Does Israel have a right to exist? The question has shadowed the Jewish state since before its founding, pursued it through wars and negotiations, and shows no sign of losing its force. Even the terms of the question are contested. Political commentator Matt Walsh argued that the phrase “right to exist” may be philosophically confused. No nation has such a right, he wrote. “If you can defend your existence, then you can exist. If you can’t, then eventually you won’t exist.”
The natural rights tradition sees it differently. Thomist philosopher Edward Feser replied to Walsh that the existence of a right does not depend on the ability to enforce it. A person possesses a right not to be murdered even if he lacks the strength to stop his attacker. Likewise, a nation may possess a legitimate claim to sovereignty even if it cannot defend that sovereignty by force. Feser concluded that Walsh is “committed to a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ conception of international relations.”
Whether or not that is fair to Walsh, the exchange clarifies the central question: what reasons could justify Israel’s right to exist? Several arguments recur in Israel’s defense, typically expressed informally in public debates but each capable of being stated in logical form. Five of the most common are presented below, with each argument followed by a brief defense of its premises. A closing reflection then examines why such arguments, despite their logical and moral force, so often fail to persuade those who oppose the Jewish state.
I. The Historical–Indigenous Argument
Premise 1: If a people originated in a land and maintained a continuous presence there, that people possesses a legitimate claim to political sovereignty in that land.
Premise 2: The Jewish people originated in the land of Israel and maintained a continuous presence there.
Conclusion: The Jewish people possess a legitimate claim to political sovereignty in that land.
Brief Defense of Premises: Indigenous peoples base their political claims not on conquest or legal decree but on the fact that their cultures first took root in a particular land. Modern political thought increasingly recognizes this principle. Native American nations, Aboriginal Australians, and other indigenous peoples around the world have pressed claims to sovereignty on the basis of ancestral ties that persist despite centuries of dislocation and intermarriage. The Jewish people fit this pattern with remarkable archaeological and documentary support. Non-Hebrew sources — the Merneptah Stele, the Tel Dan Stele, the Mesha Stele — independently confirm the presence of ancient Israel in the region. Even after the Roman-era exiles, Jewish communities remained in the land, as recorded by non-Jewish writers across subsequent centuries. Those who were forced abroad were consistently identified by host nations as a distinct people maintaining a cultural and national connection to a distant region, a fact sometimes cited by antisemites. For those host nations, the evidence was plain to see: the holidays and rituals of their Jewish neighbors followed the agricultural seasons of Israel, celebrating harvests and rains in a land far from where they actually lived. That collective memory never faded among those in exile, and many eventually returned to join the Jewish communities who had never left the homeland. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, Ottoman registers and European surveys showed that Jews had become the largest religious community in Jerusalem. More recently, genetic studies of both Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews trace ancestry to the ancient population of the Levant, lending biological weight to the historical record. If enduring ties between a people and a land justify indigenous political claims elsewhere, they justify the Jewish claim as well.
II. The Self-Determination Argument
Premise 1: All nations possess the right of political self-determination.
Premise 2: The Jewish people are a nation.
Conclusion: The Jewish people possess the right of political self-determination.
Brief Defense of Premises: The collapse of multinational empires after World War I produced a new international norm in which peoples bound together by shared history and culture possess the right to govern themselves. This principle of national self-determination reorganized the map of Europe, animated the global process of decolonization, and remains embedded in the foundational documents of the United Nations. The Jewish people satisfy the criteria that this principle requires. They share a common historical memory stretching back millennia, a religious and cultural tradition that has preserved a distinct collective identity across centuries of dispersion, a common liturgical language continuously studied and eventually revived as a spoken tongue, and a persistent self-understanding as a people rather than merely a faith community. The Zionist movement merely applied the general logic of national self-determination to this people by building the institutions through which a modern nation-state could plausibly emerge. If that principle justifies the independence of other nations, no coherent reason exists to deny it to the Jewish people.
III. The Legal Argument
Premise 1: If a state is established through recognized processes of international law, then that state possesses lawful standing among nations.
Premise 2: Israel was established through recognized processes of international law.
Conclusion: Israel possesses lawful standing among nations.
Brief Defense of Premises: Just as domestic legal systems grant legitimacy to contracts and titles that follow established procedures, the modern international system grants legitimacy to states that emerge through recognized legal and diplomatic processes. Israel’s founding followed that pattern at each stage. The San Remo Conference incorporated the Balfour Declaration into the post-World War I settlement for former Ottoman territories. The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine formalized this arrangement, explicitly recognizing the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land and calling for the establishment of a Jewish national home. When the United Nations succeeded the League of Nations, Article 80 of the U.N. Charter ensured that the rights established under the Mandate were not extinguished during the transition between international bodies. Against that background, the United Nations in 1947 recommended partition into separate Jewish and Arab states. Although the partition resolution itself was a recommendation rather than a binding enforcement measure, Israel declared independence the following year, received prompt recognition from numerous countries, and was admitted to the United Nations in 1949. Each of these steps followed the ordinary legal and diplomatic pathway by which modern states acquire international standing. Indeed, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan emerged from the same post-World War I Mandate framework. If those steps confer legitimacy on other countries, they confer it on Israel as well.
IV. The Refuge Argument
Premise 1: If a people repeatedly faces persecution while stateless, then that people possesses the right to establish a sovereign state capable of protecting it.
Premise 2: The Jewish people repeatedly faced persecution while stateless.
Conclusion: The Jewish people possess the right to establish a sovereign state.
Brief Defense of Premises: The right of a persecuted stateless people to seek sovereign protection follows from the most basic justification for political authority. Namely, legitimate government exists to protect those it governs. A people whom no state will protect has the strongest possible grounds to establish one. That principle applies to the Jewish case. For centuries, Jews lived as minorities across Europe where they faced expulsions, pogroms, and legal discrimination. The Holocaust brought that persecution to its most catastrophic extreme. Similarly, in many Muslim lands, Jews lived under humiliating dhimmi status. Jewish communities were permitted to exist only in subordinate legal and economic conditions. The vulnerability from this oppressive condition reached its depth when nearly the entire Jewish population was ethnically cleansed from Arab and Muslim countries in the twentieth century, a human rights crime sometimes called the Girush. Nor is this vulnerability purely historical, as October 7 demonstrated. FBI data also consistently shows that Jews are the leading victims of religiously motivated hate crimes in the United States, a nation widely regarded as the most favorable diaspora environment that Jews have ever known. If violent antisemitism persists even there, the case for a refuge is no relic of the past but a living argument.
V. The Democratic–Civilizational Argument
Premise 1: If a state sustains democratic institutions and contributes to a culture of intellectual and scientific discovery, then its continued existence possesses strong moral justification.
Premise 2: Israel sustains democratic institutions and contributes to such a culture.
Conclusion: Israel’s continued existence possesses strong moral justification.
Brief Defense of Premises: A state’s moral claim to continued existence is not exhausted by its founding history or its indigeneity or even its legal standing. The character of a state provides independent grounds for that claim. States that sustain political liberty, protect minority rights, and contribute to the store of human knowledge embody something worth preserving. Israel exhibits these characteristics in a region where they are not common. The country operates as a parliamentary democracy with regular competitive elections, an independent judiciary, and a free press. Muslim and Christian citizens vote, serve in parliament, sit on the Supreme Court, and participate across the range of Israeli public life. Israeli universities and research institutions contribute substantially to global science and medicine, and its technology sector has produced innovations with worldwide reach. Even though its population is only about ten million, Israel nevertheless ranks among the top fifteen Nobel prize-winning nations in the world, ahead of countries many times its size. It also ranks consistently among the world’s happiest nations, suggesting that even under the stresses of war the state succeeds in providing its citizens with a good life. None of this makes it perfect and beyond criticism. But by the standards which liberal theorists use to evaluate other countries, Israel is a society that protects liberty and advances human flourishing to a high degree. If those qualities constitute moral reasons for a state’s continued existence, Israel meets that standard as much as others.
Closing Reflection
These five arguments are logically airtight. If the premises are true, the conclusions follow by necessity. And there is abundant scholarship supporting the plausibility of those premises, far more than the brief paragraphs above could convey. Put together, the arguments form a striking cumulative case for Israel’s right to exist, and not merely because five arguments are stronger than one but because the arguments interlock, establishing a case greater than the sum of its parts.
For example, the self-determination argument requires that Jews constitute a nation; the historical-indigenous argument independently establishes that connection. The historical argument does not by itself explain why sovereignty is necessary now rather than some other arrangement; the refuge argument answers that directly. The legal argument establishes formal standing but cannot alone settle moral questions; the remaining four arguments operate on moral grounds that require no appeal to legal procedure. A critic must therefore defeat not each argument in isolation but the structure they form together, a considerably harder task.
But the most striking thing about these interlinking arguments is that they must be made at all. The modern world contains dozens of Muslim-majority states, many Christian-majority states, and numerous other countries organized around a dominant religion, language, or ethno-culture. Yet one very small Jewish-majority state on its ancient soil is regularly treated as questionable.
Critics defend this singular treatment by pointing to what they depict as Israel’s monstrous crimes. These accusations, however, often turn out to be false, exaggerated, or fabricated (for numerous examples, see Ben Dror Yemini’s Industry of Lies). Moreover, the condemnations tend to gain their persuasive force only when Israel is evaluated in isolation, an intellectual strategy that critics themselves sometimes acknowledge. Political scientists Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer admitted as much in their best-selling book The Israel Lobby: “Our focus,” they said, “will be primarily on Israeli behavior, and no attempt will be made to compare it with the actions of other states in the region or in other parts of the world.” (chap. 3, “A Dwindling Moral Case”; italics added). With that magnifying glass in place, admitted in an easily missed sentence, the authors create the impression throughout the book that Israel is uniquely bad. Yet the same type of inspection, applied consistently, would distort and delegitimize dozens of other states, especially in the Middle East but also Western states.
The persistent impulse to question Israel’s legitimacy and Israel’s alone suggests that anti-Israel opposition involves something other than disputes over evidence or standards of comparison. One can easily imagine someone who accepts the validity of the above five arguments but still rejects their soundness because of broader philosophical, theological, or psychological reasons that modify the premises. Imagine a Muslim who holds the traditional view that Jews ought to be segregated under dhimmi laws and that lands once governed by Muslim authority should remain under Islamic rule. Such a person might acknowledge the Jewish historical connection to the land, the international legal decisions of the twentieth century, even the tragedy of Jewish statelessness, and yet still maintain that Jewish sovereignty is illegitimate because it contradicts the political order which God established.
Or consider a Christian committed to replacement theology who believes that the Church has permanently replaced Israel in God’s promises. This person might well accept the logic of the arguments above and yet insist that the Jewish people no longer possess any valid national role in history. Within that theological framework, the existence of Jewish sovereignty may appear not merely mistaken but hostile to divine intention. One such contemporary activist even defends Church-enforced ghettoization of Jews as an act of mercy toward a wicked people.
Another illustration: Imagine a Jew in the diaspora who has absorbed, through years of immersion in a particular socialist or libertarian milieu, the assumption that anti-Zionism is the enlightened position and that Israel stands in the way of a more ethical political order. Such a person may not have reasoned his way to that conclusion so much as inherited it. He will resist the above arguments not necessarily because he has refuted them but because acknowledging them would threaten his place within the community whose acceptance he most values.
In these cases, arguments for Israel’s existence run up against philosophical, theological, and psychological walls. The pro-Israel reasoning is rejected for falling outside the bounds of a supposedly deeper, truer, more ethical structure of thought. The untested presuppositions, which each of these people brings to the debate, lie beyond the reach of any single argument about Israel specifically. To address those hidden assumptions would require abandoning the immediate question at hand and entering a far wider conversation about theology, history, political ideology, the psychology of belonging, maybe even the need for emotional counseling.
Wittgenstein diagnosed precisely this phenomenon: “All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis take place already within a system” (On Certainty, 105); “whenever we test anything,” he added, “we are already presupposing something that is not tested” (163). Evidence, justification, the crafting of arguments — these gain their life and persuasive force within such systems. The logic only persuades those who already inhabit a form of life in which the evidence counts.
This helps explain why defending Israel’s right to exist in day-to-day conversations can feel so disorienting and frustrating. Is the critic across from you at the dinner table a religious traditionalist or a secular progressive? A border-enforcing nationalist or an open-borders internationalist? A human rights idealist or a realpolitik pragmatist? Each requires a different conversation, a different body of knowledge, a different set of values and assumptions. You are not always immediately aware of which conceptual framework you are moving through. And Jews and Israel, as luck would have it, happen to play a role in an unusually high number of such world-pictures, each with its own rules, its own definitions, its own emotional proclivities, its own conclusions already in place. The professional scholar can barely keep up; for everyone else, the conversational task is simply overwhelming.
None of this is an argument for relativism. Some conceptual frameworks are false or immoral. And people do sometimes alter their world-pictures after their erroneous ideas collide with reality or are exposed as contradictory or meanspirited (witness Hunter Stuart and Taryn Thomas). But politics is an arena in which competing forms of life confront one another, and reason alone cannot always bridge those divides. As Wittgenstein observed of knowledge more broadly: “Of course, there is justification; but justification comes to an end” (On Certainty, 192). And: “At the end of reasons comes persuasion” (612) – the kinds of strategies described in books of rhetoric and in texts like Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and Ryan Holiday’s Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator.
But even such tactics of persuasion eventually hit a boundary. The oft-heard criticism that “Israel is terrible at public relations” assumes that some set of arguments exists which, if communicated skillfully enough, would persuade any given person who hears them. But persuasion, like evidence, operates within competing frameworks of belief and desire. Marketing and communications have their place, to be sure, but they cannot overcome every moral or ideological refusal. October 7 proved the point: not even the Palestinians’ own GoPro footage of their atrocities was enough to generate sympathy for Israel in much of the world. Indeed, in some frameworks, it was stimulating and pleasurable.
And because of that tragic fact, the disagreement between Walsh and Feser returns with renewed significance. Feser is correct that rights exist even when they cannot be enforced. But Walsh’s darker observation captures an element of political reality. In a world where valid arguments can be dismissed because of prior commitments, Israel’s survival depends less on the strength of its rights and reasoning than on its will and ability to defend itself.
