Criticisms of Israel are often met with a rhetorical question in response. The critic of Israel is frequently asked, in return, whether he or she recognizes the right of the Jewish state to exist. Even minor criticisms, ones touching on no existential questions surrounding Israel as a sovereign country, are deflected with this shift in premise. It would seem that, for many of Israel’s supporters, to fail to be anything but laudatory of Israel is tantamount to suggesting that Israel should no longer be recognized as a nation-state.
To be sure, there are those who do question Israel’s right to exist. A slogan much repeated on college campuses in the United States following the attacks against Israel by the terrorist organization Hamas on October 7, 2023, was some version of “from the river to the sea,” implying that the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea should be, as it once was, Palestine (in whatever historical form prior to 1948), and not the state of Israel. The way to accomplish this would be, no doubt, to kill or otherwise terrorize the people living in Israel.
State actors also deploy such rhetoric. In an October 26, 2005 speech to the Islamic Students Association on the topic of “The World Without Zionism,” then-Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadenijad proclaimed, according to a translation provided by the New York Times, that, “Our dear Imam said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement.” Iran is a big and powerful country which sponsors, in various ways, groups such as Hezbollah, which have attacked Israel and killed innocent Israeli citizens. Iran itself has also traded attacks with Israel.
But in this inflamed rhetoric there hides a curious non sequitur. The duel of absolutist positions–Israel is beyond criticism; Israel should be annihilated–would seem at first to miss the point. After all, Israel’s right to exist is inconsequential. Israel does exist, period. States exist and act beyond the realm of existential rights. Rights vest in people, not in states. Whether Israel, or any other state, should or should not exist has no bearing on its status in international law, and the rhetorical questions as posed about Israel’s existence can find no answer there. Even when mutual recognition is held up as a standard of states’ rights to exist, it is clear that states can and do invade one another’s territory and even eliminate other states from political existence. The “right to exist” is a mirage. States, by brute fact, do exist. Israel is no different than any other state in this regard.
And yet, the problem of Israel’s right to exist does not end there, because Israel is a particular kind of state, with a particular kind of organizing principle. Two organizing principles working in tandem, to be precise. Israel is a Jewish state. It therefore works and exists as any other state would, with the usual police powers of centralized government and monopoly on intrastate and interstate violence that nearly all states claim. But Israel exists also as a state with a controlling attribute, an adjective modifying the noun “state.” Israel is a Jewish state. This makes Israel a state unlike any other state except one, the United States of America. The reason is that, in this case, “Jewish” is not a religious modifier, but a directional one. There are Islamic states, and democratic states, and ethnic states, but Israel, like America, is a teleological state. It exists not to curate a past or to act as a homeland for a people, but to effect an end state, to transform the world as it is now into something foreordained by God.
In the United States this political teleology is the pre-Zionism known as Puritanism, which has taken various forms in American history, from Hamiltonianism to Lincolnism to Wilsonism to anti-communism to neoconservatism. In many ways, American teleological statism explains why Washington was wary of communism, a global competitor in teleology. In Israel, the teleological principle, the modifier to “state” that makes the state there unlike any other state except America, is Zionism. Israel is not a Jewish state, therefore, but a Zionist one, a state that contains a story not only about its own beginnings but also about its own destiny. Seen in historical diorama, Zionism has worked in the opposite direction as Puritanism. Puritanism began as a form of religious terrorism but gradually deracinated into idealistic-political messianism. Zionism, however, began as a largely secular reaction to another secular phenomenon, nationalism, but over time changed into the expansionist, millennialist movement whose adherents have leveled much of Gaza and are planning to continue the work elsewhere. God once blessed America but now a liberal pluralism presides over latter-day Puritanism. Zionists once largely dismissed God, but God now ordains (as do American Puritans) the genocide under way in the Gaza strip.
The nature of Israel as a Zionist state therefore complicates the rhetorical questions raised often by Israel’s supporters as to the right of Israel to exist. Does Israel have a right to exist? No, not under international law. But then again, neither does any other state. Individuals, not states, have rights. Do Israelis, then, have the right to exist? Of course they do. Israelis, as all humans, have the right to exist, to flourish, to be happy, to be safe from harm, to be loved and cared for, to defend themselves, to worship and speak and assemble as they please. That is not in question, at least not among anyone who is not a murderer or a terrorist. The complication to the question of whether Israel has a right to exist comes in the uneasiness that frames the challenge. People often ask, rhetorically, whether Israel has the right to exist, perhaps because Israel’s existence is not a zero-sum proposition, but comes necessarily at the expense of other peoples, other states, other governments. Zionism underpins Israel as a state, which means that Israel’s right to exist is necessarily entangled with other states’ right to exist. This seems to be what causes defenders of Israel to assume that anyone who criticizes Israel is merely laying the groundwork for the eradication of Israel.
The eradication of Israel as a people is an historical fact. The Jewish people suffered horrors in Europe that defy the most depraved imagination. That those people and their descendants should be uneasy about their own existence, even, or especially, when they now have a state of their own, is entirely in keeping with the nature of personal and historical trauma. But there is a flipside to that darkness, to that uneasiness born of history and devastating memory. That flipside is this: Do other states beside Israel have the right to exist? This, it would seem, is for many Zionists today an open question. Or a closed one. Many Zionists today–not the Zionists of the old stripe, the Zionists seeking a land for a people, the European colonists clearing out a parcel British colonial-style, but the Zionists seeking a future for an ancient prophecy, the Zionists for whom the Old Testament is an open invitation–publicly call for the elimination of Gaza and of the people living there. If Israel exists, the logic seems to be for these Zionists, then Gaza cannot.
This is the nature of Zionism. It is a political theology with a definite directionality. It is a telos. In a world in which all the ice-free land is already spoken for, this means that Zionism is, when animating a state, a tacit denial of the right of other states, other peoples to exist. Israel the people was gassed and burned by a state. Israel the state, born of that slaughter, insists that it keep expanding, and uses the Holocaust as explanation for statist prerogative. And this logic does not end at Gaza. With “Greater Israel” the next phase of the fulfilment of the old words of the prophets is at hand. Like the Puritans whose errand into the wilderness has kept going, over Japan, over North Vietnam, over Baghdad, and perhaps soon over Tehran, Zionists conceal endless expansion under cover of an otherwise normal-looking state. The right of the Jewish people to exist was insulted most brutally in the gas chambers of Europe in the middle of the last century. The right of Israel to exist, by contrast, is, as far as Zionism goes, a denial of the rights of other peoples. “Never again!” should be always on the lips of the decent around the world, but that admonition to recall the past should never be twisted into a justification to carve a different future out of the sufferings of others.
It is in this context, of seeing the red-herring controversy over Israel’s “right to exist” as a tacit dismissal of other states to exist, that we must revisit some of the claims made in the past about Israel and her enemies. The October, 2005 speech by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, for example–did he really call for Israel to be wiped off the map, as many have repeated over the past twenty years? Or was he looking forward to a day, couching his words in Persian figures of speech, when an unjust situation, namely that of the Palestinian people living in virtual concentration camp conditions, had given way to a brighter future? Also, the phrase “from the river to the sea,” while certainly used by many to call for the disappearance of Israel as a state, has also been used by Zionists to call for the disappearance of Israel’s rivals, both state and non-state actors. Set aside an Iranian president and campus protests, though. The problem is manifest without exemplification. It does not take a United Nations resolution to understand that Zionism, which today means the maintenance of Israel as a certain kind of state by repression and violence, is inherently racist. Nor does it take an ongoing hostage situation–Hamas’ illegal and unjustifiable seizure and torture of innocent Israelis–to make it clear that Israel itself first took the residents of Palestine hostage, and now wants to expand the hostage-taking well beyond the bounds of the present crisis.
There are many outside of Israel who appear blind to the danger of Zionism. There are also many who excuse Israel’s violence by claiming, for example, that Palestinians support Hamas (ignoring that “support” presumes freedom, which in Gaza, for obvious reasons, is highly limited), and so therefore must meet the same fate as them (although Israeli support for a genocidal government is not factored into the same equation). But Zionism endangers not just the lives of those living in places where Greater Israel seeks to expand, but also many others, including Americans, whose government supports Israel (and Greater Israel) as though Israel and the United States were one country. Many Americans cannot see this, because Puritanism and Zionism are twinned political phenomena. But many others around the world are learning that Israel’s right to exist, when analyzed, turns out to mean the right to override the existence of any state, and any people, which or whom the leaders of Israel deem an obstacle to their political teleology.
