What does "Israel has a right to defend itself" even mean? (hexbear.net)

submitted 1 year ago by a_blanqui_slate@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net

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This is the typical throwaway line used by liberals when it's pointed out that Israel should stop doing war crimes, but I'm not sure what it's trying to convey.

Rights are always a tricky abstraction, doubly so at the international level, so I'm not sure what asserting the existence of some right is supposed to do. Israel obviously has the capability to defend itself^1^, so what good is asserting some intangible right to do so? Are they actually saying "We should not stop Israel from doing what it wants to defend itself"? I imagine even they would object to Israel use of sarin or nuclear weapons, so I don't think that's what they mean. Is it "Israel should be given wide but not unlimited latitude by the US to respond as it sees fit"? Cause if that's what they mean, the easy answer is "not with our tax dollars".

Anyway this just seems like one of those empty pat expressions used during arguments I hate.

When they aren't busy doing racialist dismissiveness of Palestinian military capability.

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[-] InevitableSwing@hexbear.net 15 points 1 year ago

~~I watched some video the other day and somebody mentioned "Israel has a right to defend itself" problem. Adam Johnson?~~

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Ninja edit

I need to not break my brain trying to find that video. It was only ~30 seconds of passing comments. And I have work to do anyway.

Instead of making myself a crazy person - I googled. I only scanned this article but it seems pretty good.

Israel Doesn't Have a "Right to Exist" — But Israelis and Palestinians Do

We’re often told that creating a single secular democratic state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians would violate Israel’s “right to exist.” But no nation-state has an inviolable right to exist — especially not an ethnostate based on exclusion and ethnic cleansing.

[...]

The real issue is clarified when you append the phrase "as a Jewish state" to "Israel has a right to exist."

If "Jewish state" just means "state that happens to have a Jewish majority," then it's fine for Israel to exist "as a Jewish state," just as it's fine for the United States to be a "white Christian state" in the sense that it's a state that happens to have a white Christian majority. But if an American friend told me they thought it was very important that America always have a white Christian majority, and that, for example, our immigration policies should guarantee that black and brown people never became a majority, I would probably call them a fascist.