States are People Too?
Self-Determination and Israel’s
“Right to Exist”
by Tim Wise
Dissident Voice
February 14, 2003
For
approximately a century, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has been applied to corporations. In other
words, companies are, in the eyes of the law, just like people, granted rights
of “citizenship” by the Supreme Court. That this arrangement has enhanced
corporate power goes without saying. What’s more, by turning companies into
citizens with equal rights on a par with flesh and blood humans, the courts of
this land have extended the notion of individual liberties beyond its classical
interpretation.
Corporations,
after all, involve persons who already have rights--civil and human--so to
grant additional rights (to free association, privacy, free speech, or
whatever) to the collective entity known as Enron, or IBM, or Microsoft is to
create artificial legal entitlement on a gargantuan and redundant scale.
This said,
the same logic should apply to an analysis of nation-states. The idea that
states--entities with borders that are almost always contested and the result
of military force, fraud or theft--have rights to exist is a fairly modern
concept, and presumes that governmental entities are every bit as entitled as
flesh and blood humans to life, liberty and the pursuit of their own versions
of happiness. That such a belief can prove contentious is an understatement.
This
argument becomes especially important with regard to the conflict between
Israel and the Palestinian struggle for independence. As a critic of Israeli
policies and of the practical impacts of Zionism itself (and a Jew at that), I
am always confronted immediately with the charge (usually leveled by other
Jewish folks appalled by my unwillingness to tow the line) that I “don’t
believe in the right of the state of Israel to exist.”
It’s
always tough to respond to such a charge, because in truth I don’t believe in
the right of any state to exist, per se. I don’t believe in the right of the
U.S. to exist, or France, or Gabon, or Mauritius, or the Netherlands, or
Palestine for that matter. States do not have rights. People have rights. So
while I support the right of Jews, Americans, the French, the Palestinians and
everyone else to live in peace and dignity, free from persecution,
discrimination and violence, and able to exercise self-determination (more on
this below), that is a far cry from agreeing that a given state, in which such
persons find themselves has a “right” to exist.
This is
the difference between a nation and a state. Nations are collections of people,
who may or may not live in a particular geographic location. This is how Jews
have long viewed ourselves, particularly since the advent of Zionism, but to a
large extent reaching back long before, throughout our time in the Diaspora.
That the Jewish “nation” or national group has a right to exist is
indisputable. Since Jewish individuals are intrinsic members of that nation,
our individual rights, as the Jews we are, cannot be secured unless our
national rights are respected. So too with any national group: the English, the
Scots, the Irish, the Bantu, etc.
But to say
that because Jews have a right to exist in peace and security, and even to
argue that we have self-determination rights, is not to grant that a particular
state on a particular plot of land, where a large portion of our group have
chosen to reside, has the same right to exist as the people in question.
Self-determination, after all, does not allow any group to impose their vision
of government on others who do not share that vision. It does not allow members
of one group to take the land of others by force or fraud, just because they
desire that land, are self-determined to have it, and have the power to acquire
it by force of arms and the collusion of international power-brokers. It does
not allow groups to establish repressive regimes or governments that treat
citizens unequally, even if that is their self-determined desire. To allow such
things is indeed to trample upon the self-determination rights of other
peoples, rights which are certainly as absolute as those for the first group.
In other
contexts, almost no one would disagree with this argument. For example, rarely
have I heard Zionists in the Jewish community argue that American blacks have
the right to true self-determination (which I certainly support), let alone the
right to a state of their own, especially if said blacks might choose to put
their state on land where those same Zionists were themselves living. I mean,
really now; does anyone believe that if black folks said “we want our own
state, seeing as how we are a national group, oppressed for centuries as
African Americans, and we want that state to be in...Manhattan, including but
not limited to Harlem,” that the Jewish community would rise in support of such
a black “Zionism?”
Of course,
one might ask, what would self-determination look like if it did not include the
right to statehood? And it’s a fair question. There are several possibilities,
including self-rule and autonomous institutional development and control,
within whichever states a “nation” lives. And in theory, even statehood is one
option for a people with self-determination rights. However for such a choice
to be exercised fairly it would have to be as the result of democratic
consultation and agreement between all parties that would be effected by the
exercise of such a “right.”
In the
case of Israel, this would mean that the state of Israel’s “right” to exist
would have to be agreed upon beforehand, perhaps as the result of a compromise
that would also grant the “right” to Palestinian statehood. And these
compromised exercises of total autonomy (the result of realistic assessments as
to limited land space and the need to broker a deal) are not vitiated,
enhanced, or revoked because one or another party acts in violation of the
agreement at some point in time. The individuals on both (or all) sides have
inalienable rights which must be respected.
This is
why, for example, the claim made by Zionists that Arabs alone rejected the U.N.
partition agreement that would have created a Palestinian state in 1948 is
irrelevant, even if it were true (which it is not, as Israel rejected and violated
several parts of the agreement as well). The Arab masses were never consulted
about partition in the first place, nor did they ever agree to such an
arrangement, which would have resulted in over half of the land of Palestine
being given to Jews, who at that time comprised only thirty percent of the
population and owned only six percent of the land.
By the
same logic, it is also the case that the depredations of the Israeli government
do not make invalid the legitimacy of Jewish autonomy either. In both cases,
the rights to self-determination of Palestinian Arabs and Jews must be
respected, hopefully by mutual agreement to create equity, either in a two
state solution or a bi-national, secular and democratic one-state solution. But
either way, the state or states that emerge are not the entities to which “rights”
adhere. The rights belong to the people. The states are artificial creations.
Of course
this does not mean that borders have no validity whatsoever. It is clearly
wrong, both morally and as a matter of international law for states to attack
other states, or for extra-territorial groups to attack persons in a given
state, even if the state itself has no “rights” to speak of. Since people have
rights, they have the right to be secure in their homes and have the right not
to be attacked violently. So this means that Israel has the “right” not to be
violently destroyed by hostile neighbors or various terrorist groups, just as
those neighbors have the “right” not to be destroyed, invaded or attacked by
Israel. But these rights to not be attacked exist because such attacks would
violate the rights of the people in those states, not because the states
themselves are entitled to inviolable borders as currently drawn up.
As such,
one could argue that Israel has the “right” not to be attacked, because such an
attack would violate its citizens rights as individuals, but still not accept
that Israel has the “right” to exist as currently governmentally constituted:
as a Jewish state for example. Likewise, as I have mentioned elsewhere, one
could logically argue that the U.S. had the right not to be attacked by the
Soviet Union in 1957, or 1962--two high-water marks for the Cold War--but still
argue that the U.S. had no “right” to continue to exist as it did in those
years: as an apartheid state, where racial discrimination was practiced legally
and segregation still ruled the South.
Negative
rights--to not be overrun by hostile forces militarily, for example--do not
automatically translate into positive rights, such as those that allow one to
establish any kind of government that one wants, even one that violates the
rights of others to equal treatment.
What all
this means is fairly simple: accusing critics of Israel of not recognizing
Israel’s right to exist is the ultimate non sequitur. It has nothing to do with
anything, unless one accepts a priori that states--the artificial, often
imperial creations of ambitious elites--are organic entities entitled to full
and equal treatment as if they were human beings, as with corporations. And
even if one does accept such an idea, the fact remains that while Israel does
exist, Palestine as a state does not. So while militant Zionists charge the PLO
and others with not recognizing the right of Israel to exist, they
hypocritically refuse to recognize the right of Palestine to exist, and work
actively towards preventing such a state from coming into being altogether.
In the
end, the ultimate questions are merely these: do the rights of one group, in
this case Jews, override the rights of others, such as the Palestinians? Are
Jews more entitled to a homeland than Palestinians? And are Jews entitled to
this homeland, even if it requires the taking of other people’s land?
If the
answers one gives to these questions are yes, then there is little more to
discuss. The racism implicit in such responses cannot possibly allow for a just
solution to the current conflict. If the answers however are no, then perhaps
we can move beyond simplistic discussions about “rights” to exist, and instead
focus on the nuts and bolts work of creating justice, with peace, for all
parties involved. And perhaps we can have an honest discussion, without
censorship and charges of self-hate and anti-Semitism, as to what justice will
require. Even if one of the options might have to be the fundamental altering
of the Jewish State, into a state of its citizens, with liberty and full
equality for all. It’s just a thought.
Tim Wise is an antiracist activist, essayist and lecturer. He can be reached at timjwise@msn.com