Israel Doesn’t Have the “Right to Exist”
It Never Did
Israel Doesn’t Have the “Right to Exist”
It Never Did
No state has some divine “right to exist.” That phrase, so often weaponized in defense of Israel, isn’t a legal principle; it’s a political shield.
Like all shields used by colonial powers, it’s meant to deflect any real conversation about how the state was created, who it displaced, and why that violence is still ongoing.
Israel’s so-called “right to exist” is a rhetorical trick. It asks you to recognize a state born through ethnic cleansing as inevitable, natural, and beyond critique. If we peel back the layers of Zionist mythology, we see the truth: Israel doesn’t have some sacred right to exist. What it had was a British imperial mandate, a bunch of European funding, and a settler-colonial project that displaced over 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. What it has now is the backing of the world’s most powerful empire and a nuclear arsenal.