UPDATE:
Thanks for keeping things relatively civil (so far). I'm in Europe and going to sleep--I won't get to all of the new comments (these diaries are exhausting) but hopefully you all get a sense of my thinking from the diary and comments. Have fun and don't beat each other up.
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This is just a slightly inflated version of a comment I wrote in one of the I/P pie wars...
But I've rarely seen it addressed.
There seems to be some misunderstanding (understatement of the millennium) about the concept of a "right to exist" around here. Israel "supporters" tend to use it as an axiom, sometimes phrased as a fundamental right that comes from somewhere, where as "detractors" say that no such right exists, for Israel or any state, for that matter. In the detractors' view, Israel is there, ok, let's move on and not blab about such nonexistent "rights".
My brief take on it, as a supporter of Israel but a detractor of its current policies is below..
The concept of a "right", as put forth by supporters, doesn't strike me as something fundamental like a civil or human right--but as a defense to a near global push against the state. Polls have shown that Israel ranks somewhere around North Korea and Iran these days in terms of popularity, and several entities (Hamas in Gaza, Iran, etc.) have official platforms that actively seek to eliminate Israel and ethnically cleanse (or kill) Jews from the region.
Very few states face that sort of politically sanctioned--and widely supported--rhetoric against it--yet people here seem to pretend that it either doesn't exist, or that it's "no big deal", completely disregarding what the history of Jews both in the Middle East and Europe actually looks like.
Furthermore, it's not as if there hasn't been military action--whether state sponsored wars, or guerilla/terrorist activity (I'll use guerilla to refer to attacks on military targets like tanks, terrorist to refer to deliberately targeted attacks on civilians) conducted in order to further those goals. The fact that Israel maintains oppressive policies towards Palestinians, and has engaged in what I consider extremely lopsided responses to provocations, does not preclude the fact that these security issues that DO seek to render Israel as no-longer-a-state, do exist.
And last point--those who favor what they call a "one state solution", in which supposedly Jewish Israelis and Muslim Palestinians all have a nice spot of land where everyone gets along and no one maintains any hegemony over the other, is nonsensical in the current environment. Not only does it seek to render Jews somehow less worthy of a place of refuge than many other ethno-religious groups (even those who don't have a homeland are usually supported in their right to self-determination, or at least a semi-autonomous continguous land mass, but somehow for Jews it's seen as "getting something they don't deserve"), but it also completely disregards the issue of Jewish safety in the region. I fully agree that Palestinian Muslims now certainly have no cause to feel safe (that's the threat of the opposite "one state solution" but neither history and current ethno-religious strife bode well for a Jewish minority in a predominantly Palestinian-Arab region.
So this is all where the right to exist terminology comes from--it's the pushback against its envisioned and encouraged extermination by entities that would be all too happy to carry that out, if they could, and the tensions and animosity that persist not only among enemy governements--but among hostile populations.
That's all I have on this today, try to be mildly civil in the comments (ha)
3:56 PM PT: UPDATE:
OK, this is off topic, but fuck these people to high hell--reports are suggesting that ISIS has bulldozed the UNESCO site of Niimrud. It's late and I'm not doing a diary on this--but a heads up to any takers....