Israel has a right to exist.

No state anywhere holds a right to exist. States are political arrangements, not rights-bearing entities. People hold rights: to life, to safety, to self-determination, to return home. The phrasing transfers the language of human rights onto a state structure, so any challenge to how that state was built and how it governs is recast as a threat to its existence. The real question is not whether Israel has a right to exist, but whether the system it maintains, of dispossession, apartheid, and the denial of Palestinian return, has a right to continue. Confusing a state's policies with its existence is how the demand shields the structure from accountability.

Behind the phrase, most often used as a fallacy, sits an oppressive structure that the Palestinians are asked to affirm. Israel defines itself not as a state of all its citizens but as the state of the Jewish people, enshrined in the 2018 Nation-State Law, which grants self-determination exclusively to Jews and ranks its Palestinian citizens as second class. To affirm this state's right to exist as constituted is to affirm a right to a permanent ethnic majority, maintained by barring the return of refugees expelled in 1948. The right to exist is in practice a right to preserve the demographic outcome of ethnic cleansing. No people can be asked to grant that the exclusion of their own families is a right worth protecting.

The demand is never made of any other state. No one is asked to affirm the right of France, Egypt, or Argentina to exist before discussing their conduct. Requiring Palestinians in particular to affirm Israel's right to exist works as a loyalty test: it demands the native endorse the legitimacy of the state built on their expulsion before they may speak of their own dispossession. It asks the victims of the Nakba to ratify it as just.

The right to exist was not a standard feature of diplomacy applied to states generally. It was mobilised specifically around Israel, demanding that the legitimacy of a state founded through ethnic cleansing be placed beyond question. A state exists as a matter of fact. Whether its founding was just, and whether the system it upholds today is lawful, are separate questions. Israel does not possess a right to have been created through the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948, nor a right to sustain that dispossession by barring their descendants from return and maintaining a regime of supremacy.

The insistence on a right to exist draws on a narrative of perpetual victimhood, deployed as a foundational tactic since Israel's establishment. The state presents itself as permanently endangered and uses that framing to cast every act of domination as self-preservation. This is central to the colonial project. Settler-colonial movements invert the relationship between coloniser and colonised, casting the dispossessing power as the party in danger. That inversion lets a nuclear-armed state backed by the world's most powerful militaries bomb refugee camps, besiege Gaza, and expand across the region while claiming to fight for survival. Victimhood becomes the licence for domination: the more total the violence, the more it is presented as defence.