Some people around the world, including Jews traditionally supportive of Israel, are asking or being asked whether Israel any longer has a right to exist. The prevalence of these private and public conversations is a result of the Gaza war and the genocidal levels of violence and destruction associated with it; Israel’s attack on Iran and its expansion into Syria; Israel’s refusal to advance any plan for peace with its neighbors; and its oppression of West Bank Palestinians with a Jim Crow-style system of apartheid.
My answer to this question is, yes, the state of Israel has a right to exist—but Israel’s regime of Jewish-Zionist privilege may not.
Most people do not think like political scientists, which means they mix categories of political life without realizing it. A state is a territorially defined community recognized as such by its membership in the United Nations. A regime is a legal order within a state that specifies what is permitted and what is not permitted by its institutions and how people are chosen to fill the positions and carry out the functions it authorizes. A government is the specific group of individuals who, at any one time, fill those positions and make policy decisions.
France is a state. The Fifth Republic is the regime that, since 1958, has constituted the legal order within the French state. Emmanuel Macron is the president of the French government—a collection of officials and decision-makers authorized to make policy by the procedures and laws that comprise the regime of the Fifth Republic.
Only with this triple distinction—state, regime, government—can we understand the fate of countries whose behavior transformed them into international pariahs. And only then can we see clearly the real question about Israel now pressing upon people’s minds.
When Jews include two things in a comparison that might suggest an equivalence between them that they do not intend to convey, they say lehavdil (“let it be understood there is a difference”). So I say lehavdil as I draw attention, in this context, to the fate of the Axis powers and of Germany in particular—a fate that demonstrates the difference between the international community’s attitude toward the right of a state to exist and the right of a particular regime within it. Germany, Italy, and Japan were each occupied by the Allies. Each was subsequently allowed to join the United Nations as legitimate states—but only once the Nazi, Fascist, and imperial regimes that had plunged those states into war were replaced. U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s 1944 proposal illustrates the extreme reluctance to declare a state as rightless and to end its existence as such.
The Morgenthau Plan imagined a postwar Europe that would end Germany’s existence as an industrial state. Large, traditionally German territories would be given to Denmark, France, and Poland. The Ruhr industrial zone and surrounding areas would be internationalized. All armament factories would be destroyed, along with the entire military. For the foreseeable future, no educational institutions beyond grammar school would be allowed to operate. The countries devastated by the war would receive German forced labor to help them rebuild. The territory of Germany not allocated to other countries would be partitioned into three separate and mainly agricultural states. Whatever economic or social problems confronted Germans as a result of these measures would be the sole responsibility of the German people to resolve “with such facilities as may be available under the circumstances.”
A striking feature of the Morgenthau Plan was that even this most extreme proposal drew back from an explicit demand for state extinction. Germany had been responsible for launching both world wars and for unleashing the most devastating genocide in human history, but ending the existence of a major and capable state was still deemed a bridge too far. Instead of punishing the state of Germany, the Nazi regime that had ruled the German state was held responsible. To be sure, the West needed a strong German state to help counter Soviet threats to Central and Western Europe, but the principle involved was the distinction between standards applied to states and those applied to regimes. Instead of the German state, it was the Nazi regime that was removed from Europe.
Thus, regimes can become evil without contaminating the states within which they operate. And regimes can be replaced without ending the existence of the states ruled by those regimes. After six years of denazification, the Federal Republic, based in Bonn, was allowed to function on its own. In 1990, the regime in East Germany disappeared. The territories and populations over which it had exercised authority became part of the Federal Republic. The governments it produces have enjoyed the respect of the world because the regime that produces them is accepted as legitimate. Once again, a single, large, prosperous, and militarily capable German state exists in the center of Europe—a state whose right to exist is unchallenged. Governments produced by the Bonn regime now rule all of Germany.
True, states can disappear. The Soviet state vanished in 1991. But compared with the rate of regime replacement, such disappearances are rare. In 1989, regimes across Eastern Europe changed even as the states they ruled remained in place. The regime of the People’s Republic largely displaced the Nationalist regime that had ruled China prior to World War II. Fascist Italy was replaced by the Italian Republic. Japan is now a constitutional monarchy, not an empire. More recently, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini replaced the Pahlavi regime in Iran with the Islamic Republic, and though there are many calls for regime change in Iran, no one has challenged the right of the Iranian state to exist. In the 1990s, the world isolated South Africa and in alliance with the African National Congress rid that state of its apartheid regime, again without ending or even raising the question of whether the state of South Africa had a right to exist.
Israel is a state created by the Zionist movement, authorized by the U.N. General Assembly in 1947, and recognized by countries around the world in 1948. The economic, political, and military institutions of Zionism then became the state’s first, and so far only, regime.
It is a legal and ideological order based on fronting as a liberal democracy while dedicated, above all, to implementing and expanding the presence and success of its Jewish inhabitants. From 1948 to 1966, Arab Israeli citizens were ruled by a military government that helped engineer the expropriation of the vast majority of their lands. After the military government’s abolition in 1966, separate departments for “Arab affairs” in different ministries, coordinated by the security services, continued the regime’s enforcement of policies toward Arabs based on discrimination, subordination, and fragmentation. Since 1967, the now more than 5 million Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been living under one or another version of military occupation and losing their water and land resources to expropriation by Israel and by Israeli settlers. Unrepresented in the governments that control their movement and their access to the outside world, denied any avenue of political mobilization, and systematically immiserated, they are daily exposed to violence from Israeli soldiers and civilians that is at best disruptive and humiliating and at worst genocidal.
Even the 2 million Arabs who are citizens of Israel face scores of laws and numerous regulations that discriminate, either explicitly or implicitly, against non-Jewish Israelis and in particular against Arabs. In 2018, the Israeli parliament promulgated the closest thing Israel has to a constitutional statement of the nature of its regime: a “Basic Law” titled “Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People.” This legislation proclaimed that Jews and only Jews have rights to self-determination in the country, declared Jewish settlement as a “national value,” and stripped Arabic of its status as an official language. The purposes of its framers were made clear by their rejection of amendments referring to the equality of all citizens.
Although the Israeli regime managed to create effective institutions, a dynamic economy, and a powerful military, it failed to produce governments capable of making peace with the state’s neighbors based on even minimally satisfying solutions to the Palestinian catastrophe produced in the process of the state’s creation and expansion.
And here is where the rubber hits the road. The government of Israel refuses to end a war variously appearing as a device for protecting the career of its leader, as a cathartic but unsatisfying spasm of revenge, or as an increasingly explicit campaign of ethnic cleansing. News of starving children shot by Israeli soldiers while trying desperately to find food inevitably raise questions about whether individuals, or the world community, any longer have duties to treat as legitimate the Israeli regime that produced the government under whose auspices human society in Gaza is being obliterated.
Whether what Israel is doing is genocide or not is fundamentally a semantic problem. Whether the state of Israel has a right to exist is a category error. The real question, and one that deserves the attention and debate of both Jews and non-Jews, is whether the regime in Israel that has ruled the state since its inception has lost its right to exist. Has it, in other words, lost its ability to demand that others respect and defer to the decisions its governments make?
For many years, liberal Zionists held out hope that ruthless discrimination against Israeli Arab citizens could be made a thing of the past and that a gentle form of Zionism, recognizing minority rights but preserving the Jewish political and cultural coloration of the country, could be achieved. This vision was based, above all, on the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza that would at once provide a vehicle for Palestinian nationalism what many Israelis often refer to as the demographic “nightmare” of an Arab majority in the putatively Jewish state. But Israel’s lurch to the ultranationalist and fundamentalist right, the massive settlement of Jews in the West Bank, and the virtual defeat of the Israeli peace movement have eliminated the negotiated “two-state solution” as anything but a mirage whose disingenuous invocation serves the purposes of both its official supporters and its opponents.
For three-quarters of a century, the Israeli regime has shown itself incapable of integrating or reaching a civilized peace with Palestinians, who, even excluding refugees living outside the country, are now equal in number to Jews living in the area ruled by that regime. It is therefore proper to ask whether the regime in Israel any longer deserves to exist. What is crucial to note is that neither asking that question nor coming to a negative conclusion means that one judges Jewish nationalism to be illegitimate or inherently exclusionary. As is true of all such movements, Jewish nationalism, and even Zionism itself as one expression of Jewish nationalism, is a diverse tapestry.
By accepting that a state exercising authority over all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River does and will have a right to exist, we can bring into focus the real challenges that face those aspiring for a livable future there. The profound changes necessary for such a regime to emerge can come from defeat in war, social revolution, internal revolt, or, especially when supported by a world community ready to cut its ties with the rogue regime, by the slow but transformative mobilization of masses of people within it.
This latter path to a better future is long, but it is possible and, in this case, more plausible than the others. It will be traveled only when the various groups contending over Israel feel obliged to find allies where they previously saw only enemies.
The post The Question of Israel’s Right to Exist is a Red Herring appeared first on Foreign Policy.
