In today’s Washington, which seethes with partisan acrimony, Democrats and Republicans at least agree on this: Israel has a right to exist. This right has been affirmed by the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, and his Democratic antagonist, the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries; by the Biden administration’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and his Republican successor, Marco Rubio; by Donald Trump’s new secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, and by the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer. In 2023, the House affirmed Israel’s right to exist by a vote of 412-1.
This is not the way Washington politicians generally talk about other countries. They usually start with the rights of individuals, and then ask how well a given state represents the people under its control. If America’s leaders prioritized the lives of all those who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, it would become clear that asking if Israel has a right to exist is the wrong question. The better question is: Does Israel, as a Jewish state, adequately protect the rights of all the individuals under its dominion?
The answer is no.
Consider this scenario: If Scotland legally seceded, or Britons abolished the monarchy, the United Kingdom would no longer be united nor a kingdom. Britain as we know it would cease to exist. A different state would replace it. Mr. Rubio, Mr. Schumer and their colleagues would accept this transformation as legitimate because they believe that states should be based on the consent of the governed.
America’s leaders make this point most emphatically when discussing America’s foes. They often call for replacing oppressive regimes with states that better meet liberal democratic norms. In 2017, John Bolton, who later became a national security adviser in the first Trump administration, argued that “the declared policy of the United States should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran.” In 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the People’s Republic of China a “Marxist-Leninist regime” with a “bankrupt totalitarian ideology.”These U.S. officials weren’t urging these countries just to replace one particular leader, but to change their political system — thus, in essence, reconstituting the state. In the case of the People’s Republic of China, which signifies Communist Party dominance, or Islamic Republic of Iran, which denotes clerical rule, this would most likely require changing the country’s official name.
In 2020, Secretary Pompeo declared in a speech that America’s founders believed that “government exists not to diminish or cancel the individual’s rights at the whims of those in power, but to secure them.” Do states that deny individual rights have a “right to exist” in their current form? The implication of Mr. Pompeo’s words is that they do not.
What if we talked about Israel that way? Roughly half the people under Israeli control are Palestinian. Most of those — the residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — cannot become citizens of the state that wields life-or-death power over them. Israel wielded this power in Gaza even before Hamas invaded on Oct. 7, 2023, since it controlled the Strip’s airspace, coastline, population registry and most of its land crossings, thus turning Gaza into what Human Rights Watch called “an open-air prison.”
Even the minority of Palestinians under Israeli control who hold Israeli citizenship — sometimes called “Israeli Arabs” — lack legal equality. The Jewish National Fund, which has stated that its obligations are “to the Jewish people” and that it does not work “for the benefit of all citizens of the state,” holds almost half the seats on the governmental body that allocates most of Israel’s land.
Last month, Mr. Blinken promised that the United States would help Syrians build an “inclusive, nonsectarian” state. The Israel that exists today manifestly fails that test.
Still, for most of the leaders of the organized American Jewish community, a nonsectarian and inclusive country on this land is unthinkable. Jews are rightly outraged when Iranian leaders call for wiping Israel off the map. But there is a crucial difference between a state ceasing to exist because it is invaded by its neighbors and a state ceasing to exist because it adopts a more representative form of government.
American Jewish leaders don’t just insist on Israel’s right to exist. They insist on its right to exist as a Jewish state. They cling to the idea that it can be both Jewish and democratic despite the basic contradiction between legal supremacy for one ethno-religious group and the democratic principle of equality under the law.
The belief that a Jewish state has unconditional value — irrespective of its impact on the people who live within it — isn’t contrary just to the way America’s leaders talk about other countries. It’s also contrary to Jewish tradition. Jewish tradition does not view states as possessing rights, but views them with deep suspicion. In the Bible, the Israelite elders ask the Prophet Samuel to appoint a king to rule over them. God tells Samuel to grant the elders’ wish but also warn that their ruler will commit terrible abuses. “The day will come,” Samuel tells them, “when you cry out because of the king whom you yourselves have chosen.”
The implication is clear: Kingdoms — or, in modern parlance, states — are not sacrosanct. They are mere instruments, which can either protect life or destroy it. “I emphatically deny that a state might have any intrinsic value at all,” wrote the Orthodox Israeli social critic Yeshayahu Leibowitz in 1975. Mr. Leibowitz was not an anarchist. But, though he considered himself a Zionist, he insisted that states — including the Jewish one — be judged on their treatment of the human beings under their control. States don’t have a right to exist. People do.
Some of the Bible’s greatest heroes — Moses and Mordechai among others — risk their lives by refusing to treat despotic rulers as divine. In refusing to worship state power, they reject idolatry, a prohibition so central to Judaism that, in the Talmud, Rabbi Yochanan called it the very definition of being a Jew.
Today, however, this form of idolatry — worship of the state — seems to suffuse mainstream American Jewish life. It is dangerous to venerate any political entity. But it’s especially dangerous to venerate one that classifies people as legal superiors or inferiors based on their tribe. When America’s most influential Jewish groups, like American leaders, insist again and again that Israel has a right to exist, they are effectively saying there is nothing Israel can do — no amount of harm it can inflict upon the people within its domain — that would require rethinking the character of the state.
They have done so even as Israel’s human-rights abuses have grown ever more blatant. For almost 16 years, since Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power in 2009, Israel has been ruled by leaders who boast about preventing Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from establishing their own country, thus consigning them to live as permanent noncitizens, without basic rights, under Israeli rule. In 2021, Israel’s own leading human rights organization, B’Tselem, charged Israel with practicing apartheid. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported more attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 2024 than in any year since it began keeping track almost 20 years ago.
Yet American Jewish leaders — and American politicians — continue to insist it is illegitimate, even antisemitic, to question the validity of a Jewish state. We have made Israel our altar. Mr. Leibowitz’s fear has come true: “When nation, country and state are presented as absolute values, anything goes.”
American Jewish leaders often say a Jewish state is essential to protecting Jewish lives. Jews cannot be safe unless Jews rule. I understand why many American Jews, who as a general rule believe that states should not discriminate based on religion, ethnicity or race, make an exception for Israel. It’s a response to our traumatic history as a people. But global antisemitism notwithstanding, diaspora Jews — who stake our safety on the principle of legal equality — are far safer than Jews in Israel.
This is not a coincidence. Countries in which everyone has a voice in government tend to be safer for everyone. A 2010 study of 146 instances of ethnic conflict around the world since World War II found that ethnic groups that were excluded from state power were three times more likely to take up arms as those that enjoyed representation in government.
You can see this dynamic even in Israel itself. Every day, Israeli Jews place themselves in Palestinian hands when they’re at their most vulnerable: on the operating table. Palestinian citizens of Israel make up about 20 percent of its doctors, 30 percent of its nurses and 60 percent of its pharmacists.
Why do Israeli Jews find Palestinian citizens so much less threatening than Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza? In large measure, because Palestinian citizens can vote in Israeli elections. So, although they face severe discrimination, they at least have some peaceful and lawful methods for making their voices heard. Compare that with Palestinians in Gaza, or the West Bank, who have no legal way to influence the state that bombs and imprisons them.
When you deny people basic rights, you subject them to tremendous violence. And, sooner or later, that violence endangers everyone. In 1956, a 3-year-old named Ziyad al-Nakhalah saw Israeli soldiers murder his father in the Gazan city of Khan Younis. Almost 70 years later, he heads Hamas’s smaller but equally militant rival, Islamic Jihad.
On Oct. 7, Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters killed about 1,200 people in Israel and abducted about 240 others. Israel has responded to that massacre with an assault on Gaza that the British medical journal The Lancet estimates has killed more than 60,000 people, and destroyed most of the Strip’s hospitals, schools and agriculture. Gaza’s destruction serves as a horrifying illustration of Israel’s failure to protect the lives and dignity of all the people who fall under its authority.
The failure to protect the lives of Palestinians in Gaza ultimately endangers Jews. In this war, Israel has already killed more than one hundred times as many Palestinians in Gaza as it did in the massacre that took the life of Mr. al-Nakhalah’s father. How many 3-year-olds will still be seeking revenge seven decades from now?
As Ami Ayalon, the former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, warned even before the current war in Gaza, “If we continue to dish out humiliation and despair, the popularity of Hamas will grow. And if we manage to push Hamas from power, we’ll get Al Qaeda. And after Al Qaeda, ISIS, and after ISIS, God only knows.”
Yet in the name of Jewish safety, American Jewish organizations appear to countenance virtually anything Israel does to Palestinians, even a war that both Amnesty International and the eminent Israeli-born Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov now consider genocide. What Jewish leaders and American politicians can’t countenance is equality between Palestinians and Jews — because that would violate Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
The post States Don’t Have a Right to Exist. People Do. appeared first on New York Times.
