Who Has the Right to Exist?

A few nights ago, I was preparing for an interview with an international broadcaster. The subject of the interview was entirely unrelated to what follows. But as minds often do in preparation for such conversations, mine wandered beyond the subject at hand. Somewhere along the way, I found myself puzzling over a question we hear repeatedly in contemporary political discourse, particularly in Western media discussions about Israel: Does Israel have a right to exist?

It is usually presented as a simple yes-or-no question. But the more one considers the wording, the trickier it becomes because of what the framing itself does. A moment of hesitation to answer, or even choosing not to, can lead others to make assumptions about a person's political or moral position. Yet sometimes the problem is not in finding an answer, but in making sense of the question in the first place.

Consider the question for a moment: what does it actually mean for a state to have a right to exist?

Perhaps the place to begin is with the words themselves: right and exist. To exist simply means to be — to be present, to have being. A right to exist says something more: it suggests that existence itself is an inherent entitlement.

For a human being, this makes sense. It is self-evident in the word itself: a human being. To be is to exist. A person's existence does not depend upon recognition, approval or permission from another. The right to life and dignity belongs to the human being by virtue of being human. Therefore, peoples — groups of human beings — have rights, too. International law recognizes, among other principles, the right of peoples to self-determination.

A state, however, belongs to a different category. A state is a political and legal institution. It organizes authority over territory and provides a structure through which societies govern themselves. States possess rights and obligations under international law; sovereignty and territorial integrity, for example, are fundamental principles of the international order. This, however, is distinct from the ideaof an inherent right to existence.

Consider the same question outside the language of geopolitics. Does a company have a right to exist? Does a university? 

These institutions certainly exist, but their existence is simply a fact: people created them, and people continue to sustain them. We would not normally say that a university exists because it has an inherent right to do so. We can value it, protect it by law, give it legal rights and impose obligations upon it, but none of this means that its existence itself is an inherent right.

A state is, of course, far more consequential than a company or university. But the underlying distinction remains: a human being's existence carries an inherent claim to life; an institution's existence is something human beings create, organize and sustain.History illustrates this well. States have emerged and disappeared, divided and united, and assumed new political forms. They are human political constructions, not immutable features of nature. And while states may change, the people who live within them do not lose their right to life, dignity or security.

This brings us to the problem at the core of the original question. Philosophically, it risks what is known as a category error: attributing to one kind of thing a quality that belongs to another. Asking whether a statehas an inherent right to exist in the same sense that a human being does makes the premise of the question itself flawed.

There is also a broader lesson here. Questions are not always neutral. They can carry assumptions of their own, and when repeated often enough, those assumptions can begin to pass unnoticed. A question can become a political litmus test – a single, decisive question used to judge whether someone meets a particular political or ideological standard. It can also become a tool of propaganda when its framing advances a specific idea, while hesitation or an attempt to question it is treated as a sign of prejudice.

This matters especially in political discourse, where an answer can carry significant consequences for the person giving it and for what that answer could be understood to represent. It is, therefore, worth being conscious not only of the answers we are asked to give, but of the questions we are expected to accept.