Martin Asser

The idiot’s guide to states – and their ‘rights’: 1. States exist. Some 200 of them. 2. States are the political arrangement in which a people express their self-determination. That arrangement can and does change. 3. States enjoy rights, but only against each other. They have the right, for example, not to face unprovoked aggression from another state. 4. No state has some enduring, abstract “right” to exist. Otherwise bad ones like apartheid South Africa would be unreformable. 5. Peoples, by contrast, do have a right to exist. That’s why states that commit apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide are so gravely violating international law. Because they are violating a people’s right to exist. 6. When people argue Israel has a “right” to exist, they are trying to dupe you into believing international law is fine with apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide. It isn’t. For obvious reasons, international law prefers the rights of peoples over those of states. Otherwise, no state could ever be illegitimate. Its rights would trump those of the people it rules over. 7. When someone refuses to agree that Israel has a “right” to exist, they are not being antisemitic, whatever the media keeps telling you. They are upholding international law: the precedence of peoples’ rights over those of states. 8. The claim that Israel has a “right” to exist is not what it seems. It’s really the claim that the current reality of extreme inequality between Israelis and Palestinians be set in stone. It’s the diabolical claim that Israel has a right to commit apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinian people.