Israel has no right to exist …….
Preface
This is the third article in the series covering key concepts of Zionism and my critical awareness of these ideas as I developed from being a Zionist Jewish South African to becoming an anti-Zionist Jewish South African.
The second article in this series explains what Zionists mean by Israel’s ‘right to exist’, and the role that this concept played in the development of Zionism in my town and my own development as a young Zionist. In the present article I will discuss the critique of the right to exist concept and describe important milestones on my journey towards fully grasping that critique. The essence of anti-Zionism is contained in the phrase ‘Israel has no right to exist’, in other words the ideology of anti-Zionism rests on the critique of Israel’s right to exist and its right to exist as a Jewish state.
This article is based on the framework elicited previously, to make sense of the ideological struggles between Zionism and its opponents. However, these struggles need to be placed in the context of the contemporary political economy of Israel. Jeff Halper[1] has argued that the drivers of contemporary Zionist ideology, which emphasises the continued Judaization of historic Palestine and the ongoing relocation of Palestinians, are the relations between Israel as a regional hegemon with a developed military industrial complex (specialised also in high tech surveillance) and other metropolitan countries and peripheral powers that prioritise the pacification of their populations that are revolting against the effects of austerity and social marginalisation. Economically, according to Halper, Israel fulfils a role of supplier of niche
pacification services, the technologies and arms of which have been tried and tested on the Palestinian populations captive in Gaza and the West Bank, and to a lesser extent against Palestinian Israeli citizens. Halper provides a useful political-economy framework for understanding the functioning of Zionist ideology against the Palestinians: Israel needs to occupy and attack Palestinians in order to test the surveillance and ordnance products that it markets to other states that have rebellious populations.
The state of Israel of course does not express its intentions thus. It claims that it does what it has to do to ensure Jewish physical and cultural survival in a hostile world. Making this view hegemonic, in the sense that it becomes the ‘common sense’ of significant economic and political elites across the globe, is crucial for legitimising the implementation of Israel’s military products and security services to its clients. Resisting this requires the demystification of the right to exist ideology that clouds the underlying drivers that Halper has identified.
The first section of this paper unpacks the meaning of the critique of the terms right to exist and right to exist as a Jewish state. The second section briefly describes the key milestones in my intellectual development that fundamentally challenged these two key Zionist concepts, thereby completely undermining my interpellation as a Zionist. Once we have cleared the mystique that surrounds the right to exist elements of Zionist ideology, we will see clearly these underlying political and economic drivers of Israel’s policy towards Palestinians.
The next article will describe some key milestones in the global ideological struggle over the right to exist concept, including the discourse from the Black Lives Matter movement and from the Movement for Black Lives. All these articles address important issues to lay the basis for forthcoming articles about the meaning of being Jewish and of antisemitism.
Critique of Rights Claims
International Law and Ontological “Right to Exist”.
Ernest Marshall Brown (in the Yale Law Journal, 1916) argues that states have no ontological right to exist — in response to then communities’ (in Latin America and Europe) demand for nation states, during World War One. Jeff
Handmaker and Gentian Zyberi point out that there is no esoteric right for states to exist (internationally recognised boundaries imply a ‘right of existence’, not a ‘right to exist’). State formation happens through social processes. The legal basis, territorial integrity and juridical form of a state reflects broader political and economic processes, and not the other way around. The state of Israel emerged through ethnic cleansing of more than 700 000 Palestinians between November 1947 and the end of 1948: over 400 towns and villages, where they and their forebears had lived for centuries, were destroyed.
Jeremy Hammond argues that United Nations General Assembly Resolution 188 was no legal basis for partitioning historic Palestine, but recommended that the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine’s partition plan be implemented, requested the Security Council to take up the matter and called on Palestinian inhabitants (under no legal obligation to do so) to accept. The Arab Higher Committee regarded as outside the United Nations’ jurisdiction, and contrary to the letter and spirit of its charter, to order or recommend the partition of Palestine. Arab Delegations’ proposals to refer the legal issue to the International Court of Justice were never put to vote by the president of the Assembly.
Under international law recognition of a state’s existence refers to a clearly defined territory. (This forms the basis for territorial integrity of a state and it’s right not to be attacked across its borders, unless such attack is in self-defence). Handmaker and Zyberi note that the borders of Israel remain undefined. Palestinian rights activist and scholar (and vocal critic of Israel) Norman Finkelstein, disagrees arguing that the International Court of Justice has defined the borders of Israel as the 1949 armistice lines.
Western Democracies are not Ethnocracies.
Liberal western democracies are not juridical ethnocracies. Their jurisprudence makes all citizens equal and assigns to them not only civil rights but also the right to constitute the nation that these states represent. Therefore, Israel’s claim that it is a democracy in the same way that the US, Britain, etc. are democratic is a false analogy. A further critique of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is that in practice it requires violation of the rights of others (i.e. Palestinians).
Activist publisher Ali Abunimah notes that for a person (or state entity) to bear a right, there must be an enforcement venue, legal relief (e.g. a penalty imposed on the violator) but that remedies must be lawful and equitable.[2] A right to exist as a Jewish state is not recognised in international law — there is no venue to enforce the right. Potential violators of this right are three groups of Palestinians. First, returning refugees (from 1948). Second, Palestinians living in occupied territories (through birth and population growth rate). Third, Palestinian refugees in exile exercising their right of return. In addition, gentile African refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants, would potentially violate the right by living in the country and reproducing. Remedies to these threats range from denying the right.
to return, expelling Palestinians in territories under Israel’s control, limiting numbers of children permitted, stripping Palestinian Israelis of their right to vote, or retaining a separate governance regime that excludes them from exercising political power in the state. Abunimah observes that all these ideas have at some point been advocated and that some are even already in place. He notes that the ideologies and practices that give expression to this right are racist and inherently unjust and inequitable. He concludes that this right therefore cannot pass muster of the principles of justiciable rights.
One should add that with respect to contemporary Muslim theocratic states (like Iran and Saudi Arabia), they too do not have a right to exist as theocratic states.
Resisting Interpellation
In the first, introductory, article to this series I described both how I was interpellated as a Zionist and also how I later resisted my interpellation as a Zionist. There were three key milestones in my personal resistance to my identity as a Zionist. At each juncture the extent of my level of awareness, and clarity about the meaning and implication, of the right to exist concept, was indicative of how close I remained to my Zionist identity or how far I had strayed from being a Zionist.
1978 milestone — public debate
In the introductory article I mentioned a period characterized by my doubting and criticising (in a debate at the University of Cape Town in 1978) and thereafter withdrawing from the politics of challenging Zionism. The trigger for my getting into this debate was my discovery of Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation as an explanatory tool for the 1948 Nakba and the emergence of a modern capitalistic economy in historic Palestine.
For many years I had questioned the idea that the people without a land came to the land without a people. But if there were no people in the land, how come there were all these Palestinian refugees?
The narrative that I encountered in response to this question was that ‘we’ had come to Palestine with an outstretched olive branch, only to be viciously attacked by Palestinians and neighbouring Arab countries. This meant that there were people living there previously, only not our type of people. And they didn’t appreciate our presence. And they were developmentally backward and could have benefitted from ‘us’ if only they had accepted us… There were always fall-back explanations in response to each new question.
As opposed to this tendentious reasoning, the Marxist framework provided a rational explanation based on the underlying material and ideological interests of the main Zionist formations and their leaders. However, I remained unclear about Israel’s right to exist and whether a Jewish political state was necessary for Jewish survival (i.e. Israel’s right to be a Jewish state….). I was demystifying the good faith interpretation of the history of the Zionist colonization of Palestine without clarifying what end state I was supporting as a solution to the status quo. I avoided — as many still do today — studying and clarifying the question of the right to exist.
2010 milestone — newspaper opinion editorial
After succumbing for many years, to being ‘pacified’ about the issue of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, I nevertheless ‘came out’ through an article in the public domain in 2010. The trigger for my writing this article was an attack on Archbishop Tutu, who was not only an icon of the South African anti-apartheid struggle but also a moral beacon. He had called out Israel for being an apartheid state. The 2010 article was similar to my 1978 debate input, in that it avoided critiquing the right to exist as well as assessing the potential strategic options for ending the state of oppression of Palestinians by the state of Israel.
This speaks to the power of this concept in Zionist ideology and the hegemony of that ideology, as mentioned in the second article of this series. Zionist ideology effectively projects the existential necessity for the right to exist: it is the fundamental justification for Israel as a Jewish state, without which Jews anywhere and everywhere allegedly face the likelihood of physical and cultural annihilation. From a Zionist perspective this justifies Israel’s possession of atomic bombs and its willingness to use them to ensure the existence of a Jewish state. Israeli writer, satirist, dramatist and screen writer, Ephraim Kishon, captured the force of this apocalyptic appeal in a 1976 article in the Jerusalem Post[3]. More recently, a prominent Israeli military professor confirmed that this was a right for which Israel was prepared to launch its atomic bombs should its existence as a Jewish ethno-state be threatened with termination.
2012 milestone — becoming part of the solution….
A second similarity was that both my 1978 and 2010 public questioning of Zionist practices and theory, were done as an individual. This changed with the third milestone in 2012 when I joined a group of Palestine solidarity activists who were protesting the raising of funds for the Jewish National Fund at the children’s shop Reggies.
This marked the start of my engagement with various groups of Palestine solidarity activists in Cape Town and Stellenbosch: I started to become collectively involved in not only studying the history and current state of the oppression of Palestinians, but also with counter strategies to oppose this oppression, such as a consumer boycott, a massive 2014 street protest in Cape Town, resistance to the Israeli Defence Force recruiting of volunteers from South Africa, organising an investigative journalist movie on Israel’s 2014
attack on and atrocities in Gaza, and an academic boycott of Israeli conference attendees in Stellenbosch in 2018.
Initially I participated in events organised by the NGO BDS South Africa and Christian activist grouping Kairos South Africa, organisations that were closely aligned with the ANC government and lacked a perspective that could link oppression in historic Palestine with exploitation and marginalization in post-apartheid South Africa. Given my critical independence, I moved on.
Most of the political practices referred to above took place over the last six years under the auspices of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign Cape Town (PSC CT). In PSC CT I found a space where I could practice an independent left-politics within the solidarity movement, which has involved relative independence while still observing a minimal organisational discipline. The integration of collective political practice with critical reflection has enriched my understanding of what the Palestine solidarity movement should be about and the importance of democratic practices and ethical political behaviour. It also highlighted the need for a principled opposition to the ideological elements, right to exist and right to exist as a Jewish state.
Conclusion
The notion that Israel has no right to exist is — or should be — core to the anti-Zionist ideological framework. This is because Israel’s right to exist is a pivotal conceptual element that underpins the entire Zionist ideological framework. Critique this concept and reveal its theoretical blindness as well as the historical inaccuracies on which it rests, and you undermine the entire Zionist ideological edifice. The converse is also true. Failing to address a critique of this concept leaves a major ideological weapon in the hands of Zionists who will continue to use it to delegitimse the movement for equal Palestinian rights.
This paper clarified the dogmatic basis for the right to exist concepts and shows that these have no basis in scientific theoretical discourse that understands the emergence of social identities from historical socio-economic and socio-political contexts. The paper also clarifies the events that led up to the United Nations General Assembly resolution recommending partition, and why this cannot be a legal right assigned to the state of Israel to function as a Jewish ethno-state.
I also traced the milestones in my process of critical distancing from and rejection of Zionist ideology, emphasising the importance of the right to exist concept in cementing individual Zionists into a broader movement with its own self-understanding.
Across the globe the identity of the state of Israel was interpellated based on this concept. Historically, key figures in black liberation struggles, like Martin Luther King and (to a lesser extent) Nelson Mandela were instrumental in solidifying this interpellation. But in recent years the struggle for black lives has started to call into question the legitimacy of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish ethno-state. The history of and contemporary ideological struggles between Zionists and their anti-Zionist opponents over the legitimacy of these two concepts forms the content of the fourth article.
Paul Hendler, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 30 January 2022.
[1] Cf. Halper, J 2015 War against the people — Israel, the Palestinians and global pacification, Pluto Press.
[2] Abunimah, A 2015 The Battle for Justice on Palestine, AMEC, pages 21 to 25.
[3] Quoted in Hirst, D 1977 The Gun and the Olive Branch — the Roots of Violence on the Middle East, Faber, pages 350 to 351.
