Israel has no "right to exist" under International law

By invoking Israel’s “right to exist,” Zionists deliberately conflate criticism of Israeli crimes into claims of genocidal intent toward Jews—a distortion as cynical as it is false.

By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack.

In contemporary political debate, few questions are wielded like a cudgel and with more moral theatrics than “Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?” It is posed to those critical of Israel’s criminal actions against Palestinians as a litmus test of decency, a trapdoor under which critics of Israeli policy are meant to fall. Answer with anything less than an unqualified “yes,” and you are immediately accused of antisemitism, of hating Jews, and wanting to wipe Jews off the map. Yet this question, treated as sacred and untouchable, rests on a false premise that nation states have a “right to exist.”

The truth is that under international law, no state has a “right to exist.” Rights belong to human beings and peoples, not to abstract political constructs. And Israel, given its decades of criminal actions against Palestinians and neighbouring nations, its violations of the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and other international norms, certainly cannot claim an exceptional right denied to every other state in history.

International law defines statehood through factual criteria, not metaphysical entitlements. The 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, a cornerstone of modern international law, lists four qualifications for statehood: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. There is no clause granting any state an inherent, perpetual “right to exist.” States exist as a matter of fact, not as bearers of eternal rights. They emerge, transform, dissolve, and reconstitute themselves through revolutions, secessions, negotiated partitions, and collapses. International law accommodates these changes, but it does not forbid them.

The United Nations Charter reinforces this reality. Article 2(4) prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. This is a rule governing conduct among existing states, not a guarantee that any particular state will survive unchanged forever. Territorial integrity is protected against forcible alteration by other states, but states themselves can dissolve, merge, or split through internal processes. The Soviet Union did not violate some mystical “right to exist” when it collapsed into fifteen independent republics. Yugoslavia did not breach international law when it fragmented into multiple states. Czechoslovakia did not commit a crime when it peacefully divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. East Germany did not violate a metaphysical right when it disappeared into a unified Germany. South Vietnam, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro‑Hungarian Empire, a unified Korea, the British Empire—all of these entities once existed and no longer do. Their disappearance did not breach any legal right, because no such right exists.

If states possessed a “right to exist,” the world map would be frozen in time. The British Empire would still stretch across continents. The Ottoman Empire would still rule vast territories in the Middle East. The Austro‑Hungarian Empire would still dominate Central Europe. A unified Korea would still exist. South Vietnam would not have vanished. The Soviet Union would still be intact. History itself refutes the notion that states have an inherent right to exist. History shows that borders are not sacred. They are contingent expressions of power, identity, and consent.

The same logic applies to movements of self‑determination. Pakistan emerged from the partition of British India. Bangladesh was born from the struggle against Pakistani domination. Eritrea, East Timor, and South Sudan came into being through long, painful fights for independence. Dozens of former European colonies across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean asserted their right to self‑determination and became states. If colonial powers had possessed a “right to exist” in their imperial form, none of these nations would exist today. The very idea of decolonization would have been illegal. Yet international law recognizes the right of peoples to self‑determination, not the right of empires to perpetuate themselves.

The same principle holds in Canada. Sovereignty movements in Quebec and Alberta have been allowed to pursue independence referendums. If Canada had a “right to exist” as it is currently constituted, such referendums would be forbidden. Any attempt to alter the country’s borders or political structure would be a violation of Canada’s supposed right to exist. But that is not how international law works. Canadians have rights, but Canada as a political construct does not.

Israel is a particularly unstable example for any claim about a state’s “right to exist,” because its borders have never been legally defined, other than those agreed to with Jordan and Egypt. The 1948 armistice lines were ceasefire boundaries, not permanent borders. Since then, Israel has refused to specify its territorial limits in law. After 1967, it occupied the remainder of historic Palestine and parts of Syria, creating a situation in which the legal status of these territories remains contested and unresolved. Influential factions within Israel openly endorse the concept of a “Greater Israel” extending “from the Nile to the Euphrates”, and encompassing all of historic Palestine, as well as all or part of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Even Israel’s own political leadership cannot agree on where the state is supposed to begin or end. A state that refuses to define its borders, that expands through occupation and annexation, cannot coherently claim a “right to exist.”

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has repeatedly affirmed that Israel’s occupation, settlement enterprise, and annexation of Palestinian territory are illegal under international law. In its 2004 Advisory Opinion on the construction of the separation wall, the ICJ held that the wall and the associated regime “severely impedes the exercise by the Palestinian people of its right to self‑determination” and that Israel’s measures “are contrary to international law.” In its 2024 Advisory Opinion on Israel’s 57-year long occupation of Palestinian territories the Court went further, concluding that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful, that it must end its unlawful presence as rapidly as possible, evacuate all settlers, and that all states must refrain from recognizing or assisting Israel’s illegal actions.

These are not marginal opinions. They are authoritative legal determinations by the world’s highest judicial body. They confirm that Israel’s occupation is illegal, its settlements are illegal, its annexation is illegal, and its regime in the occupied territories violates fundamental norms of international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention’s prohibition on transferring the occupier’s civilian population into occupied territory. A state that maintains an illegal occupation, that builds illegal settlements, that annexes territory in defiance of the UN Charter’s ban on the acquisition of territory by force, cannot plausibly claim a “right to exist” in its current form.

Yet whenever critics raise Israel’s atrocities—its bombing of civilians, its destruction of homes, its starvation of populations, its attacks on neighbouring countries—Israel’s defenders pivot to the same question: “Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?” This is a diversionary tactic. The goal is to shift attention away from Israel’s criminal behaviour and toward an abstract, emotionally charged claim. The question is posed most aggressively when Israel’s actions are hardest to defend—after massacres in Gaza, after airstrikes in Lebanon and Syria, after assassinations in Iran, after attacks on Yemen, after documented war crimes and crimes against humanity.

By insisting on Israel’s supposed “right to exist,” Zionists and their supporters seek to conflate criticism of a state’s policies with a desire to exterminate its people. They want the public to infer, without it ever being spelled out, that anyone who denies Israel’s “right to exist” is calling for the annihilation of Jews around the world. In this framing, even those who explicitly call for equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians are smeared as extremists. Jewish critics of Zionism, Holocaust survivors who oppose Israeli apartheid, Palestinian human rights advocates, reputable legal scholars—all are painted as enemies of Israel’s existence.

This rhetorical strategy is designed to protect a rogue state, not a vulnerable population. It is meant to shield Israel from accountability for its actions—its decades‑long occupation, its apartheid regime, its ethnic cleansing, its repeated violations of the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force against other states, its war crimes and crimes against humanity. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, and other human rights organizations have documented Israel’s system of apartheid against Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel itself.

The ICJ, UN bodies, Holocaust and genocide scholars have warned that Israel’s actions in Gaza—indiscriminate bombing, deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, obstruction of humanitarian aid, and the use of starvation as a weapon—meet the threshold for genocide under the Genocide Convention. A state committing genocide cannot claim a “right to exist” in its current form. Apartheid South Africa had no right to exist as an apartheid regime. Nazi Germany had no right to exist as a genocidal state. Rhodesia had no right to exist as a white supremacist entity. Israel, whose crimes are more severe than apartheid South Africa’s, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu observed after visiting the occupied territories, cannot be granted a unique carve‑out.

The mistake at the heart of the “right to exist” discourse is to conflate the state with the people it claims to represent. Israelis as individuals have a right to exist. They have a right not to be oppressed, ethnically cleansed, or be subjected to genocide. Palestinians have the same right. They have a right to live in dignity, to be free from occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing. But Israel as a political construct has no right to exist as an ethnocratic, apartheid, occupying, genocidal state. When a state is used to oppress another people, it becomes illegitimate. It must be reconstituted in ways that restore legitimacy by guaranteeing equal rights to all.

The Palestinians have never had a state, neither historically nor in the modern era. During the past 2000 years they have lived under the rule of the Roman Empire, various Arab and Turkic empires, the Ottoman Empire, under the British mandate, and they now live under Israeli occupation. They were excluded from the decolonization process that followed the Second World War. Their armed resistance movements—PLO, Hamas, Islamic Jihad—are liberation movements recognized under international law as fighting against colonial domination and occupation, despite the fact that some Western nations have labelled them as “terrorists.” The Palestinians are struggling to achieve what others have already achieved—a political framework that protects them from being oppressed, ethnically cleansed, and genocided by a state that claims to represent all Jews globally.

That framework could take different forms. It might be a Palestinian state alongside a reconstituted Israeli state, both committed to equal rights. It might be a single democratic state in all of historic Palestine, with equal citizenship for Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others. It might be a binational confederation. Whatever the arrangement, it will not possess a metaphysical “right to exist.” It will have to earn its legitimacy by serving the dignity and security of all people living within it.

Nationalism, which elevates the state above the human being, is an ideology that is at the root of many wars and conflicts since the late 1800s. It is a modern ideology that has already produced catastrophic failures—bloody revolutions, world wars, genocides, ethnic cleansings, and the dissolution of empires. Thinkers across disciplines have diagnosed nationalism as a dangerous pathology. Albert Einstein called it “an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.” Erich Fromm described it as “our form of incest, our idolatry, our insanity,” with patriotism as its cult. Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt traced the origins of totalitarian movements to European imperialism and nationalism, which eroded the nation‑state system by pursuing unlimited expansion and racial hierarchies incompatible with bounded territorial politics. George Orwell, in “Notes on Nationalism,” distinguished it from patriotism, arguing that nationalism is not love of one’s country but the will to dominate others in its name.

Nationalism demands loyalty to an abstract “nation” while subordinating universal human rights to collective myths. It turns territory into “holy land,” political texts into sacred scrolls, and the state into an object of worship. It defines the stranger as an enemy rather than a neighbour. In a world of nuclear weapons, climate crisis, and global economic interdependence, this ideology is not only morally bankrupt, it is existentially dangerous.

The only legitimate foundation for political order is universal human rights. Any state—Israel, Canada, Australia, the United States, or any other—must guarantee equal rights to all people within its borders, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or origin. When a state violates those rights, it loses legitimacy. Israel’s defenders ask the wrong question. The correct question is: Do Israelis and Palestinians have a right to live in equality, dignity, and safety? International law answers unequivocally “yes.”

In the end, the question that must confront the world is not whether a particular state deserves metaphysical permanence, but whether human beings—Palestinian and Israeli alike—deserve to live free from domination, dispossession, and fear. International law, history, and basic moral reasoning all point to the same conclusion—political entities are transient, but human dignity is not. Israel’s invocation of a “right to exist” is a political shield meant to obscure the reality of a genocidal apartheid regime sustained through occupation, annexation, and overwhelming military force. No slogan can erase the legal record or the human suffering inflicted by Palestinians by Israel since its creation and by Zionist terrorists before it came into existence. The future will not be secured by defending the permanence of any state, but by dismantling systems of supremacy and building a political order rooted in equality, accountability, and shared humanity. Only when the rights of people—not the privileges of states—become the foundation of our politics will a just and lasting peace be possible in historic Palestine, the wider Middle-East, and beyond.

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