Is It A Right For A Country To Exist?

I’ve been pondering about this topic for a while, but couldn’t find the right words to say my thoughts out loud. This post is the product of many variations of the same thing, some of them scrapped before ever being written anywhere.

No country in the world establishes its ability to exist through rights. Countries establish their ability to exist through force. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

If you consume German-language or really any Western media, you’ve probably been bombarded with the claim that “Israel has a right to exist” or “Israel has a right to defend itself”. Germany’s leadership is so convinced that this makes sense that they are forcing those applying for citizenship to recognize those statements as true as a prerequisite to granting them citizenship. As an anarchist, I don’t believe in states’ ability to raise claim on rights, nor do I believe they can protect us from having our rights violated — especially by them1. In this essay, I’ll try my best to explain why states don’t have rights and why Germany’s imposition of that belief is a violation of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Before all else, we need to define what a right means in daily life.

What is a right?

A right is a privilege granted to someone or something by an authority. There would be no need for the concept of rights in a horizontal society because there would be no authority to grant or violate that right to begin with. Likewise, freedoms wouldn’t need to exist as a concept if there weren’t entities to counter them; say censorship for freedom of expression or weaponizing the court system against activists rightfully calling out crimes against every living being on Earth. Similarly, a crime is a crime as long as there is an authority to punish it.

A right is also a concession that the ruling class makes when not doing so endangers their wealth and power. If a country has a right to exist, then who is the one conceding? Is it the imperialist colonial power who are the ones paying the price for this concession or the people on the ground whose land was forcibly extracted from them? Whose land they had to flee or else have unspeakable things done to them? Whose lives are still pure hell as a consequence of imperialist aggression?

In this context, it’s important to highlight the difference between the necessity of statehood and a people’s self-determination. Palestinians, Jews, or any other people are entitled to making decisions affecting them themselves. They are entitled to shaping their lives however they want. So why is it that for some people we’re supposed to celebrate their statehood – however legitimate or illegitimate we see it – and others not? Why the double standards? Is it because they’re not “civilized” enough? Too “savage” for your taste?

This also means that an authority can only have rights if there is a superior authority to grant or violate those rights. Even if you believed there was a higher entity than nation-states to grant, safeguard or violate rights, such as the UN and its subsidiaries, those function as long as their rulings and opinions are given weight to by enough and the right2 countries. We’ve seen Israel unscrupulously ignore ICJ rulings and various UN resolutions because the right countries opposed them or shielded Israel, mainly colonial powers like Uncle Sam and his besties.

Statehood vs. Self-determination

Now, you might be wondering why I’m telling you all of this. The reason is simple: It’s important to see that all the concept of right and duty isn’t written in stone and represents a dynamic between a superior and inferior entity. However, as long as the superior entity is the judge on rights, duties, and crimes, its rights cannot be granted to it by its subjects. An actor cannot choose to be the victim and perpetrator at the same time. A parent cannot become the child. Just like the child cannot take on the role of the parent.

Asking an individual to recognize the validity of an institution – in this case a nation-state – that exists to exercise perpetual violence or else is like asking a lion to follow orders or else be whipped. But most importantly, if this state has to exist and it has a right to do so, why does its existence and legitimacy depend on a symbolic gesture that is an individual’s recognition of its legitimate existence if it’s doing so rightfully? And how would individuals be able to play the role of the state, the one granting and safeguarding rights – at least in theory – without having the monopoly on violence that nation-states have?

Especially next a nuclear power like Israel, though this applies to really any nation-state, working class people’s influence on politics is minuscule, like comparing the effect Saturn’s rings have on the Sun’s life span3. It’s negligible and most likely unrelated. Yet, here we are, with nation-states declaring what feels like a complete state of emergency because a bunch of people are rightfully and peacefully protesting the first televised genocide in history.

Conclusion

A year after Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip and a week after their ground invasion of Lebanon, people still believe that Israel has a right to defend itself, when it stopped doing the defense part the second it invaded the enclave and now Lebanon. I don’t know about you, but defense doesn’t look like a ground invasion to me.

Even after writing all this, I still fail to comprehend the logic Germany’s government is using to justify their blanket support of Israel in addition to denying naturalization to those who are not similarly inclined.

Maybe it’s because Israel’s existence provides Germany and Austria a way to shrug at antisemitism, because, you know, Jews can go elsewhere if they don’t like it here. Maybe our top dogs don’t have our – working class people which are the majority of the population anyway – interests in mind after all. Or maybe we’re all Khamas™️ with secret bunkers without knowing it 🥱4.

Further Reading

I highly, highly recommend reading Today is not a day for satire, it’s a day for serious talk by Laura K. who usually writes great satire about the saddest things, though at this point she cannot parody world events because this world has gone totally nuts.

  1. According to the Washington Post, 1,172 people have been killed by police officers this year alone. ↩︎

  2. An old saying goes: All people are equal; some are just more equal than others. The same goes for countries (USA ≠ Angola; UK ≠ Syria; France ≠ Singapore). No shade 🥰 ↩︎

  3. I’m no astronomer, but what I’m saying here is that you’d be comparing apples to oranges. ↩︎

  4. Israel, please don’t bomb me, I have a little sister to take car-💥 ↩︎

Philosophy