The Right to a State and State’s Rights

Zionism, like the Confederacy, treats oppression as a moral imperative

Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (mural study, U.S. Capitol), 1861

Journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a new book in which he (like many human rights organizations) characterizes Israel as an apartheid state.  CBS News correspondent Tony Dokoupil grilled Coates on his supposedly limited perspective, and demanded to know why he criticized Israel. “Is it because you just don’t believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?” he asked.

That’s a common Zionist talking point; Zionists insist, over and over, that criticism of Israel is the same as denying Israel’s right to exist. They then equate that with antisemitic calls for Jewish genocide.

Coates’ calm reply was telling. “My answer is that no country in this world establishes its ability to exist through rights,” he said. “Countries establish their ability to exist through force.”

I think that’s a really important response, and I think it helps get at the way that Zionist framing of Israel’s rights as a state are inseparable from the ideological justification of apartheid as a practice. Only individuals can have rights. Nationalist projects, however, are addicted to claiming rights for themselves. They do so specifically as a tactic for claiming victimization and oppressing individuals. When a nationalist project claims a right, the right that is claimed is always the right of oppression.

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States Can’t Have Rights

In the US context, the term “state’s rights” is inextr icably linked to the cause of the Confederacy during the Civil War. The Confederacy insisted that states could secede from the Union to protect their rights—especially the right to white supremacy and the perpetuation of Black chattel slavery. The white people of Confederate states continually and obsessively said that they had a right to enslave others.They insisted that to deny them the ability to oppress others was an attack on their own liberty. For example, here’s the beginning of the declaration of secession of Georgia:

For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic.  

South Carolina, in its declaration, excoriates the federal government for “its encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States”—that encroachment especially consisting of refusing to enforce fugitive slave acts. South Carolina, in the view of its white leaders, had a right to enslave Black people permanently and without interference. It demanded recognition of its rights, which meant recognition of, and aid in enforcing, slavery.

The right of the state, for which South Carolina went to war, was the right to strip people of rights. Confederate states said that they were victimized because they were not allowed to oppress people as they felt was their due. The right of the Confederacy to exist was inseparable from its right to kidnap, beat, and rape Black people with impunity.  

Nationalist rights and nationalist exclusions

It’s not just the Confederacy; claims to collectivist nationalist rights typically rely on collectivist nationalist exclusions. A demand for a nationalist right to power and authority, and especially for an ethnonationalist right to power and authority, goes hand in hand with stripping certain individuals, and certain groups, of rights.

You can see this in the philosophy of American national expansionism which allotted to white Americans “the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us”—a national right which was inseparable from the dispossession and genocide of native peoples. You can see it in China’s genocidal treatment of the Uyghur’s, who are accused of separatism and of posing a threat to the Chinese nationalist project. You can see it in Myanmar, where Buddhist nationalists have excluded Rohingya Muslims from citizenship and have actively tried to exterminate them, again because they are seen as a threat to national unity and national identity.  

In each of these cases, the core argument is the same. The ethnonationalist state (of China, of Myanmar, of America, of the Confederacy, of Israel) is presented as having an overriding right to exist and to impose its imagined homogenous community upon the land. The existence of people who do not conform to that imagined homogenous community then becoms not just an obstacle, but a dangerous threat to the integrity of the ethnonationalist policy. If an ethnonationalist state has a right to exist, then, through the inevitable logic of power, it has the right to police, expel, or murder those who threaten its purity and cohesion.

Zionists say that they are simply asking for an acknowledgement of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. But Israel cannot exist as a Jewish state without heavily policing citizenship and the franchise. It has to make sure, at a minimum, that non-Jewish people never outnumber or outvote Jewish people, just as the white supremacist Republican party in the US obsessively works to disenfranchise non-white people in an effort to ensure ongoing ethnonationalist power. Again, the right to an ethnonationalist state is by definition a “right” to strip power and rights from those who do not conform to the ethnonationalist logic of ethnicity, power, and place.

What about…

Nationalists in power inevitably, when faced with these arguments, turn to whataboutism. What about nationalist resistance movements? What about Hamas? If the Taliban can have a state, why can’t Israel? If the Iranian project is okay, why isn’t the Zionist one?

The answer is, again, as Coates said, that the Taliban and Iran are not “okay”. Hamas’ vision, insofar as it involves an ethnonationalist state in which Jews are ethnically cleansed, is not okay either. States are established through power, not through right. Iran did not have a right to impose a vicious misogynist theocracy on its people; it did so through power. Now that it exists, we have to deal with it one way or the other. But if we said, “Iran has a right to exist!” and then used that as a rationale for sending Iran lots of weapons with which to brutalize its people and its neighbors, that would be bad.

Jewish people have a long history of being excluded and targeted by states built around Christian or Muslim ethnonationalist identities. That traumatic and ugly history has led many Jewish people to conclude that they need an ethnonationalist state of their own—one which excludes and targets others. This is framed as a right; it’s framed as strength. But it’s neither; it’s just the self-righteous justification of oppression.

State’s do not have a right to exist; they do not have a right to violence and genocide in the name of imposing an ethnonationalist manifest destiny on the ground. States—all states—have duties. They have a duty to protect their citizens. And they have even more of a duty to protect those they do not consider citizens. The groups who are excluded from the franchise and from the ethnonationalist vision of community—be they Jews, immigrants, Uyghurs, native people, Palestinians, Rohingya, or Black people—those are the people who have the most powerful claim to rights, to care, to equality.

An abstraction does not have rights. An exclusionary ethnonationalist state does not have rights. It has power, and with that power, as the poet says, comes responsibility.  Coates is calling on Israel to recognize the rights of all its people. Because whether we’re talking about, China, Iran, Israel, or the Confederacy, no nation has the right to decide that its existence depends on subjugating some of its residents to others.