The Problem with Saying “A Country Has a Right to Exist”

In countless discussions of the long and weary struggle between Israel and its neighbours, one phrase rises above the rest: that Israel “has a right to exist.” The gauntlet is set down with unflinching confidence. The opponent—invariably aware that dissent courts moral suspicion—tends to offer the polite concession that Israel does indeed have a right to exist. And so the rhetoric reaches its mark. But why must we suffer this?

We have seen it and heard it countless times. And yet it resounds endlessly—on Fox News panels, in the opinion pages of the New York Times, across the airwaves of Mark Levin’s talk radio show. Whenever the debate brushes against the thorny questions of Israel’s proportionality and restraint, it spills from Jewish mouths with unhesitating assurance. Whenever attention turns to the American hand in Israel’s defence, it flows just as readily from the lips of Christian Zionists. The glib slogan surfaces even among the politically indifferent—those who follow little, read less, yet see it all the same as a truth that declares itself.

The success of the claim lies squarely in its universal appeal. Though deceptively simple, the “Right to Exist” argument wears three distinct masks. First, the legalistic: invoked as though mere recognition under international law could magically confer a state a permanent, unquestionable right. Then the moral: appealing to conscience, culture, history, and survival, insisting that their communities and identities can never be erased. And finally, the theological, the worst and most dangerous, most familiar in the Israeli formulation, which casts the claim in the language of sacred history and divine promise. Each mask carries authority, each feels self-evident to certain audiences—but each dissolves under basic scrutiny. It cannot be legal right, grounded in recognition. It cannot be a moral right, derived from justice or consent. And it cannot be a theological claim, dependent on faith.

Historically, states have never depended on such justifications. They arise from power, consolidation, and survival. The development of the modern state system was not the triumph of abstract rights, but the outcome of conflict, negotiation, and control. Borders were drawn not because they were morally “deserved,” but because they could be defended. To speak of a state’s “right to exist” in this context is to impose a language of ethics onto what has always been a domain of power and pragmatism.

This is not to underplay the importance of legitimacy. But legitimacy, as Thomas Hobbes understood, is functional rather than moralistic. A state justifies itself by maintaining order and preventing chaos. It exists because it works—because it commands authority—because it is coherent—not because it possesses an inherent moral right analogous to that of an individual.

The confusion deepens when states are intentionally conflated with the people who inhabit them. Individuals may possess rights; political entities do not, and they cannot. To assert that a country has a “right to exist”, however one tries to ground it, is to elevate a highly contingent, historical structure into something that is absolutely inviolable. And history offers little support for such permanence. Nation-states fall apart, merge, and disappear with regularity. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia stand as recent reminders that no political arrangement is immune to change. They also remind us that these transformations occur through politics, power, and circumstance—not through moral, legal, or theological guarantees.

What, then, is achieved by invoking this language? In practice, it serves only a political function. To affirm a state’s “right to exist” is to grant it a kind of moral immunity—to shift debate away from its actions, its structure, or its legitimacy, and toward a binary of recognition versus denial. It simplifies a complex reality into a single, unexamined assertion, and it does so on purpose.

And this is the crux of the matter. The “right to exist” is not a principle that clarifies; it is one that obscures. Yes, it carries rhetorical force, but it has no philosophical substance. Countries simply do not possess rights in the way we do. They endure, as they always have, through power, legitimacy, and historical circumstance.

We may conclude, then, with some confidence, that while the phrase carries political weight, it is rather hollow when weighed against reason.