"The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine allocated the majority of the land to a Jewish state, even though Jews were a minority of the population and owned only a small fraction of the land. The war that followed, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, produced the mass displacement and killing of Palestinians. In that sense, the creation of Israel represents a foundational contradiction — an original sin within the supposedly rules-based international order.
Yet the political conversation rarely confronts that contradiction. Instead, it fixates on the ritual question of whether Israel has a “right to exist.” In reality, international law does not recognize such a right for states; it recognizes the right of peoples to self-determination and prohibits territorial conquest. The question functions less as a legal inquiry than as a political litmus test.
As Mohammed El-Kurd has argued, this framing forces Palestinians and others into a rhetorical trap. Rather than addressing dispossession, occupation, or unequal rights, they are first required to perform a moral certification assuring the world they do not seek violence before their political grievances can even be heard. The result is a debate that substitutes abstract pledges for the material realities of military rule, displacement, and statelessness.
The answer to those two fundamental questions should start with the fact that the very order itself was founded on an initial contradiction that set it up for hypocrisy — and hypocrisy is the ultimate vulnerability. The system at once created this contradiction and is weakened by it. What comes next need not rely on false promises but on actions rooted in reality."
https://jacobin.com/2026/04/israel-right-exist-palestine-self-determination/
#Israel #Zionism #Palestine #SelfDetermintation #InternationalLaw
Aral Balkan
Joanne Jacobs
Ken M Sweeney
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