believe Israel has the right to exist. The short answer is, no.
No state has a god given right to exist. The ‘right’ for states to exist is not recognised in any treaties or international law.
For any state to come into existence is a by-product of a peoples right to self-determination, and that ís enshrined in international law.
Self-determination is a core principle of international law, arising from customary international law, but also recognized as a general principle of law, and enshrined in a number of international treaties.
But even thát is not automatically granted to many groups of peoples; Catalans, Basques, Kurds, Sikhs, etc.
To say one doesn’t believe Israel’s right to exist in the Middle East, especially after this genocide, is a legitimate argument to make.
It’s perfectly compatible to believe in Jewish people’s right to self-determination, just not inside historic Palestine.
Judaism precedes Zionism by thousands of years.
It is Zionism that brought the colonial project to Palestine. When around the time of the invention of the Zionist movement by Theodor Herzl in 1897, European Zionist Jews began purchasing land across small parts of Ottoman occupied Palestine.
A group of people going from one continent, and building a new state inside another continent (without consent), is textbook colonialism.
When an ideology such as Zionism, commits such barbaric crimes against the Palestinians since the unilateral declaration of independence of Israel in 1948, it loses all legitimacy to exist.
To say Israel doesn’t have a right to exist, is not the same as saying the Jewish people don’t have a right to self-determination.
They can have their self-determination in any other part of the world, where their self-determination doesn’t require state sponsored terror and ethnic-cleansing to enable it.
The primary case Zionist Jews make for having a Jewish self-determined state in historic Palestine, is because they claim it’s their ‘ancestral homeland’ – my ‘ancestral homeland’ can be traced back to what is sovereign India.
That doesn’t mean I, as a Muslim, now have the right to gather my gang and go and build my Muslim self-determined state inside of India.
No. It’s utter baloney!
Israel is the only state in the post-war era that was invented on another’s land. Post-war era is the correct starting point because it is then that we created international laws that prevented such actions.
Ever since Israel’s inception in 1948 – it has ranked top at the UN in the resolutions against it. Partly because it passes itself off as a democratic state and takes all the advantages of being accepted as that – but with that comes responsibilities and accountability. And so to compare Israel with non-democratic states is nonsensical. It has to be compared with other democratic states.
In fact, the IHRA definition for antisemitism suggests it is antisemitic to compare Israel with non-democratic states. I mention this because we often hear why pro-Palestinians never talk about dismantling Syria, or North Korea for example. Well, they are already sanctioned to the hilt, Israel is not. They are not built on another’s land, Israel is.
Israel has no legal, moral or religious right to exist. It is only the geopolitical landscape that enables it to exist – but the more pressing question is, now that it does exist, what is the best way forward for the Palestinians.
