After Duma: Does the State of Israel Have a ‘Right to Exist’?
If it institutionalizes rape and torture, for instance, to extract confessions from suspected criminals?
Israel’s leaders and staunchest supporters have a penchant for pleading the case for the Jewish state’s ‘right to exist’. A recent letter to the Guardian newspaper is only the latest example.
Now, outside the fact that there’s no such right enshrined to states anywhere, let’s play devil’s advocate a moment and say there is.
Did the Soviet Union, therefore, have a ‘right to exist’?
Does North Korea?
Does the People’s Republic of China?
Did Nazi Germany have a ‘right to exist’?
And if so, does that supposed right supercede the decision of another nation to go to war against it?
Did the allied nations, therefore, trample Nazi Germany’s ‘right to exist’?
Did NATO’s Cold War against the Soviets tread upon that country’s ‘right to exist’?
Obviously not.
For, again, there’s no such right, and in the world of power politics and geopolitical maneuvering, only might makes right.
But again, for the sake of argument, let’s still assume there is such a right and that all nations possess it.
Is it possible for a nation to lose that right?
Is it possible that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, by dint of the oppression and destruction they visited upon their own and other peoples, lost their ‘right to exist’?
Is it possible that’s what triggered the nations of the so-called free world to unite militarily against them until they prevailed?
Hmm…
If so, then at what point does a nation summarily lose its ‘right to exist’?
What specifically must it do?
Must it murder people for ideological reasons?
Indeed, does a murderer have a right to exist?
Does a rapist or a pedophile?
And would a state that institutionalizes rape and torture, for instance, to extract confessions from suspected criminals, maintain its right to exist?
Would a state that employs sex workers and other deviates to threaten and molest minors in police custody have a right to exist?
After Duma, the State of Israel has, at the very least, to answer that question.
Minimal Demands, Minimal Respect, Minimal Legitimacy
One more aspect to this ‘right to exist’ argument that the State of Israel and its apologists harp on, and it’s simply this –
Existence…?
Is that what you want recognized?
Your ‘existence’?
Is that what you aspire to?
Is that the very best you would claim?
Oh, I know, it’s because enemies threaten your existence that you’re forced to offer a counter-claim – a ‘right to exist’. To live. To be left alone in peace. Is that right?
No, actually, it’s not that.
It’s much deeper.
The fact that your claim is merely for ‘existence’ is precisely what makes you the target you seek to avoid being.
It’s what makes you laughably expendable.
You want – like every stone and plant and vegetable, like every ant and wild boar – to exist.
Wonderful.
That’s your claim.
That’s the right you demand.
The sum total of your suit.
And we say…
When a nation’s goal is merely to ‘exist’ (like what? – an etherized patient?) – it becomes ludicrous.
A laughingstock.
So…
Unless the Jewish people has a purpose – and it most certainly does! – and not only demands of itself, but from the entire world, that its purpose be fulfilled… then by all measures, it has absolutely forfeited its ‘right to exist’.
And more than that.
Any Jew, whether in Israel or without, who aspires merely ‘to exist’…
Well, we invite him to do so elsewhere – far from the holy hills of Eretz Yisrael.
Say, in Tahiti.
For we’ve got greater work to attend than that.
Dean Maughvet