States Don’t Have a Right to Exist. People Do.

In today’s Washington, which seethes with partisan acrimony, Democrats and Republicans at least agree on this: Israel has a right to exist. This right has been affirmed by the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, and his Democratic antagonist, the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries; by the Biden administration’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and his Republican successor, Marco Rubio; by Donald Trump’s new secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, and by the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer. In 2023, the House affirmed Israel’s right to exist by a vote of 412-1.

This is not the way Washington politicians generally talk about other countries. They usually start with the rights of individuals, and then ask how well a given state represents the people under its control. If America’s leaders prioritized the lives of all those who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, it would become clear that asking if Israel has a right to exist is the wrong question. The better question is: Does Israel, as a Jewish state, adequately protect the rights of all the individuals under its dominion?

The answer is no.

Consider this scenario: If Scotland legally seceded, or Britons abolished the monarchy, the United Kingdom would no longer be united nor a kingdom. Britain as we know it would cease to exist. A different state would replace it. Mr. Rubio, Mr. Schumer and their colleagues would accept this transformation as legitimate because they believe that states should be based on the consent of the governed.

America’s leaders make this point most emphatically when discussing America’s foes. They often call for replacing oppressive regimes with states that better meet liberal democratic norms. In 2017, John Bolton, who later became a national security adviser in the first Trump administration, argued that “the declared policy of the United States should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran.” In 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the People’s Republic of China a “Marxist-Leninist regime” with a “bankrupt totalitarian ideology.”These U.S. officials weren’t urging these countries just to replace one particular leader, but to change their political system — thus, in essence, reconstituting the state. In the case of the People’s Republic of China, which signifies Communist Party dominance, or Islamic Republic of Iran, which denotes clerical rule, this would most likely require changing the country’s official name.

In 2020, Secretary Pompeo declared in a speech that America’s founders believed that “government exists not to diminish or cancel the individual’s rights at the whims of those in power, but to secure them.” Do states that deny individual rights have a “right to exist” in their current form? The implication of Mr. Pompeo’s words is that they do not.

What if we talked about Israel that way? Roughly half the people under Israeli control are Palestinian. Most of those — the residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — cannot become citizens of the state that wields life-or-death power over them. Israel wielded this power in Gaza even before Hamas invaded on Oct. 7, 2023, since it controlled the Strip’s airspace, coastline, population registry and most of its land crossings, thus turning Gaza into what Human Rights Watch called “an open-air prison.”