Jonathan Cook Substack
After the Greens passed a motion declaring ‘Zionism is racism’, every establishment journalist is suddenly playing dumb about the most elementary of issues in international law
Israel has no right to exist. That’s the position in international law. It has nothing to do with hatred of Israel or antisemitism.
In fact, no state – none – has a “right” to exist, including states busy extolling their democratic credentials.
If the UK had a “right” to exist, for example, it would mean that Scotland could not be allowed to vote for independence. Why? Because such a vote would break up the UK. It would be a violation of the UK’s supposed “right” to exist as the UK.
Which is precisely why the UK has no “right” to exist.
Peoples have a right to exist. When that right is abused, it invariably involves very serious violations of international law – often through crimes such as apartheid, ethnic cleansing or genocide.
States, by contrast, don’t have a “right” to exist. They simply do exist as a matter of fact – until they suddenly don’t. Like apartheid South Africa. Like Rhodesia. Like Czechoslovakia. Like Yugoslavia. Like Nazi Germany.
This is so obvious it should not even need stating.
Were states to have a “right” to exist, completely arbitrary factors such as their borders, demographic make-up and political institutions would be sacrosanct. Inviolable. It would be impossible for minorities to secede, for territories to be transferred, for apartheid structures to be overturned . Any such change would be a transgression of the state’s “right to exist” as it is.
And yet every single journalist employed by an establishment media outlet is suddenly playing dumb on this most elementary of issues. They’ve all suddenly had a collective lobotomy. They insist Israel must be the exception to the rule that no state has a “right” to exist.
Watch, for example, the BBC’s Nick Robinson berating Green party leader Zack Polanski for refusing to affirm Israel’s “right to exist”. Polanksi correctly argues instead that Israelis and Palestinians have a right to live in equality.
Incendiary stupidity
Why all this incendiary stupidity from our supposedly brightest and best journalists?
Their doltishness is not accidental.
A Green party motion last week determined that Zionism – the ideology that created and sustains Israel – is racism. That brought very unwelcome attention to the question of what kind of state Israel is.
I have written at length on why Zionism is a form of racism, so I won’t rehash the arguments. You can read them here.
But what Robinson and the rest of the media are insisting on is a unique carve-out for Israel. They argue that Israel has an exceptional right – one that no other state enjoys – to exist as it is and in perpetuity.
The implication, the one they want you to infer without them having to spell it out, is that any attempt to end Israel as a racist state, and reform it into a democracy where Israelis and Palestinians have equal rights, is a violation of its supposed “right to exist”.
They also want you to assume that anyone who denies Israel’s “right to exist” is calling for the mass murder, the genocide, of Israeli Jews – and possibly all Jews.
In their telling, those calling for the extermination of Jews include Zack Polanksi, the Jewish leader of the Greens, and Stephen Kapos, an elderly Holocaust survivor and one of the proposers of the motion.
What these journalists are doing has nothing to do with protecting the Jewish population that live in Israel. It’s about setting in stone a highly militarised state that subjugates Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel itself, that refuses to define its borders, that has been judged to be committing the crime of apartheid by the world’s highest court, and that is carrying out a genocide in Gaza according to a consensus of legal and human rights authorities and genocide scholars.
If apartheid South Africa had no “right”to exist, Israel has no “right” to exist either. Its crimes are far graver than apartheid South Africa’s, as the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel peace laureate, famously observed after he travelled around the occupied territories – and did so long before Israel started committing genocide in Gaza.
Like that other famous apartheid state, Israel must be reconstituted as a democracy so that it no longer poses a danger to the Palestinian people it has spent decades dispossessing, oppressing and now genociding.
‘State of Gaza’
Every time I make this argument on social media, Israel’s apologists excitedly exclaim that I have been hoisted by my own petard. If Israel has no right to exist, they jabber, then a Palestinian state must have no right to exist either.
Yes, that’s right. Let me say it again: no state has a “right” to exist.
And that may prove a very good thing for the Palestinian people.
Imagine Donald Trump’s Board of Peace decides to rebuild the tiny enclave of Gaza along the lines of his stated plan: as a Mar-a-Lago resort on the Med, where Palestinians live effectively as guest workers, servicing wealthy Gulf Arabs with restaurants, AI data centres, casinos and brothels. Trump might choose to call this madhouse the state of Gaza.
And imagine that, under intense international pressure, Israel finally allows the remaining territorial shards of the West Bank it hasn’t colonised with illegal settlements to hold elections tightly regulated by Israeli military officials. The fragmented West Bank government has no control over its borders or airspace, it has no territorial integrity, it has no army, it is separated from Gaza and East Jerusalem, and it has no access to the outside world without Israel’s permission. Israel decides to call this hell-hole the state of Palestine.
Does this “state of Gaza” have a “right” to exist? Does “the state of Palestine” have a “right” to exist too?
Would any struggle by Palestinians living there to assert real control over either of these states and reform them violate those states’ “right to exist”?
For the sake of the Palestinian people, let’s hope not.
But that is precisely the argument being advanced by Israel’s apologists. If the current state of Israel has a sacrosanct “right to exist” as it is, then any supposed state Trump imposes on the Palestinian people, on whatever terms, would enjoy a similar “right to exist”.
Dignity and security
The mistake being made here is to associate the state as it exists with the people it is supposed to represent.
Israelis have a right to exist – they have a right not to be oppressed, ethnically cleansed, genocided – and the state that represents them is legitimate so long as its role is to protect them from these kinds of threats. So long as it provides them with a degree of dignity and security.
But Israelis lose the right to maintain their state as it is if that state is used to oppress, ethnically cleanse or genocide another people, like the Palestinians. Then it becomes an illegitimate state, just like apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany. It must be reconstituted in ways that regain its legitimacy.
That is not “singling out” Israel.
The Palestinians have never had a modern state. They have lived under various occupiers – including the Ottomans, the British and Israel. They were entirely excluded from the decolonisation process that followed the end of the Second World War.
They cannot be judged as having a legitimate or illegitimate state because they have no state. They need a state precisely to protect them from being oppressed, ethnically cleansed and genocided by the state representing Israelis.
The armed groups in Gaza are not a state, and neither are the so-called “moderates” in the West Bank. They are not even proper governments. They are either quislings or resistance movements fighting for their people’s liberation, a right accorded to the Palestinian people under international law. The Palestinians are fighting to have a state that represents them, to remove an occupier that abuses and murders them.
That representation might come via a Palestinian state, or it might come via a confederated or unitary state in which Israelis and Palestinians enjoy equal rights.
Even that state won’t have a right to exist. It will have to earn its place in the hearts of Israelis and Palestinians by serving to protect their collective dignity and security better than any other arrangement.
That is lesson we could all do with remembering as we ponder whether the states that claim to represent us really do so.
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