People Have Rights, States Have None

We need to flip the narrative

This year’s New York City mayoral primary has yet again exposed the contradictions of the US support for Israel’s genocidal ethnocracy and the media’s complicity in laundering its lies. Young, socialist, charismatic, immigrant, Muslim, Zohran Mamdani has been within striking distance of credibly accused sexual predator and grandma killer Andrew Cuomo, and as such the media has been hounding Mamdani for his refusal to genuflect in front of this most sacred cow of Israeli apartheid. The brainless refrain of “Israel has a right to exist” inverted into a question to hammer the candidate with, and worse into a question of support for Israel’s right to exist as an explicitly Jewish state. An ethnostate. This, 20 months into a genocide and 78 years into an illegal occupation. The shamelessness of the media is nothing new, but rarely do we see the consequences of the refusal of our political class to confront the absurdity of this zombie mantra exposed so starkly. Zohran affirmed in initial questioning, his belief that “Israel has a right to exist”, but had a better response in a recent interview where he said he believed in its right to exist as a state with equal rights for all, something Israel does not have. This is far better than what we are used to in our political universe, but it is still not enough. It is not enough because it ultimately avoids interrogating the nature of the unquestioned dogma itself. Do states, any states, have a right to exist?

Let’s not mince words: Israel does not have a right to exist. No state does, and certainly not one predicated on a violent maintenance of demographic control, whose foundation is based on exclusion and expulsion, that bombs and starves and occupies its neighbors and has two separate tiers of justice. But even if Israel did none of that, it still wouldn’t have a right to exist. No state, anywhere, has that right. What states have is responsibilities, to their people, to the environment, to the world. States are meant to be bodies that manage a society for the people that live in it and are responsible for maintaining the basic infrastructure and services to meet the needs of those people. The perversion of the concept of rights inherent in the idea of Israel's “right to exist” is that this assumed right comes at the expense of the basic human right to life, to return, to freedom for Palestinians. The right of a faceless body, an entity, is placed on a higher plane than the rights of flesh and blood human beings.

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

The modern conception of a state with territorial sovereignty has only existed for a few hundred years. The first written mentions of human rights predate Hammurabi. Human rights are inalienable, universal, inextricable with what it means to try to have a world worth living in, yet we see our most basic human rights violated daily in the name of the metaphysical “rights” of states all over the globe. That states should in and of themselves have a right to do anything but be the servants of their people is a profound misunderstanding of why a society even exists. Simply put, any state or body that commits regular violence against her people or the world is illegitimate as it is not serving its purpose, and should be replaced or dissolved. That we don’t even have the courage to challenge the framing of states rights, as if they are some divine truth, is where we must start. We must insist of a frame of the existence of governing bodies as servants rather than sovereigns. Why even build these societies if they are not based on improving and enhancing the lives of the people within them and around them? Without that, what is it all for?

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We see everywhere, from Harlem to Hebron, the consequences of this unchallenged shibboleth. We see it in states that don’t feed their people, that don’t house them, that commit violence against them, that surveil and imprison them. We see it in states that use their strength to crush other peoples, all based on the belief that they have “rights” to do so. In fact, states that act against the health and safety of their people are the tragic norm in this violent world.

We must remember that states should exist if and only if they are fulfilling their duty to the people within them, and if their existence does not come at the expense of human lives. We most of all must never accept the flawed premise that Israel could ever have rights, that any state could. We must start to view states as instruments that exist at our service, or shouldn’t exist at all.

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