No state has a “right to exist”. The purpose of institutions is to serve human beings, and if your institution is slaughtering human beings en masse then it must be stopped. The survival of the institution itself in this scenario is of almost no import.
In the crudest terms, yes, that is the take, but I consider this a very misleading way to describe my view.
In particular, my view is that authorities are beholden to allthose they have authority over, no more and no fewer. Obviously, drawing the boundary between who is and is not subject to a given authority can be tricky, but in order to create a just world we have to do our best. In any case, if a group of Jewish people (or people of any other ethnicity) want to, you know, gather together somewhere and establish a government which only has authority in their community, whose members are all represented fairly, etc., then that’s absolutely fine by me. In this sense, I consider all people to have the right to self-governance. The problem is that the state of Israel has authority over people who are not fairly represented in its processes of government, and therefore to whom it is not in practice beholden—namely, the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank, and, since the 2007 blockade of Gaza and especially with the current war in Gaza, the Palestinians of Gaza. These are people that the state of Israel is exercising its authority over, and therefore, they become part of the constituency whose needs, just treatment, and fair representation it is responsible for. And currently, it is not making good on that responsibility. There are many names for this arrangement—apartheid, colonialism, etc.—but they all describe the same thing in slightly different permutations.
What I want to stress is that, not just rhetorically but descriptively, when the Israeli state starts exercising itself as a state over Palestinians, it ceases to merely be an example of “Jewish self-government”. It is, especially so long as Jews remains structurally the Israeli ruling class, an example of Jewish government of Palestinians at the expense of Palestinian self-government. That is what I object to.
In simpler terms: among those people that a state in fact governs, one does not get to pick and choose which among them the state has a responsibility to represent. You do not get to look at a state like Israel, which in fact exercises authority over everyone living in Palestine, and describe it as “Jewish self-governance”. That’s not what it is! The entirety of Israel/Palestine is either part of Israeli territory or under Israeli occupation, i.e. subject to the authority of Israel!
Of course, Israel apologists assert that this wholesale occupation, the until-future-notice exercise of Israeli authority over Palestinians without representation, is necessary to maintain the existence of Jewish self-government at all. But, if that’s true (which in fact I don’t think it is), all they’ve done is argue that Jewish self-government can’t exist in a just world. That would be unfortunate: I would like to see a world in which any community of people, with mutual bonds of whatever sort, can establish institutions that serve them and are responsive to their desires according to some fair process. If those people are Jewish and those institutions are state-like, then such an arrangement has a fair claim to be called “Jewish self-governance”. But if those institutions come at the cost of other people being able to do the same, if they “require” the exercise of authority over millions of other people, without equal and fair representation, for a seemingly indefinite period of time, then no, they cannot justly exist.
Institutions are beholden to everyone over whom they exercise authority. They do not get to pick and choose who among these people they must represent the interests of.
