The World’s Favorite Existential Question: Should Israel Exist?

Peloni:  Must read article by Victor Satya!  The poignant consequence of questioning if Israel should exist posits the implication that Israel’s survival is debatable, and that this debate should be held by those other than the people which formed this nation, in both the millennia past or in its current reconstitution.  And this word ‘reconstitution’ is the point upon which the ignominious debate should be silenced once and for all.  Indeed, the League of Nations did not grant the Jews a state of their own, but instead empowered them with only the recognition that our ancient people would once again be constituted on the indigenous lands of our ancestors.  This recognition itself was in deference to the will of the Jewish people to rebuild our nation on our land as represented by the Zionist movement.

Recognizing this personification  of Jewish strength, or the fact Jews have any strength at all, lies at the root of what fuels this manufactured qualifying debate over whether Israel should exist, ie whether the Jews should have the means by which to express their identity or to defend their people or to act with any demonstration of independence, all of which is missing in the shtetl mentality which is clearly all that is acceptable to those who seem to deem themselves with the authority and impunity to debate the equity in the existence of a state consisting of Jews.  Not only is there no basis upon which to raise this challenge, but those who would do so lack all dignity in doing so as well.  Their abuse and condescension of the Jewish people populates and informs their selective abuse and disregard of the Jewish state.  Those who would characterize the tolerance of our state as questionable simply have no limit of shame as their infamy also demonstrates no bound.

Victor Satya | TOI Blogs |May 10, 2026

Israeli Flag. Photo by Benjamin Istanbuli on Unsplash

Today, there is an extraordinary global habit in which millions who would never dream of questioning Japan, Brazil, or Belgium casually gather to debate whether the Jewish state should continue existing at all.

There are few propositions in modern political discourse more absurd than the idea that Israel does not have a right to exist. Yet this idea now floats through universities, media panels, and activist circles. Suggest abolishing Belgium and people assume you are clinically unwell. Suggest abolishing Israel and suddenly you are considered “critically engaged.”

And whenever this insanity is challenged, its proponents immediately reach for the same emergency flotation device: “Well, no country has an inherent right to exist.”

The remarkable thing, of course, is that this grand principle somehow materializes only in discussions about the Jewish state. Nobody spends their weekends debating whether Peru should continue existing. Nobody hosts student encampments demanding the dismantling of Denmark. Canada does not wake up each morning to discover protesters chanting for its annihilation between oat-milk lattes and diversity seminars.

We are told, with immense moral seriousness, that Jews have a right to exist, just not as a sovereign people in their ancestral homeland. Which is rather like telling someone they have every right to live, just preferably not in their own house. The modern world’s message to the Jews increasingly sounds like this: you may survive anywhere, provided it is nervously, temporarily, and always at somebody else’s discretion.

And this argument somehow passes for enlightened thought.

The truly astonishing part is how historically illiterate the entire proposition is. We are endlessly informed that Jews are merely European colonizers who arrived in “Palestine” and displaced its indigenous inhabitants. The only problem with this argument, apart from archaeology, recorded history, language, religion, genetics, and reality itself, is that it collapses under roughly two minutes of serious scrutiny.

The Jewish connection to the land predates Islam, Christianity, Arab conquest, and indeed the very name “Palestine.” Jews did not arrive in the Middle East and suddenly invent a historical attachment after a difficult weekend in Tel Aviv. The name Israel itself is ancient. Jerusalem has been central to Jewish civilization for thousands of years. Hebrew originated there. Jewish kingdoms existed there long before many modern states currently lecturing Israel on colonialism had even emerged from swamps or tribal disputes.

One almost admires the confidence required to inform Jews they are foreign to Judea. It is rather like flying to Athens and explaining to Greeks that they are actually Scandinavian settlers.

And yet this fiction persists because it performs an important ideological function: if Israel is framed as a colonial state, then its self-defense can be reframed as illegitimate aggression. This is the real destination of the argument. The claim that Israel has no right to exist inevitably bleeds into the claim that Israel has no right to defend itself. After all, colonial powers are not supposed to defend themselves. They are supposed to apologize, retreat, self-liquidate, and preferably do so while being applauded by Western graduate students wearing keffiyehs.

When terrorists massacre civilians, Israelis are granted minutes of international sympathy before the conversation turns to whether Israel’s response is “proportionate.” But Israel, uniquely, is expected to absorb violence. The reason Israel insists on its right to exist is not difficult to understand. Its enemies openly promise to destroy it.

Hamas does not hide this ambition. Iran does not whisper it privately in dimly lit basements. In Tehran, there is quite literally a countdown clock predicting the destruction of Israel. Hezbollah exists largely as an Iranian proxy positioned on Israel’s border. Yet somehow, in the middle of all this, There are those who keep asking why Israel is the only country insisting on the right to exist, doing so from a position that rarely pauses to consider why it might be the only country forced to make that insistence in the first place.

Well, perhaps because it’s enemies keep threatening to eliminate them.

France does not face neighboring militias dedicated to its extinction. There is no giant digital timer in London counting down the days until Belgium disappears. Spain is not surrounded by armed proxies chanting for its destruction. Yet somehow Israel is expected to behave as though these threats are merely colorful regional misunderstandings.

And then there is the irony surrounding the word “Palestinian” itself. During the British Mandate, Jews living there were also called Palestinians. Jewish newspapers carried the name. Jewish orchestras carried the name. Jews held Palestinian passports. Rome, after suppressing the Jewish revolt in the second century, renamed the province Judea as Syria Palaestina. The move was not accidental geography, it was administrative erasure.

One does not rename a region in honor of a people one is trying to preserve.

But facts have become deeply inconvenient to modern ideological fashion. The colonial narrative also conveniently ignores another awkward detail: nearly half of Israeli Jews descend not from Europe, but from Jewish communities expelled from Arab and Middle Eastern countries. The alleged European colonial project somehow arrived speaking Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, and Yemeni dialects.

This may be history’s first colonial movement in which the colonizers themselves were refugees fleeing extermination, expulsion, pogroms, and ethnic cleansing.

A peculiar empire indeed.

And beneath all this lies something older and uglier. The Jewish problem, historically, was never merely that Jews existed. It was that Jews insisted on existing collectively, visibly, and sovereignly rather than permanently as tolerated guests. That is why the existence of Israel unsettles so many people. Israel represents Jews no longer asking permission from kings, empires, universities, mobs, or international organizations in order to survive.

The scandal, ultimately, is not that Israel exists. The scandal is that in 2026, after everything history has already demonstrated, so much of the civilized world still treats Jewish sovereignty as a negotiable question.

And perhaps that explains everything.

One can disagree with Israel’s policies, governments, and decisions. But when the debate shifts to whether it should exist at all, we are no longer in the realm of politics, we are in something far older, and far less honest.

Perhaps the most revealing part of this entire debate is not what is said about Israel, but the ease with which so many people imagine the world would be better without it, and the silence that follows that thought.