This is the typical throwaway line used by liberals when it's pointed out that Israel should stop doing war crimes, but I'm not sure what it's trying to convey.
Rights are always a tricky abstraction, doubly so at the international level, so I'm not sure what asserting the existence of some right is supposed to do. Israel obviously has the capability to defend itself1, so what good is asserting some intangible right to do so? Are they actually saying "We should not stop Israel from doing what it wants to defend itself"? I imagine even they would object to Israel use of sarin or nuclear weapons, so I don't think that's what they mean. Is it "Israel should be given wide but not unlimited latitude by the US to respond as it sees fit"? Cause if that's what they mean, the easy answer is "not with our tax dollars".
Anyway this just seems like one of those empty pat expressions used during arguments I hate.
- When they aren't busy doing racialist dismissiveness of Palestinian military capability.
I mean even if you start the war crime tally then, Israel is still the undisputed War Crime Champion of the region.
They mean that
can react to any threats as they see fit, while 
are paranoid human rights abusersIf I punch you, but then you punch me back, I have a right to defend myself by punching you back. But you don't have a right to punch me if I punch you. Only me. Basically.
and also I will keep punching you until you die and also your entire family and the fight started because I moved into your house and told you to fuck off out
I watched some video the other day and somebody mentioned "Israel has a right to defend itself" problem. Adam Johnson?---
Ninja edit
I need to not break my brain trying to find that video. It was only ~30 seconds of passing comments. And I have work to do anyway.
Instead of making myself a crazy person - I googled. I only scanned this article but it seems pretty good.
Israel Doesn't Have a "Right to Exist" — But Israelis and Palestinians Do
We’re often told that creating a single secular democratic state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians would violate Israel’s “right to exist.” But no nation-state has an inviolable right to exist — especially not an ethnostate based on exclusion and ethnic cleansing.
[...]
The real issue is clarified when you append the phrase "as a Jewish state" to "Israel has a right to exist."
If "Jewish state" just means "state that happens to have a Jewish majority," then it's fine for Israel to exist "as a Jewish state," just as it's fine for the United States to be a "white Christian state" in the sense that it's a state that happens to have a white Christian majority. But if an American friend told me they thought it was very important that America always have a white Christian majority, and that, for example, our immigration policies should guarantee that black and brown people never became a majority, I would probably call them a fascist.
The funny thing is, according to the UN's ICJ, it doesn't have a right to defend itself (in the occupied palestinian territories).
Another hexbearianistite (can't remember who, sorry) mentioned the 2004 ICJ advisory that was regarding Israel building a wall on the green line, which is the border decided at the 1949 armistice (and often referred to as the 1967 or pre-1967 border). Here they agreed that the wall was illegal, due to quite a few reasons: it restricts freedom of movement and self determination of Palestinians, it also went beyond the agreed green line and extended into Palestinian territories. Since then, Israel ignored the ruling and continued construction.
What I gather from this is that even the ICJ thinks that Israel is an occupying power, and does therefore not have the right to defend itself.
it means they buy into inaccurate biblical narratives about history, fully believe that white brooklyn jews are the original and exclusive indigenous people to the region, and see israel as the small bean anti-colonial indigenous resistance fighting for its survival against hordes of inhuman antisemitic barbarians on all sides.
It's another case of white, European colonists committing genocide against an indigenous population.
20 years from now, it'll all be "oh how awful" and they'll make Dances with Wolves style sad movies about it.
Omega armchair response here, mostly drawing on college courses from a few years ago
Basically, rights in the context of international law are very specifically entitlements to something (like clean water) or entitlements not to be subjected to something (like discrimination). These rights are meant to apply to every person universally (as long as the state governing you has ratified the relevant charter), and they can never be taken away. No one can legally take away your right to clean drinking water, for instance. States do not have rights because they are neither people or a group of people, but rather an apparatus operated by people.
A state can use force in self-defense against another state or entity, but this is NOT a right, because there are limits and conditions enforced by international law*, and rights are meant to be inalienable and unconditional. You as a person can't be (e: legally) prevented from drinking water, but a state CAN
be prevented from retaliatingviolate law regarding self-defense if they're not doing it in the right way.This is tricky terminology wise because people like to use terms interchangeably when they don't have the same meaning, either by accident or as rhetorical sleight of hand. To say Israel has a "right" to defend itself would be to say that it can conduct those military operations without concern for international law. Based on what we're seeing right now I guess that's correct in a realist sense...
*Of course, these conditions are rarely applied consistently. Take the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia for instance, which was declared to be "illegal but justified" by the Independent International Commission on Kosovo (funny how most of the members of that commission were from NATO states".
A state can use force in self-defense against another state or entity, but this is NOT a right, because there are limits and conditions enforced by international law*, and rights are meant to be inalienable and unconditional. You as a person can't be prevented from drinking water, but a state CAN be prevented from retaliating if they're not doing it in the right way.
But, as we see in the case of Palestine right now, people can be prevented from drinking water. It my be inalienable in a normative sense, but this whole conflict is replete with examples if Israel withholding the rights of Palestinians.
Conversely, Israel can't be prevented from retaliating. Right or not, they are going to retaliate anyway, and the international communities willingness to accept it seems to only be weakly tied to how egregious their retaliation seem to be. I guess the realist perspective you allude to is what I am getting at here, so the statement "Israel has a right to defend itself" seems to be doing a rhetorical slight of hand between factual and normative statements.
You're right, I slipped up in my phrasing there and have edited it to make things slightly clearer. Part of what makes discussing this so difficult is the incredible breadth of difference between what is mandated by international law and what really happens in practice.
Didn't mean to imply you had slipped. I actually found your reply quite helpful in organizing my thoughts.
Nah my phrasing could have used some work regardless. Glad it was helpful though!
Bonus: There's further complications on how the terms country/nation/state changes things. People like to use those terms interchangeably, too, but they can mean different things depending on who you ask. I used "state" with a pretty rigid definition above. While some people use "nation" in the same way, it can alternatively connote more of a group of people with a common region, ethnicity, religion, and so forth. In that context, a nation CAN have rights, as despite the supposed universality of rights they often must be specifically expressed for vulnerable groups. That's the prime contradiction of rights as it happens—if a right needs to be enumerated like that, it's not really universal, is it?
the law isn't important when they say "Israel has a right to defend itself" they mean a moral right. Israel doesn't need a legal right nuclear weapons put you above any human laws
It means the same thing when confederate southerners say they have the right to defend their property
I would argue they have as much right to defend themselves as the guy who breaks into your house, murders members of your family, boots others out, and forces you to live in a toilet, dependent on them to provide you with food, water and medication, and on top of that they get angry about any criticism; in this scenario as well, if you defend yourself, they call the cops and the cops beat you up. They have some half-assed reason for why they supposedly own your house (something about their war of independence great great great grandad having owned the land), but you also know they'd been talking about invading the people living down the street and doing the same to them. You go on the internet and you find out some losers from half a world away are also seriously saying the home invader does indeed have a right to the house and to defend themselves and to add grievous injury to injury they're also funding him getting new guns too while they call you a savage for not even trying to get along with your home invader, who by the way punches you in the face and shoots whichever of your kids you still have in the knees if you so much as look at them funny. They invite members of their own family over to live in your house, but your own family members can't come back, and if you leave you won't be allowed to come back either, and that's if they let you leave.
If any of this sounds ridiculous it's because anti-home invaderism is racism, never mind that the original home invader has literally stated that no no, we're actually doing a home invaderism and has expressed a hatred for his own race when they oppose the home invaderism.
It's not really an empty phrase. Its incredibly loaded. "Israel has a right to exist" is literally saying "Settlers have a right to colonize," but said in a way to make opponents of settler colonialism appear exterminationist when the Colonizers are the ones commiting genocide.
It's a dogwhistle.
Like how stealing passports at OR Tambo Airport in 2009 was "exposing Hamas agents" and "counter-terrorism".
States have recognised to have rights to do violence under international law under various circumstances.
They are saying that Israel is a legitimate state and that it has the right to do violence in defence of that state.
The opposite position to this is it is instead a "zionist entity", not legitimate, and therefore does not have that right and is just a violent terrorist entity occupying the rightful Palestinian land.
This seems like a cart and horse issue though, because those rights are not granted or revoked by any supervening authority; they're essentially fictitious. The same honestly goes for notions of legitimacy.
When someone says I have the right to remain silent, that means that any interrogation coerced out of me in contravention of that right will be ruled inadmissible by a supervening authority (the judge). There's no judge to appeal to in these cases; no stick to rap Israel with when in acts beyond it's "rights". So is it just saying Israel can do what it wants and I need to shut up?
Yes. They are inventions of words. And they only matter to the people who care about words.
But pretending to care about words matters a great deal to liberals, their hypocrisy and disregard for the rules based order they advocate for being exposed is a huge risk. The observance of these words is a part of the control structure that reduces the risk of revolution, the population of the global north BELIEVING that we observe and adhere and care about these rules is a large part of what makes the imperial core significantly less susceptible to revolution than the periphery where people are not so naive about this.
It's not the entire picture, but it's a piece of it and one that matters a great deal.
It's a legitimate state in that it has an army and land and you can't really illegitimately have those things it's a matter of possession
they are carrying out an ongoing genocide so they are a legitimate state that has apartheid laws that is actively seeking to destroy an ethnic group. Germany and South Africa didn't need to be illegitimate states for that to be a breach of international law and immoral
