Did the Confederate State of America (1860-1865) have an inherent right to exist? How about the USSR? Don't the right-to-exist fans of apartheid Israel regret the lack of existedness of Apartheid South Africa? (I know Dick Cheney does). The Iroquois Nation's history of existence didn't seem to trouble the minds of the North American colonists who wiped it out. Does West Virginia have a right to exist? Abe Lincoln created it by waving his hand during the Civil War because the hilly terrain of that part of the rebelling slave state of Virginia wasn't suitable for big slave-worked plantations and the hill people didn't support the planting class's war. Maybe we should reconsider it's right to existence and deprive the Southern right-wing nutcases of two Senate seats.
States are not people. States rule over people, either by happy consent or miserable force of arms. They can come and go without a bloodbath, without killing or chasing out anyone in particular. States are expendable. When a particular state form oppress people and cause their deaths then it has forfeited its right to exist...it has to be abolished and a new more just state established.
Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 that the people have a right to abolish a state that oppresses them. What's wrong with that?
Israel does not have any inherent right to exist any more than France, or Tahiti or anyplace else. Its existence should depend on representing democratically those who live under its rule. If Israel is for the Jews only, a supposed "Jewish state for all the Jews in the world," then it has no right to rule over the 25% non-Jews within the borders the rest of the world recognizes as defining the State of Israel (what the government of Israel thinks the borders are is something entirely else); nor does it have any right to rule over the West Bank where non-Jews are under martial law with no rights at all. Nor does it have the right to blockage and starve the people of Gaza.
A Palestinian member of the Knesset, Mohammed Tibbi, famously quipped "Israel is democratic toward the Jews and Jewish toward the Arabs."
Israel's elastic borders and its supposed right to exist no matter what form its governance takes is going from bad to worse. Ethnic dictatorship and pogrom-like violence against Palestinians and the African refugees who are "enemy infiltrators" according to majority Jewish opinion in Israel is happening and is getting worse (all the New York Times and other media coverups to the contrary).
The Jews who live in Israel/Palestine have a right to live there, but don't have any inherent right to rule the roost, to lord it over everyone else and enact laws that give them precedence over any other people who live there. If you want democracy then it's one-person-one-vote. Period.
Nor does the idiot argument that an exclusively Jewish state has to exist because of the holocaust hold any water. Jews are safer in LA, Chicago and New York than in a stolen land where the native inhabitants have been expelled, killed and humiliated.
By Jeffersonian standards the state of Israel should qualify as having forfeited its right to exist in its present form. But Jefferson had his inconsistencies--slaves, Indians-- his democracy was for white men. But it took a civil war and more to make adjustments to that...and we can see that the civil war in the USA was not really pushed to a decisive social victory...and it's not even over yet.
As racist Jews of European origin were rioting against African refugees who were living in Tel Aviv (there are videos of lynch-mob behavior of the chosen people fire bombing the homes and businesses of Somali and other African refugees)a cabinet minister in Netanyahu's governign coalition declared publicly that "Israel is for the white man." This is what you get with a "democratic" Jews-only state.
But the point is that there is not any current form of a state that has a lock on unchanging existence no matter the consequences. Humans have a right to live, states are only worthwhile if that help that process.
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