There is a question often asked in political debates about Israel and Palestine: “Does Israel have a right to exist?”
At first, it sounds like a profound moral challenge. But the more one thinks about it, the more strange the question becomes. What does it mean for a state to have a “right to exist”? Israel already exists. It has a government, borders, an army, institutions, a population, international recognition, and membership in the international system. It is not an abstract theory waiting to be believed into reality. It is a state, created through history, diplomacy, war, and political power.
The question, then, is not really whether Israel exists. It plainly does. Nor should the question be whether the people living in Israel today have basic rights. They do. No serious moral argument should deny the rights of civilians — Jewish, Arab, Muslim, Christian, secular, immigrant, native-born — to live safely, freely, and with dignity.
The deeper question is different:
Did the Jewish people, after the Second World War, have a moral right to create a sovereign ethnic-national state in Palestine, with control over immigration and demographic destiny, in a land where another people already lived and formed the majority?
That is the real question. And it is much harder to answer with slogans.
Jewish suffering was real — but suffering alone cannot create a right to another people’s land
The suffering of Jews in Europe was immense. Centuries of exclusion, pogroms, discrimination, exile, and finally the Holocaust created one of the clearest moral catastrophes in modern history. The desire for safety, sovereignty, and refuge was not irrational. After the Holocaust, many Jews believed that life as a minority under the protection of other states had failed. They believed that without a state of their own, Jews would always depend on the mercy of others.
That fear was not invented. It had history behind it.
But the problem is this: suffering does not automatically create a right to statehood at another population’s expense.
If historical oppression alone entitled a people to their own sovereign state, then the principle could not apply only to Jews. It would also apply to the Kurds, the Tamils, the Rohingya, the Tibetans, the Sahrawis, the Assyrians, and many other peoples who have suffered persecution, statelessness, exclusion, or violence. Many minorities around the world have been oppressed. Many have strong historical identities. Many have cultural, linguistic, religious, and territorial claims.
Yet the modern international system does not usually say that every oppressed minority has a right to break away and form a state. In fact, the opposite is usually true. The world generally protects existing borders and territorial integrity. It may support minority rights, autonomy, citizenship, language protections, or power-sharing, but it rarely grants full sovereign independence simply because a people has suffered.
So if suffering does not give the Kurds an automatic right to Kurdistan, or Tamils an automatic right to Tamil Eelam, or Rohingya an automatic right to their own state, why would it give Jews a unique right to create a state in Palestine?
This is the inconsistency at the heart of the issue.
The Palestinian objection was not irrational
The Palestinian Arab rejection of partition is often presented as mere refusal, hatred, or rejectionism. But one must understand the logic from their point of view.
Palestinian Arabs were the majority population in Palestine. They had towns, villages, farms, families, holy places, trade routes, memories, and social life rooted in the land. They had not caused the Holocaust. They had not committed Europe’s crimes against the Jews. Yet they were asked to accept the division of their homeland so that a Jewish state could be created, partly as a solution to Jewish suffering in Europe.
From their perspective, this was not justice. It was displacement of responsibility.
Europe had persecuted the Jews, but Palestine was being asked to pay the price. The moral debt of Europe was being settled with Arab land and Arab political rights.
That does not mean Jewish suffering was false. It means Palestinian dispossession was also real.
Two truths can exist at the same time: Jews desperately needed safety, and Palestinians were not morally obligated to surrender their homeland to provide it.
Why not one equal civic state?
The modern ideal of the state is supposed to be civic equality: one country, equal citizenship, equal rights, and no ethnic or religious group possessing superior ownership over the state. Of course, many modern states fail this ideal. Many discriminate against minorities. Many define national identity in ethnic, religious, or linguistic terms. But the ideal itself remains powerful.
So why create a Jewish state at all? Why not create one democratic Palestine where Jews and Arabs had equal rights?
The answer is that Zionism did not merely seek equality for Jews inside an Arab-majority Palestine. It sought Jewish sovereignty. It sought control over immigration, security, land policy, and national destiny. A single democratic state would almost certainly have had an Arab majority, and that Arab majority would likely have restricted Jewish immigration. From the Zionist perspective, that defeated the purpose of the project.
This is why partition became attractive to many international diplomats. It appeared to offer a compromise: one Arab state and one Jewish state. But it was not a neutral compromise. The Jewish state was created in a land where Jews were still a minority overall, while Arabs were asked to accept the loss of sovereignty over large parts of their country.
So the issue was not simply two equal national groups peacefully dividing a neutral space. It was a settler-national movement, supported by international power and post-Holocaust sympathy, gaining sovereignty in a land where another people already lived as the majority.
That is why the wound has never healed.
The problem with “a right to exist”
The phrase “right to exist” hides this history. It turns a concrete historical and moral dispute into an abstract loyalty test. If someone questions the moral legitimacy of Israel’s founding, they are often accused of denying Israel’s “right to exist.” But that phrase can blur several different issues.
A state can exist without its founding being morally pure. The United States exists, but its creation involved settler colonialism, slavery, ethnic cleansing, and the destruction of Indigenous societies. Pakistan exists, but partition produced horrific violence and displacement. Turkey exists, but its modern formation involved ethnic violence, forced population transfers, and the Armenian genocide. Many states exist today because history was violent, not because their creation was morally clean.
To say this is not to demand that these countries vanish or that their populations be punished. It is to say that statehood is often produced by power before it is justified by morality.
Israel is no different. It exists. Its people have rights. But its existence as a fact does not automatically prove that its creation, in the form it took, was morally justified.
The better question is not: “Does Israel have a right to exist?”
The better question is: “Was it morally legitimate to create a Jewish ethnic-national state in Palestine against the will of the Arab majority?”
And to that question, the answer is far less comfortable.
Israel was achieved, not simply deserved
The uncomfortable truth is that Israel came into being not because the Jewish people possessed a unique abstract right that no other oppressed people had. It came into being because Zionism succeeded.
It succeeded diplomatically, through the Balfour Declaration, British imperial policy, lobbying, and international support. It succeeded institutionally, through the creation of Jewish political, military, agricultural, and economic structures in Palestine before statehood. It succeeded morally in the eyes of many after the Holocaust, when international sympathy for Jewish survival was at its highest. And it succeeded militarily in 1948, when the proposed state became a reality through war.
This does not mean Jewish people had no rights. Jews had every right to safety, dignity, refuge, cultural life, religious freedom, and protection from persecution. They had a right not to be massacred. They had a right not to be excluded from the world. They had a right to live as equal human beings.
But that is not the same as saying they had an automatic moral right to establish a sovereign Jewish-majority state in Palestine, with control over immigration and national identity, despite the existence of another people already living there.
That distinction matters.
Why this matters today
Some will argue that this debate is useless because Israel already exists. But the way we frame the past shapes how we understand the present.
If Israel is treated as the natural and morally unquestionable expression of Jewish rights, then Palestinian resistance appears as irrational aggression against a legitimate order. But if Israel is understood as a state created through a political victory that solved one people’s catastrophe by producing another people’s catastrophe, then Palestinian grievance becomes much easier to understand.
That does not justify violence against civilians. It does not mean Israeli Jews today should be expelled, killed, or stripped of rights. Most Israeli Jews alive today were born there. They know no other home. They too have legitimate fears, memories, and attachments.
But it does mean that Palestinians are not wrong to question the justice of the original arrangement. They are not wrong to say: Why were we made to pay for Europe’s crimes? Why was our majority status ignored? Why was another people’s national project given priority over our right to self-determination?
Those questions cannot be answered honestly by saying, “Israel has a right to exist.” That phrase does not address the wound. It avoids it.
A more honest conclusion
The Jewish people suffered terribly, and their desire for safety after the Holocaust was deeply understandable. But historical suffering does not, by itself, entitle any people to create an ethnic-national state in a land where another people already lives and forms the majority. If that principle were applied universally, the modern international order would collapse into endless partitions and secessionist claims.
Israel exists today because Zionism had the organization, timing, diplomacy, international sympathy, and military strength to make it exist. Its existence is a fact. The rights of its people today are real. But the moral legitimacy of its founding as a Jewish state in Palestine remains deeply contested.
The question is not whether Israel exists. It does.
The question is not whether Jewish people deserve safety. They do.
The question is whether Jewish suffering gave Zionism the moral right to create a sovereign ethnic-national state at the expense of Palestinian self-determination.
And the honest answer is: no people’s suffering, however terrible, automatically gives them that right.