I have heard that it is anti semetic to “deny israel has a right to exist”
Which makes me curious. Is it a generally accepted premise either in law or just by people that countries have “rights”?
I think of rights as something people have.
If countries do have rights, is exisiting one of them?
countries have “rights” proportional to the amount of force they can enact
No nation has rights, and colonial nations certainly cannot justify their existence morally
I agree. My question was less about Israel having this right. I am wondering if “has the right to exist” is discussed about any other country or if it was created just for this situation.
Do Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Ireland or any other have “the right to exist”?
I’m certainly not a geopolitics professional but I can’t think of any other nation that people claim has a “right” to exist. The closest thing I can think of as far as Westerners trying to argue legitimacy would Taiwan, maybe? But I don’t think I’ve ever seen it defended as having some innate right to existence.
iirc some people used to say some kind of kurdistan has the right to exist but
doesn’t care about them anymore so i haven’t heard about rojava or anything for several yearsnone of the more established nation-states act like they’re under existential threat as the zionists do, so it doesn’t really come up. I think the primary purpose of the argument is to whitewash israel’s atrocities and it doesn’t have much to say about geopolitics.
Oh yeah, I think you’re right. I’m surprised we don’t hear East Turkestan has a right to exist, now that I think about it
The right of a state to exist is nothing but an abstraction of material reality, that the state exists as part of the social superstructure necessary to facilitate the processes of production. I think maintaining a clear difference between the state and the nation is pretty important here. Should the state of Israel exist? To someone who doesn’t support the subjugation of an indigenous group of people under an ethnostate, no. And that has nothing to do with antisemitism at all.
like inherently? no absolutely not. at best, groups of people have the right to declare themselves the constituents of a nation-state but then we have to talk about what rights are and whether it’s even a coherent idea outside of the completely arbitrary legal systems we invent.
In international law, yes. At least in theory. Powerful states can usually do what they want to less powerful states, but the international order supposedly guarantees a recognised state’s sovereignty, certain rights of trade and passage through waters, and a number of others.
This is a really interesting question. There’s international laws signed that say what its signatory states must do for their citizens and what they can do to each other, which I think at implies that states at least have some sort of rights, but this is undermined by what counts as an extant state. If a state does not have sufficient recognition by other states it can’t exercise its rights, which is why we see the unequal application of Israel and Palestines rights to exist and defend itself (if those rights meaningfully exist at all).
In other words, a state exists if it has recognition by the hegemony, and if it is it’s granted some minimum of rights. A state does not have a right to recognition and therefore doesn’t have a right to exist. This seems like a limitation of liberal geopolitics because even if a state has popular support by its own masses and has the monopoly over violence commonly required, there’s no guarantee it will be recognized as such.
What other rights do countries claim to have? And do they articulate with that language?
Taxation, passing laws, incarcerate people, control trade, etc?
All things countries do.
Is there a declararion on the rights of governments.
Generally they have what I understand as “negative rights.” It’s not that countries have explicit rights, but have implicit rights to not have things done to them through other countries signing treaties saying the won’t do things. So theoretically countries should have a right to not be war crimed by countries that have signed the Geneva Conventions, e.g. why many less radical pro-Palestine commentators are literally only asking for the fair application of international law to Israel
I have no idea about the legal aspects of this question, and also laws are almost always written by the bourgeoisie so I don’t value them, but for me I think the idea that countries have rights that supersede human rights is absurd to me. Like, the idea that living creatures deserve rights before abstract concepts like countries or corporations is so self evident to me.
So for me at least, I do not think Israel as a Zionist state has a right to exist. The Zionist project requires ethnic cleansing and genocide to exist and continue and that should be enough to argue against any rights that are to be ascribed to the entities that support that project
