I read a comment recently here on DKos to the effect that the commenter believed – or believes, rather – that the State of Israel has forfeited any claim to continued existence because of the circumstances of its founding. Palestinian scholars especially refer to the establishment of Israel as 'The Nakba', an Arabic term meaning 'cataclysm', a term chosen perhaps for its linguistic closeness to the term 'Holocaust'. In short, Israel has no right to exist.
That's an extraordinary statement, and one that deserves a closer inspection. There are several levels of meaning here well worth examining more closely. I also realize that writing about this involves wading feet first into a snakepit, since many people have strong feelings about the vexing issues complex surrounding Israel and Palestine, and there seem to be virtual teams arguing for or against either of the two parties concerned; but some statements, just casually made, lend themselves to an exploration of terrain I don't usually visit, and this is one of them.
A discussion of the exact occurrences surrounding Israel's independence can be found here; for the purposes of this examination, I'm going to assume that at least some events that fit our present-day understanding of the term 'ethnic cleansing' took place.
In practical terms, if someone denies that Israel has a right to exist, that person is logically saying that Israel should not exist. What does that mean?
Astonishingly, I can't recall any argument seriously being made anywhere in any other context that any other nation-state should simply be ended due to past or present behavior of that state, certainly not on DKos. China is presently actively oppressing its Tibetan minority, engaging in a sort of low-level ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide. Over the last two weeks, two diaries have been written on this site referencing Tibet. Russia is currently engaging in considerably less discreet genocide in Chechnya; an equivalent two-week search on DKos turns up one diary. By the same token, not a soul is calling for the disestablishment of Serbia, a rogue state which in the last decade launched a campaign of genocide in the Balkans which displaced millions and killed 200,000. Charles De Gaulle is said to have said that after a Third World war started by Germany, the French-Polish frontier would run at the Elbe; other than that more theoretical threat, nobody is calling for the annihilation of Germany despite that country's staggering crimes in the last century. De Gaulle himself came to power because of the civil war in then-French Algeria, which resulted in a million deaths; nobody is calling for the extinction of France.
And yet, despite the many crimes committed by, and in the name of, nation-states, only one, Israel, has people believing it should not exist, and arguing that position here on DailyKos. It's not epistemologically proper to weigh out one state-committed horror against another; but a simple reading of the evidence suggests that, no matter what the extent of questionable (or even criminal) Israeli actions around that country's independence (and since) was, that there are other, more guilty, and more recent candidates for death as states, if that is to be the appropriate remedy for state-sponsored atrocities.
One could argue that this is not a double standard, as DailyKos is an American site catering to Americans, and the United States government supports the State of Israel with direct and indirect financial aid; therefore, the argument would run on, we need to hold Israel to a higher standard than, say, Russia. Given this country's support of Israel, the reasoning could go, we as Americans incur culpability for the actions of the Jerusalem government.
The problem with that chain of reasoning is this: we do in fact give aid to Russia, specifically to assist that country in securing its nuclear weapons; we are, and my guess would be that Progressives overwhelmingly support this policy, very much interested in Russia's receiving and making good use of this aid. We also, having given that country Most Favored Nation (MFN) status in the last decade, actively assist China. Same with Serbia; per Wikipedia, this country is the largest source of foreign aid to Serbia and Montenegro. Germany, meanwhile, directly responsible for the deaths of 55,000,000 people in the last war, including the Holocaust of European Jewry, benefited from Marshall Plan aid and the security offered by the American alliance. To point out these instances of history is not, by the way, either minimalizing or apology; it is contextualization. It is difficult at best, preposterous at worst, against this historical backdrop, to argue that Israel alone of all the nations has incurred such criminal shame that it has forfeited its most basic claim on the world, its existence.
What would it mean for Israel to no longer exist?
There are several options: one, a disestablishment of Israel by merging it with the West Bank and the subsequent creation of a bi-national state on the Cisjordanian territory of the former British Mandate of Palestine, with rough Jewish-Arab population parity; two, an absorption of the entire territory into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, thereby recreating territorially the original mandate, with an Arab majority; and three, by simply throwing the Jews into the sea, as is the expressed wish of the Palestinian terror organization Hamas, with the result that an all-Arab state would cover the current Israel and West Bank. The fourth option would be to declare Israel's suicide within its present borders as a Jewish State by somehow striking out its Jewish character, a unique and unprecedented penalty not expected of any but the Jewish nation.
All of these options are troubling both for the citizens of Israel itself and for Jews in the Diaspora.
It's not an exaggeration to say that the rest of us too often have failed to speak out or take effective action when Jews are persecuted, as they are often enough today, and always have been. As far as I am concerned, the existence of Israel as a powerful Jewish state provides a needed corrective to the world's complacency towards, and occasional complicity in, persecution of Jews. That corrective would fail should Israel fall by the wayside. Nor is it credible to believe that the existing inhabitants of Israel would simply live unscathed in their homes in a bi-national state, or one with an Arab majority; the post-Independence ethnic cleansing of Jews from all Arab countries would seem to undermine that assumption. By way of comparison, there are more Arabs within Israel today than there are Jews in the entire Arab world by a factor of 217; Israel is home to 1,413,500 Arabs, while all Arab states combined contained roughly 6,500 Jews in 2001. This at least suggests that Jews in an Arab-majority state would have reason to be apprehensive of deportation and expropriation – because that's what happened elsewhere. It's also hard to see what would be desirable to Progressives about this kind of outcome, unless of course one believes that the sins of Israel require an eye for an eye for that country's civilian population. Biblical, sure, but Progressive, no. Why is this being called for?
What a call for Israel's disappearance as a sovereign nation-state means is this: that Israel is so completely beyond the pale in its actions and its being that the standards applied to other countries simply do not obtain to it, and that it is such a unique evil in history that it must disappear, no matter what this might mean to its people.
That of course is the key question regarding those who deny Israel's right to exist. The only criterion that clearly separates Israel from all other sovereign states in the world is its Jewishness or more precisely its role as the vehicle of Jewish nationalism. The problem the denialists – if that's an apt phrase – have is not however due to either the fact that Jewishness is most commonly expressed as a religion, or with nationalism itself.
There are no arguments against self-consciously Muslim states – such as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia – or Hindu states like India (founded at the partition of the Indian Empire, three months after Israel, to encompass India's Hindus, and constitutionally secular), or the Buddhist Bhutan, or against Italy and Spain, until relatively recently officially Catholic.
There are also no arguments against nationalism that demand the obliteration of states; indeed, the people who deny Israel's right to exist seem to be ardent defenders and advocates of Palestinian nationalism, despite the fact that the Jewish nation is most certainly older than the Palestinian.
This is not about various iterations of Israeli policy, it seems to me. Those who argue for the death of Israel because of its 'original sin', interestingly yet another Biblical concept, are not going to be swayed by, say, the (eminently desirable) end of the occupation, if or when that occurs, or by compensation for victims of the 'Nakba' (itself a contentious concept), or any other action that Israel could take while still remaining a Jewish State and an expression of Jewish nationalism.
Rather, those that demand the death of the Jewish State seem to be driven by something darker and deeper than anything at the policy level. It's fair to call that hatred; The Guardian, as unimpeachable a left-wing source as any, just calls it anti-Semitism.
Israel errs like all other nations: it is normal. What anti-Zionists find so obscene is that Israel is neither martyr nor saint. Their outrage refuses legitimacy to a people's national liberation movement. Israel's stubborn refusal to comply with the invitation to commit national suicide and thereby regain a supposedly lost moral ground draws condemnation.
I would not necessarily go quite as far as The Guardian, but clearly, those who wish for the death of Israel – which is what the rejection of its right to exist really means – are at the very least guilty of singling out a single nation, and one which happens to be Jewish, for a treatment unknown to any other nation on earth. That should be troubling to everyone, and require a higher explanatory threshold than most any other statement that comes readily to mind. Why?