The idiot’s guide to states – and their ‘rights’: 1. States exist. Some 200 of them. 2. States are the political arrangement in which a people express their self-determination. That arrangement can and does change. 3. States enjoy rights, but only against each other. They have the right, for example, not to face unprovoked aggression from another state. 4. No state has some enduring, abstract “right” to exist. Otherwise bad ones like apartheid South Africa would be unreformable. 5. Peoples, by contrast, do have a right to exist. That’s why states that commit apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide are so gravely violating international law. Because they are violating a people’s right to exist. 6. When people argue Israel has a “right” to exist, they are trying to dupe you into believing international law is fine with apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide. It isn’t. For obvious reasons, international law prefers the rights of peoples over those of states. Otherwise, no state could ever be illegitimate. Its rights would trump those of the people it rules over. 7. When someone refuses to agree that Israel has a “right” to exist, they are not being antisemitic, whatever the media keeps telling you. They are upholding international law: the precedence of peoples’ rights over those of states. 8. The claim that Israel has a “right” to exist is not what it seems. It’s really the claim that the current reality of extreme inequality between Israelis and Palestinians be set in stone. It’s the diabolical claim that Israel has a right to commit apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinian people.

Israel has no right to exist. That’s the position in international law. It has nothing to do with hatred of Israel or antisemitism. In fact, no state – none – has a “right” to exist, including states busy extolling their democratic credentials. If the UK had a “right” to exist, for example, it would mean that Scotland could not be allowed to vote for independence. Why? Because such a vote would break up the UK. It would be a violation of the UK’s supposed “right” to exist as the UK. Which is precisely why the UK has no “right” to exist. Peoples have a right to exist. When that right is abused, it invariably involves very serious violations of international law – often through crimes such as apartheid, ethnic cleansing or genocide. States, by contrast, don’t have a “right” to exist. They simply do exist as a matter of fact – until they suddenly don’t. Like apartheid South Africa. Like Rhodesia. Like Czechoslovakia. Like Yugoslavia. Like Nazi Germany. This is so obvious it should not even need stating. Were states to have a “right” to exist, completely arbitrary factors such as their borders, demographic make-up and political institutions would be sacrosanct. Inviolable. It would be impossible for minorities to secede, for territories to be transferred, for apartheid structures to be overturned . Any such change would be a transgression of the state’s “right to exist” as it is. And yet every single journalist employed by an establishment media outlet is suddenly playing dumb on this most elementary of issues. They’ve all suddenly had a collective lobotomy. They insist Israel must be the exception to the rule that no state has a “right” to exist. Watch, for example, the BBC’s Nick Robinson berating Green party leader Zack Polanski for refusing to affirm Israel’s “right to exist”. Polanksi correctly argues instead that Israelis and Palestinians have a right to live in equality. Why all this incendiary stupidity from our supposedly brightest and best journalists? Find the answer in my latest article No state has a ‘right’ to exist – least of all an apartheid, genocidal state like Israel. A link to the full article is in the reply post ⬇️