Argument · heard from pro-Palestinian voices
“Israel is evil and illegitimate — it has no right to exist.”
Israel was founded by expelling a people and survives only by force: occupation, siege, war after war. A state built on that is not a state like others that happens to do bad things; it is a crime that happens to be a state. No state has a 'right to exist' anyway, and certainly not this one. The only just outcome is its end.
Common pro-Palestinian argument — made by Hamas, Moncef Khane
Where it's been said
“There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity.”
“Conceptually or legally, no such natural or legal right exists – for Israel or any other state.”
Traps in play:◆ The strict enemy frame◆ Motte and bailey◆ Where does the story start?
Why people find it convincing
- Palestinians were not asked. The Balfour Declaration (1917) promised a national home in a country whose large majority was Arab, and the 1947 partition plan was voted by other states over the objection of the people living there.
- The state's birth in 1948 came with the flight and expulsion of about 700,000 Palestinians who were never allowed back, and with the destruction of hundreds of villages.
- Since 1967 millions of Palestinians have lived under an army they did not choose, and the wars in Gaza have killed tens of thousands. To many people the images of that suffering are the whole case.
- The argument has a respectable-sounding legal version: there is no 'right to exist' for any state in international law, only a right of peoples to self-determination, so demanding that Palestinians recognise Israel's 'right to exist' asks them to endorse their own dispossession. A former UN official wrote in Al Jazeera in 2024: 'Conceptually or legally, no such natural or legal right exists – for Israel or any other state.'
- Hamas's 2017 'Document of General Principles' states it plainly (Art. 19): 'There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity.'
What's true
The founding was a catastrophe for Palestinians, and 'right to exist' is not a legal category.
The grievances are real: Palestinians were not consulted in 1917 or 1947, the Nakba happened, and so did decades of military rule and devastating wars. And the legal point is correct as far as it goes: international law knows the right of peoples to self-determination and the territorial integrity of states, not a free-standing 'right to exist'. The phrase became central when the US and Israel made it a condition for talks with the PLO, and the PLO did use it: Arafat's letter of 9 September 1993 says 'The PLO recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security.' Rabin's reply recognised the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people, not a Palestinian state, an asymmetry Palestinians still point to.
primary documentHamas, 'A Document of General Principles and Policies' (1 May 2017) (2017) ⚠
Art. 19: 'There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity.'
primary documentIsrael–PLO letters of mutual recognition, 9 September 1993 (1993) ⚠
Arafat: 'The PLO recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security'; Rabin recognises the PLO as 'the representative of the Palestinian people'.
pressMoncef Khane, 'No state has an inherent right to exist, not even Israel', Al Jazeera (5 November 2024) (2024) ✓
Quote checked against the page.
What's left out
The test would sink almost every state, and the people who live there are a people too.
If being founded in war, with expulsions, over the objection of the inhabitants makes a state illegitimate, the rule applies to most of the world: the United States, Australia, Pakistan and India (1947), post-war Poland and Czechoslovakia (which expelled millions of Germans), and the Arab states drawn by the same British and French Mandates. The legal argument cuts both ways too: if states have no 'right to exist', peoples do have self-determination, and the Jews of Israel, about seven million people, most born there and about half descended from Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, are a people exercising it. Israel was admitted to the UN in 1949; its legitimacy as a state is as settled in law as any. And 'illegitimate' quietly moves from what Israel does, which can be judged act by act, to what Israel is, which no act can change.
Traps here:◆ Motte and bailey◆ Where does the story start?◆ "What about you?"
The load-bearing word is 'evil'.
The argument runs on a premise more than a conclusion. Once Israel is defined as evil in its essence, nothing it does can count in its favour: a warning before a strike is 'cover', aid is 'PR', gay rights are 'pinkwashing', an Arab judge is a 'token' (see 'The strict enemy frame' and 'Distrust as premise'). That premise is what the chain of charges, coloniser, apartheid, genocide, builds toward, and it is mostly delivered by images of suffering rather than by argument (see 'The image does the arguing'). The mirror premise exists too: 'the Palestinians are evil', and it has the same effect in the other direction.
Traps here:◆ The strict enemy frame◆ The chain: coloniser → apartheid → genocide
Where it leads if pressed
What happens to seven million people?
'Israel has no right to exist' is sometimes defended as meaning only 'Israel as a Jewish state', and that its Jews could stay as equal citizens of a new state. That is a real position (see the one-state solution cards). But the argument's own premises don't protect them: if the state is a crime, its citizens are its criminals, and the 1968 PLO Charter recognised as Palestinians only Jews resident before 'the Zionist invasion'. In practice the argument leads to the solution card 'One Arab (or Islamic) state from the river to the sea', and to a question it doesn't answer: where would Israeli Jews go, when half of them have families who were driven out of Arab countries? The mirror version, 'the Palestinians have no right to a state', leads to the same kind of dead end on the other side. What survives is the demand the grievances actually support: that Israel be judged by what it does, and that Palestinians get what Israelis have, a state and security.
Traps here:◆ The strict enemy frame