Israel has a right to exist. Its political system does not.
JVL Introduction
Israel’s defenders ask why Israel is the only country on earth whose very existence is routinely challenged.
But says Beinart, if you replace “country” with “political system,” the premise makes no sense.
Political systems are routinely questioned and challenged.
The US sanctions over twenty countries because it opposes their foreign policies or because their political systems violate human rights. And it criticises openly many, many more.
“There’s nothing unfair, let alone antisemitic, about applying those same standards to Israel.”
And Beinart is crystal clear that he wants Israel’s political system – which the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem characterizes as “Jewish supremacy” – to be replaced with one based on equality under the law irrespective of religion and ethnicity.
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With our usual thanks to Peter Beinart for permission to repost. You can subscribe to his regular mailings here.
This article was originally published by the Beinart Notebook on Wed 7 Sep 2022. Read the original here.
Israel has a right to exist. Its political system does not.
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The article ignores the right of return and the legitimacy of the Settlements. It seems to assume every individual will remain in the property they currently occupy and only the political organisation will change. With a majority (though I am not sure they would have one), the Palestinians could change the land law as they wished. But the changes they would seem to have in mind would surely lead to chaos worse than what we saw in Yugoslavia. Generally, too little attention is paid to the legitimacy of individuals’ land tenure even within pre-1967 Israel. And if I recall correctly, when the PLO proposed a secular Palestine, their position was that only Jews who had settled there before 1917 would be allowed to remain.
A country obviously has no ‘right to exist’. It’s a nonsensical concept. The correct question is whether the current geo-political arrangement gives all its people the human rights they are entitled to under international law – and the answer to that is obviously no.