Does Israel have the right to exist?
We hear this argument a lot. At first it seems like a way to implicitly assert that Palestinians pose an existential threat to Israel, which justifies Israel’s ethnic cleansing of them. However, it seems ridiculous to think that Palestinians can be a threat to a state with such a powerful and well-funded military.
But the threat that Palestinians pose is not so much material, but more, well, existential. Because if Israel is forced to share the land with Palestinians and accept them as equal citizens, then the whole concept of Israel as a specifically Jewish state is gone.
What defines a nation-state is that the people who belong to it are its citizens with certain rights and duties. Crucially, this citizenship cannot be tied to a particular race, ethnicity, or religion. This is the historical achievement of the nation-state: to sublate differences between people by turning them into abstract citizens, thereby creating the foundation for the idea of human rights in general.
However, the price you pay for citizenship is a certain alienation; you no longer belong to a society because your family has lived there for generations, but because you own a certain document that asserts your nationality. This alienation is what Nazi Germany tried to reverse with its ideology of Blut und Boden, blood and land. The Nazis claimed that each race has a natural right to some land that constitutes their home land. That’s why the natural enemy of the Nazis was the Wandering Jew, the people without a land. What disturbed the Nazis was that, insofar as the modern nation-state alienates us from our land and race, all citizens effectively become Jewified, a people without a land.
Since the Jews paid a horrific price for their non-belonging, we decided to give them what we’ve given up: a land of their own. Israel is a land of the Jews and for the Jews, which effectively makes it a pre-modern state. Inevitably this means apartheid and oppression for its non-Jewish minorities. Ultimately, Israel cannot exist as a Jewish state without expelling Palestinians from it. This is how defending Israel’s right to exist can implicitly justify a genocide.
How can the West, with its ideals of democracy and liberalism, offer its full-throated support for a country that engages in ethnic cleansing and genocide? Maybe what Israel represents to us is a fantasy of social belonging, of a home land; the very thing we lost when we entered modernity.