[Peace-discuss] Right to exist

[C. G. Estabrook]

[It may do no more than create more trouble for Brother Green,
but I've sent a shortened version of the following to the
News-Gazette.  --CGE] 


In response to a thoughtful letter from David Green, the
writer of a letter to the News-Gazette [Feb. 23] asks, "I
wonder if Green believes Israel has the right to exist?"  I
don't know how Mr. Green would answer, but that's a strange
question for an American to ask.

The United States is based on the principle that no state has
a right to exist.  "Whenever any form of government becomes
destructive of [securing human rights], it is in the right of
the people to alter or abolish it," says the Declaration of
Independence. Although we may tend to forget it, this
principle has been clear throughout our history.  In his first
inaugural address, Lincoln pointed out that a country belongs
to the people who inhabit it.  "Whenever they shall grow weary
of the existing government, they can exercise their
constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary
right to dismember or overthrow it."

The United States began by overthrowing a government that had
forfeited its right to exist -- the Declaration of
Independence is a bill of particulars, meant to show how that
had happened.  A government has a right to exist, according to
American doctrine, only when it works to "establish justice,
insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense,
promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of
liberty." If it does not work towards these things --
especially if it actively works against them -- it has no such
right.

In the present case we must ask if the government of Israel
satisfies this condition in regard to the people it rules over
-- some ten million between the Jordan River and the
Mediterranean.  The answer is obvious.  Like the government of
the former apartheid state of South Africa, it works in the
interests of only a minority of those inhabitants -- and is
destructive of the rights of the others -- so in neither case
can the state be said to have a right to exist.

There's a further difficulty.  All states, whether democracies
or dictatorships, are the states of their inhabitants, as
Lincoln noted -- except the state of Israel.  By law, Israel
declares itself the state not of its inhabitants but of the
Jewish people world-wide.  

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