In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, David Shulman writes:
On October 29, after four soldiers were killed in Beit Lahiya [Gaza], the [Israeli] army bombed a five-story apartment building; it claimed that a “lookout” had been sighted on the roof. Nearly a hundred people died, at least twenty of them children, and we have no count of the wounded. An obscene question arises: Was it worth it—for a presumed lookout? But I can’t help asking myself: For this we created a Jewish state?
I can hardly summarise who David Shulman is: I urge you to look up his Wikipedia biography, to which I linked above. He is an Israeli-American scholar of South Indian culture and religion and a co-founder of the organisation Taayush, which describes itself as “Israelis & Palestinians striving together to end the Israeli occupation and to achieve full civil equality through daily non-violent direct-action.”
In my previous post, on Pamela Paul’s NYT Opinion piece deploring the American Historical Association’s resolution against “scholasticide” in Gaza, I refuted her claim that the destruction of virtually all educational institutions in Gaza might be justified because “Hamas . . . shelters its fighters in schools.” I wrote:
For the documented destruction to be justified under the laws of war, Hamas would have had to be hiding active fighters in every site destroyed by Israel at the time of the destruction, and the damage to protected institutions and killing of non-combattants would have to be proportionate to the military gain afforded by the actions.
Israel’s actions, as described by Shulman, perfectly illustrate my point: the possible presence of a “lookout” on a roof cannot possibly justify the killing of nearly a hundred people, twenty of them children. And this is not an isolated incident. Shulman writes:
Israel has embraced cruelty and atrocity as a normative mode of waging war. . . What we are experiencing now in Israel is a profound failure of our shared humanity, a deadly apathy of the soul. Worse still is the taste for killing and inflicting pain that has infected so many, beginning at the top.
This conclusion, which is supported by ample evidence, shows how in its effort to erase the Palestinians, Israel is destroying itself. The fundamental baseline of defense of Israel has always been that Israel has a “right to exist” as the expression of the self-determination of the Jewish people.
But does a state such as Shulman describes enjoy that “right to exist?” Recall the distinction made in the study of the Soviet Union and its dependencies between “socialism,” a model for a just society, and “actually existing socialism,” which must be studied, analysed, and understood on the basis of the empirical reality of societies claiming to be “socialist.”
The ideology of Zionism asserts that Jews have the right to exercise self-determination by establishing a Jewish state – therefore Israel has the right to exist. But today there is an actually existing Jewish state, as described by Shulman. The question of that state’s legitimacy cannot be answered by an appeal to an abstraction or doctrine, any more than Stalin’s Gulag could be justified by Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
As I argued in a previous post, the God of the Bible nowhere grants the Jews the right to a state: he grants them a covenant: they may settle the Land of Israel in return for keeping his commandments. When the elders of the Israelite tribes ask the Prophet Samuel to appoint a king to rule them “like all other nations,” that is, to establish a state (1 Samuel 8:5), God warns Samuel:
“It is not you that they have rejected; it is Me they have rejected as their king. Like everything else they have done since I brought them out of Egypt to this day – forsaking Me and worshiping other gods – so they are doing to you. Heed their demand; but warn them solemnly, and tell them about the practices of any king who will rule over them.”
After telling Samuel of the injustices a king will commit, God instructs him to warn the Israelites, “In that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” (1 Samuel 8: 7-9.)
The question, “Does Israel have the right to exist?” grants that right an aura of irrefutability by confounding the theoretical right to exist of a concept with the reality of the Jewish state as it actually exists. The question relevant to today’s affairs is not “Do Jews have the right to self-determination?” or “Does a Jewish state have the right to exist?” but rather, “Does the actually existing State of Israel have the right to exist on the basis of its claim to be a Jewish State?” Does any state such as the one described by Shulman have the right to exist? Or do those suffering from its oppression have the right to replace it with a state putatively based on justice and equality, as stated, for instance, in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America?
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If it is ever established, that is not the end. Such a state will face the same questions about its actual practices. It will not be able to justify oppression by the right to self-determination of the Palestinians, any more than Israel can justify itself by the right to self-determination of the Jews. No actual state has a “right to exist.” Only people have rights, which states are bound to defend rather than violate.
Barnett R. Rubin is Director, Afghanistan Regional Project and Associate Director, Center on International Cooperation of New York University. He is the author of Blood on the Doorstep: the Politics of Preventing Violent Conflict, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System,Afghanistan from the Cold War through the War on Terror, and other books.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack account. It has been edited slightly for style.