Why Does Israel Still Have to Justify Its Existence?

VENI, VIDI… DID I UNDERSTAND?

There is a question about Israel that seems to be asked more and more often, especially by younger people: Why should there be a Jewish state at all?

People are free to ask it. What I find increasingly difficult to understand is why Israel seems to be required, again and again, to answer it.

Because asking what Israel does is one thing. Asking whether Israel should exist is something else entirely.

We can debate any Israeli policy. We can judge its governments. We can argue about 1948, 1967, the settlements, Gaza, borders, the treatment of Palestinians, the proportionality of military operations, even the constitutional character of the state. We can investigate war crimes and, if they are proven, demand accountability.

All of that is legitimate.

But there is an enormous leap between saying that a state has acted wrongly and asking whether that state should disappear. And that leap deserves an explanation.

We do not normally ask whether Russia should cease to exist because of crimes committed by its government. We do not periodically reopen the question of Turkey’s right to exist because of its history with Armenians or Kurds. Pakistan’s conduct does not automatically turn Pakistan’s continued existence into an open question. We can challenge governments, borders, wars and policies without turning every dispute into a referendum on the political existence of the people involved.

Why does this happen so often with Israel?

Perhaps to answer that we need to go back much further than Gaza, 1967, or even 1948. Because the story did not begin there.

The Jews did not simply arrive in the Middle East one day and arbitrarily choose a piece of land on which to build a country. Israel, Judah, Jerusalem, Samaria, Judea: these are not names invented by the Zionist movement. They belong to a history stretching back almost three thousand years. There were kingdoms, destructions, exiles, returns, foreign rulers and, eventually, a diaspora that scattered much of that people around the world. But the religious, cultural and historical connection to that land never disappeared.

That does not mean other populations were not living there throughout those centuries. They were. Their descendants also have a history, an identity and rights that do not disappear simply because we recognize Jewish history.

That is precisely why the conflict is so difficult. We do not have one people with a history confronting another without one. We have two peoples who regard the same land as a fundamental part of their identity.

And yet something often disappears when Israel’s birth is viewed exclusively through concepts such as colonialism or settler colonialism.

For almost two thousand years, the overwhelming majority of Jews lived under the rule of others. There were periods when they lived extraordinarily well, although those periods were the exception. In many others they were discriminated against, expelled, dispossessed, persecuted or killed.

But the constant was something else: in the end, their security depended on somebody else. A king, an emperor, a religious majority, a government, or a society willing to tolerate them.

As long as that tolerance lasted, they could live. When it disappeared, they could flee – if they could find someone willing to take them in. And sometimes they could not even do that.

The Holocaust took that vulnerability to an almost unimaginable extreme. But it would be a mistake to say that the Holocaust created Zionism. Modern Zionism had emerged decades earlier, precisely because some European Jews had reached an uncomfortable conclusion: emancipation, integration and culture did not necessarily make antisemitism disappear.

Then came Auschwitz.

Six million dead do not automatically grant territorial rights over another population. That argument would be far too simple, and unfair to the Palestinians.

But Auschwitz demonstrated something different: what can happen when a persecuted people has no place whose fundamental obligation is to receive them, and no force of its own whose mission is to defend them.

That distinction is essential to understanding Israel.

Zionism was not merely a project to have a flag. It was also an answer to a much more brutal question: What happens when nobody wants to take you in?

And that question did not disappear in 1945.

When Israel was born in 1948, it was not only European Jews who arrived. In the following years, huge numbers of Jews also came from Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Syria and other countries across the Arab and Muslim world. Some were expelled, others fled persecution or an atmosphere that had become unbearable, and still others emigrated for different reasons. Their stories were not identical, and it would be wrong to squeeze them all into a single explanation.

But most of them ended up in the same place: Israel.

That makes the now-familiar image of white Europeans landing in the Middle East to colonize an indigenous population considerably more complicated. A fundamental part of Israeli society descends from people whose ancestors had lived for centuries in the Middle East and North Africa.

None of this erases the Palestinian tragedy.

In 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes. They lost villages, property and a land they too regarded as their own. For them, it was the Nakba, the catastrophe.

Denying that does not help Israel. It weakens Israel’s case.

Defending Israel’s existence does not require pretending that Israel is innocent of everything. It requires something much harder: accepting that two painful histories can be true at the same time.

And that brings us to the present.

For decades, particularly in the West, Israel was seen as David facing Goliath: a small country surrounded by much larger enemies, fighting to survive.

For a twenty-year-old today, that picture can be almost impossible to understand.

The Israel they know has F-35s, missiles, intelligence capabilities, technology, nuclear weapons it has never officially acknowledged, and the backing of the United States. They see checkpoints, settlements, soldiers and, since October 2023, an endless stream of images from Gaza: destroyed buildings, displaced families, dead children, hunger and suffering.

On their phone, Israel no longer looks like David. It looks like Goliath.

It would be absurd to deny the moral impact of those images. It would be equally absurd to pretend that all of it is propaganda.

But an image can show us one person’s suffering with extraordinary clarity while explaining very little about the hundred years of history that led to that moment. Social media is extraordinarily good at showing us victims. It is much less good at explaining history.

And into that environment came a vocabulary that had been developing for decades: colonialism, apartheid, oppressor, oppressed, indigenous, supremacy, decolonization.

It did not begin with TikTok.

After 1967, parts of the New Left began to interpret the Palestinian conflict through the framework of the great anti-colonial struggles. The Soviet Union, for its part, helped associate Zionism with imperialism and racism. In 1975, a majority in the United Nations General Assembly went so far as to declare Zionism a form of racism. That resolution was revoked in 1991, but the concepts did not disappear. Later came Durban, BDS, settler-colonial studies, intersectionality and, eventually, the incorporation of Palestine into America’s own racial vocabulary.

None of that proves those categories are false. The origin of an idea does not determine whether it is true. But these are not neutral words that simply fell from the sky either. They have a history.

And when Israel is placed exclusively inside a colonizer-versus-colonized framework, something important happens: an enormous part of the history disappears.

The Jew stops being a member of an ancient people with a historical connection to that land and becomes simply a settler. Zionism stops being, among other things, a movement for national self-determination and becomes colonialism, full stop.

At that point, the conclusion is practically built into the premise.

If Israel is a colony, it must be decolonized. If Zionism is racism, it must be eliminated. And if a Jewish state is by definition a form of ethnic supremacy, then the very existence of that state becomes the problem.

At that point the discussion has changed completely. We are no longer asking what Israel does. We are asking whether Israel should exist.

And that is exactly where I think we should stop and look more carefully.

If the Palestinians are a people, do they have a right to self-determination? I believe they do.

But then comes a second question: Are the Jews a people?

If the answer is also yes, it becomes difficult to explain why the principle of self-determination should work for one and disappear for the other.

There is a fairly simple test.

What exactly would Israel have to do to acquire this right to exist that it apparently still has to prove? Change its government? Withdraw from the West Bank? End the settlements? Accept a Palestinian state?

We may support some, or even all, of those things. But none of them answers the fundamental question.

Because anyone who considers Jewish self-determination itself illegitimate will continue to consider Israel illegitimate even if Netanyahu, the settlements and the occupation all disappear tomorrow.

Then we are no longer arguing about 1967.

We are arguing about 1948.

And if we keep going backwards, we end up arguing about Zionism itself, understood in its most basic sense: the right of the Jewish people to political self-determination. Taken to its logical conclusion, what is being called into question is the very existence of Israel as a Jewish state.

That seems to be exactly what is happening in part of the contemporary debate.

So the question changes again.

Why, among so many peoples claiming some form of self-determination, do we continue to treat Jewish self-determination as something requiring a special justification?

Ukrainians fight to preserve Ukraine. Palestinians demand Palestine. Kurds have sought some form of self-determination for generations. Armenians, Turks, Greeks, Arabs, Persians and dozens of other peoples regard it as perfectly natural that their collective identity should have political expression.

We can imagine a post-national future in which none of this is necessary. Perhaps one day it will come. But we do not live there yet.

We live in a deeply national world, where borders matter, armies matter, identities matter and, unfortunately, it also matters who has the ability to defend themselves when coexistence breaks down.

And the Middle East is hardly an exception.

Israel has made peace with former enemies. It has relations with Arab countries that were adversaries for decades. Millions of Arab citizens live inside Israel itself. None of that fits comfortably into a simplistic picture of an eternal war between Jews and Muslims.

But neither can we ignore the fact that movements, ideologies and states still exist for which the problem is not simply Israel’s borders.

The problem is Israel.

Hamas does not simply propose changing the 1967 borders. The Islamic Republic of Iran does not merely have a territorial dispute with Jerusalem. There are also currents of radical jihadism that have turned Jews and Israel into enemies who are not simply to be fought, but exterminated.

And it would hardly be the first time in modern history that Jews have faced an ideology that did not seek to negotiate with them, integrate them or change their behavior, but to eliminate them.

Nazism took that logic to its most extreme and criminal expression.

These are different historical phenomena and they should not be confused. Hamas, radical jihadism, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Nazism belong to different contexts, ideologies and historical periods.

But they share something Jews cannot simply ignore: in each of them, for different reasons and to different degrees, there appears the idea that coexistence with the Jew – or with the Jewish state – can be replaced by a logic of “them or us.”

That does not mean that “Muslims” want to destroy Israel. Such a generalization would be both false and irresponsible.

But it does mean that, for Israelis, the question of security is not some historical paranoia invented to justify whatever Israel chooses to do. It is a real question.

And for Jews it carries a historical resonance that cannot simply be wished away.

For centuries, somebody else decided when they could stay. And when they had to leave.

The State of Israel changed something elementary in that equation.

For the first time in centuries, Jews no longer depended exclusively on somebody else being willing to take them in. And they no longer depended exclusively on somebody else being willing to defend them.

That does not give Israel the right to do whatever it wants. But it explains why asking Jews to surrender that capacity again is not an innocent theoretical exercise.

Israel must answer for its actions, like any other state. Its governments can be judged. Its policies can be condemned. Its leaders can be held accountable. Its soldiers can commit crimes. Its decisions can be wrong.

None of that should be beyond discussion.

What does require an explanation is why Israel’s mistakes – even its crimes, if they are proven – can be used to question not only its government but the political existence of the people who created it.

Because then we are applying a different question.

Israel does not have to prove its innocence over and over again in order to continue existing. And perhaps it should not have to appear periodically before a court of world opinion to prove its right to exist all over again.

Before asking Jews once more to explain why they need a state of their own, perhaps we should reverse the question.

Why, among so many peoples claiming self-determination, do we still regard theirs as requiring a special justification?

That right is not greater than the Palestinian right. But neither is it lesser.

Recognizing one should not require denying the other.

Perhaps the answer will eventually be two states. Perhaps future generations will find another political structure capable of genuinely guaranteeing security, freedom and dignity to both peoples.

I do not know.

What I do find difficult to accept is a solution that begins by asking precisely the people who learned in the most brutal possible way what it means to depend on others for survival to be the first to surrender the instrument they built so they would not have to depend on them again.

We can debate what kind of Israel should exist. We should.

We can debate what kind of Palestine should exist beside it. We should do that too.

But perhaps there is one question we should stop asking as though it were still awaiting a verdict:

Whether Israel has the right to exist.