Peter Hallward[1]

On 7 October 2023 some arguments began that continue to this day. Did the Hamas-led attack on Israel come out of the blue or was it a response to decades of domination and dispossession? Was it an incomprehensible act of savagery or a long-awaited prison break? A well-timed strike at a complacent oppressor or a counter-productive mistake? Were its intended targets military or civilian or both? Were Hamas leaders telling the truth when they said “there were clashes and confrontations [but] we did not have any intention or decision to kill civilians”?[2]

These and other questions may divide global opinion for the foreseeable future, but in the wake of 7 October many world leaders immediately united around a single principle, proclaimed with a single voice: confronted with an enemy like Hamas, Israel has an obvious right to defend itself. Everyone can see that the first responsibility of a government is to protect its people from harm, just as everyone knows they have a right to protect themselves if they come under attack.

Within forty-eight hours of the 7 October attack the leaders of the US, UK, France, Germany and Italy issued a joint statement proclaiming “our steadfast and united support to the State of Israel, and our unequivocal condemnation of Hamas and its appalling acts of terrorism […]. Our countries will support Israel in its efforts to defend itself and its people against such atrocities.” US president Joe Biden set the tone, confirming a few days later that “Israel has the right to defend itself. We must make sure they have what they need to protect their people today and always.” On 12 October German chancellor Olaf Scholz insisted that “Israel has the right, guaranteed by international law, to defend itself and its citizens against this barbarous attack, and to restore security within and for Israel.” By then, Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau had already declared that his government “unequivocally condemns these terrible attacks in the strongest possible terms and reaffirms its support for Israel’s right to defend itself, in accordance with international law.” Trudeau’s Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese affirmed the same principle, as did allies of the US and of Israel across the world. All through the increasingly bitter debates that would define the ensuing weeks and months, leaders like Biden, Trudeau, Scholz and Sunak would return to this point again and again, as a fundamental and self-evident point of orientation. It’s not surprising, needless to say, that appeals to a right to self-defence should resonate particularly well in countries like the US or the UK in the wake of attacks they themselves suffered on 11 September 2001 or 7 July 2005.

No less than the American government which used 9/11 as a pretext for its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich and Yoav Gallant was certainly quick to act on its mandate to defend itself. Within hours of the 7 October attacks the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had initiated the most intensive military assault on any territory since the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Within a few weeks, the IDF had already dropped the equivalent of two nuclear bombs on a region only a quarter the size of London. By April 2025 that number had risen to the equivalent of six Hiroshima bombs. Dissatisfied with the pace of IDF progress in Gaza, in late March 2025 veteran US congressman Tim Walberg proposed that Israel should emulate the American example more directly. “It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.” Since “the Palestinian cause is an evil one”, echoed Walberg’s fellow House Republican Randy Fine on 22 May via an interview with Fox News, Israel should now take the final step towards its elimination. “We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here.”

Right from the start, Israeli counter-measures were conducted and framed in terms that quickly led many hundreds of scholars and observers (myself included) to characterise them as “potentially genocidal.” The more time has gone on, the more reasons have accumulated to justify that characterisation. Nevertheless, for most of this time Netanyahu and his backers have been able to say to the world: We’re taking these painful but necessary steps in self-defence. We are targeting Hamas terrorists and their terrorist infrastructure. We regret the loss of civilian life and are doing all we can to minimise it. Inhuman Hamas terrorists cover themselves with human shields; is it our fault then if some of our targeted killings take out some of these shields as well?

When in due course Israel was called to justify its bombardment of Gaza before the International Court of Justice, in January 2024, it consistently framed its actions in terms of legitimate self-defence. As late as 21 May 2025, when the IDF chief of staff Eyal Zamir shared a statement about Israel’s latest military offensive in Gaza he reminded the Palestinians that “we are acting in self-defense. […] We are not the ones who brought this destruction upon you. We are not the ones who started this war. We are not the ones who have deprived you of food, shelter, and money. […] Hamas brought destruction, and it will not be the one to rebuild.”

Over the past eighteen months, Israel has wheeled out its alleged right to self-defence, over and over, to justify every bombing, every assassination, every routinely-regretted instance of collateral damage. Incessant appeals to this right, precisely as an uncontroversial and self-evident entitlement, have been an essential part of the propaganda war—or rather, these appeals have made up virtually the whole and exclusive substance of that war. They remain an essential part of the campaign first to demonise and now to criminalise critics of the genocide. Well before Trump’s second administration came along to put the finishing touches on this campaign, its importance was understood perfectly well by someone like Palantir CEO Alex Karp, when he addressed other military-security-intelligence contractors in April 2024. At the time student protests and encampments were beginning to spread and perhaps threatening to delegitimate the whole Zionist project. Echoes of mass opposition to war in Vietnam were impossible to miss. “We kind of just think these things that are happening, across college campuses especially, are a sideshow,” Karp explained. “No, they are the show. Because if we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever.”[3] However many bodies might pile up, surely anyone can understand the difference between killing people in self-defence and murder pure and simple. Or as Netanyahu’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich admitted in August 2024, “nobody will let us cause two million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified and moral […]. What can we do? We live today in a certain reality, we need international legitimacy for this war.”[4]

 

A Right of Self-Defence?

 

The international legitimacy of Netanyahu’s government and their war, such as it is, has always depended on them winning this all-important intellectual debate about Israel’s right to self-defence. They deserve to lose it for at least four reasons.

I

In the first and most obscenely obvious place, despite every effort to conflate news and fake-news, truth and post-truth, it’s still not easy to mistake something for its direct opposite. However much Netanyahu’s government might block or mislead the media, however many journalists its army might kill (and that number now exceeds the combined total killed during both world wars, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslavian wars and the US invasion of Afghanistan), however much it might attack and then exclude UNWRA and other international organisations, it remains hard to represent twenty months of untrammelled assault as a defensive operation. It’s hard to account for the killing of tens of thousands of children and infants, the wholesale obliteration of Gaza’s infrastructure, the relentless bombings of supposedly “protected” places of refuge, etc., in terms of self-defence. It’s hard to see why self-defence might require the destruction of all nineteen of Gaza’s universities and the full or partial destruction of virtually all its hospitals and clinics. It’s hard to remember, when “more than 95 per cent of schools in Gaza have been partially or completely destroyed,” that under international law (as UNICEF observed in November 2024) schools should themselves remain “protected spaces.” Whether they take aim at schools or hospitals or houses or tents, it’s hard to explain the way Israeli pilots identify and multiply the targets they eliminate, via AI-driven targeting programmes like “Lavender,” “The Gospel,” or “Where’s Daddy?,” in anything but “offensive” terms. The more people targeted by deliberate policies of mass deprivation begin to starve, meanwhile, the harder it becomes to justify such policies in terms that bear any sort of relation to any notion of defence.

II

The second reason is or should be equally obvious, and concerns the location of all these targets. From the moment it began, Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, in the eyes of the UN and international law, has itself always been judged unlawful i.e. legally indefensible. Though they may be evoked less often today than in previous decades, the principles enshrined in the UN resolution that framed all diplomatic negotiations following Israel’s incursions of 1967 remain perfectly clear. After confirming the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war,” the first paragraph of Security Council resolution 242 calls for the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” This point is not complicated, and the basic condition for peace in an occupied territory could not be more self-evident: a complete and unqualified end to the occupation.

Rather than accept the legally sanctioned borders that applied before 1967, however, Israel and the US have opted to persevere in a thoroughly illegal project of invasion and colonisation. Israel formalised its unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem in 1980, and in 2017 US President Trump “finally acknowledge[d] the obvious” fact of full Israeli control of the city, celebrating this “recognition of reality” as “a long overdue step to advance the peace process.” Meanwhile dynamic maps of Israeli settlements established in the West Bank since 1967 speak for themselves. There are now several hundred Israeli settlements or outposts in the West Bank, and the number of Israeli colonists has grown to around 700,000 (living in the midst of around 2.7 million Palestinians). Every new settlement is as illegal as the last, but once established each additional “fact on the ground” becomes a further outpost to expand and “defend.” Adam Smith might easily have recognised what’s going on: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”

Following through on plans for the mass expulsion of Palestinians announced in 2017, in May 2023 Netanyahu’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich began taking steps designed to enable an additional 500,000 Israeli settlers to push into the occupied West Bank. A year later he confirmed that his government was now in a position to “establish facts on the ground in order to make Judea and Samaria [i.e. the occupied West Bank] an integral part of the state of Israel. […] We will establish sovereignty in Judea and Samaria first on the ground and then through legislation. I intend to legalise the young settlements. My life’s mission is to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state.” It’s no surprise that the best-prepared settlers were quick to exploit the new opportunities opened up by international reactions to 7 October, and at a party meeting last year Smotrich could applaud the fact that in 2024 the amount of confiscated land was around ten times larger than the average of previous years. In January 2025, Netanyahu’s Defence Minister Israel Katz launched a new assault on the long-established West Bank refugee camps of Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams, first set up to accommodate people expelled by Israel in 1948. Over several weeks at least 40,000 refugees were forced to evacuate. On 21 February Katz declared that the three camps “are now empty of residents,” and “instructed [troops] to prepare for a prolonged presence in the cleared camps for the coming year, and to prevent the return of residents.”

After months of technically unauthorised land grabs, on 29 May 2025 Netanyahu’s government finally gave formal sanction for the largest single expansion of settlements in several decades, approving the construction of 22 new Jewish communities scattered all across the occupied territory. “The new settlements are all placed within a long-term strategic vision,” explained Netanyahu’s Defence Ministry, “whose goal is to strengthen the Israeli hold on the territory, to avoid the establishment of a Palestinian state, and to create the basis for future development of settlements in the coming decades.” Defence minister Israel Katz described the announcement as “a Zionist, security, and national response—and a clear decision on the future of the country.” Smotrich hailed it as a “once-in-a-generation decision,” before adding: “Next step sovereignty!”

It’s now clearly just a matter of time, the Israeli reporter Elisha Ben Kimon told the BBC in late May, before Netanyahu’s administration tries to annex what remains of the West Bank as a whole: “I think that Israel is a few steps from declaring this area as Israeli territory.” Netanyahu’s own intentions remain perfectly clear. “The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land,” he insists, “not in our eternal capital Jerusalem, nor in our ancestral heritage of Judea and Samaria.” Trump’s new ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has been equally candid about the new US position. “When people use the term ‘occupied,’” he told an interviewer last year, “I say: ‘Yes, Israel is occupying the land, but it’s the occupation of a land that God gave them 3,500 years ago. It is their land.’”

The question brooks no equivocation: will the consistent international legal judgement on Israel’s colonies actually be enforced, yes or no? Israel and the US are answering this question as we speak, in the most emphatic terms, but they cannot justify it in terms of “self-defence” unless they turn the meaning of words inside out. An occupation established and maintained by military conquest is illegal by definition but even those who insist that Israeli citizens have an ancestral if not divine right to settle the territory they now occupy cannot argue that it is theirs to “defend” unless they admit that defence and conquest amount to one and the same thing.

III

A third and more far-reaching argument against Israeli’s recourse to the language of protection and defence has been stressed in a number of contexts by the legal scholar and writer Ronald Roberts, alongside many others: “In reality no occupying power has a legal right of self-defence.”[5]

Article 51 of the UN Charter acknowledges the general and “inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations,” but on a number of decisive occasions both UN officials and the International Court of Justice have concluded that this article does not condone measures a state might take against the inhabitants of a territory it has invaded or occupied. Most notably, when in 2004 the ICJ was asked to rule on the legality of Israel’s recently constructed security barrier or “wall of apartheid” in the West Bank, after “finding that the construction of the wall and its associated régime were contrary to the relevant provisions” of several international conventions, it condemned the way the wall denied local inhabitants of their freedom of movement and prevented “their exercise of the right to work, to health, to education and to an adequate standard of living.” After condemning these things the court “concluded that Israel could not rely on a right of self-defence or on a state of necessity in order to preclude the wrongfulness of the construction of the wall, and that such construction and its associated régime were accordingly contrary to international law.”

More recently, jurists and policy analysts like John Dugard (former U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories and Professor of International Law at the University of Leiden), Noura Erakat (Rutgers professor and co-founder of Jadaliyya magazine) and Mitchell Plitnick (president of ReThinking Foreign Policy and a former co-director of Jewish Voice for Peace) have all repeatedly evoked the several ways that international law undermines the incessant and invariant refrain that “Israel has every right to defend itself.” As Plitnick explains, ever since the state was founded in 1948, Israeli leaders have claimed this right so as to:

“deny Palestinians the right to their property, to their homes, and to their freedom. It was used to justify the theft of Palestinian property in the wake of both the 1948 and 1967 wars, and to excuse the imposition of martial law on Palestinians inside the new state for nearly two full decades. The mantra of Israel’s “right to defend itself” is invoked at virtually every turn not only by Israel and its supporters, but also by friendly governments in the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia, and other places. So here’s a news flash: Israel actually does not have the right to defend itself in terms of the West Bank and Gaza. It has the right to protect its citizens, but it does not have the right to use overwhelming military force against people under its occupation.”

By definition, where one exists a sovereign state invests itself with the power to protect its citizens, but if such protection was Israel’s priority then as Plitnick points out you might expect it “to desist from putting them in harm’s way by planting settlements in the middle of occupied territory.” As an occupying power, Israel’s primary responsibility is to protect rather than compromise—let alone directly threaten—the safety of the people living under its occupation. In brief, “Israel cannot simultaneously occupy Palestinian land and attack it as a ‘foreign’ threat, or treat those resisting as enemy combatants.” In 2024, a group of Israeli legal scholars including professors Orna Ben-Naftali, Aeyal Gross, Itamar Mann and Yuval Shany again confirmed that Israel, at a minimum, as the belligerent occupier of northern Gaza, “must actively ensure the local population has sufficient access to the supplies needed for its survival.”

By twisting its interpretation of international law in order “to justify its use of militarised force,” argued Noura Erakat during one of Israel’s earlier assaults on Gaza, when Israel refers to its right to defend and protect itself, what it’s actually protecting is first and foremost its “colonial authority.” Since Israel undeniably exercises de facto control over its occupied territories, it is therefore also required in principle to safeguard the inhabitants of those territories via recourse to all appropriate police powers. In practice, however, Israel:

“uses those police powers to continue its colonial expansion and apartheid rule and then in defiance of international law cites its right to self-defence in international law to wage war against the population, which it has a duty to protect. […] It specifically forces the people of the Gaza Strip to face one of the most powerful militaries in the world without the benefit either of its own military, or of any realistic means to acquire the means to defend itself.”

The longer its war goes on, the more Israel has come to conceive the very notion of defence in terms of aggressive if not spectacular offence. The more it seems that “any good defence is also an attack,” notes the philosopher Elsa Dorlin, the easier it becomes to appeal to “the principle of defense of self to legitimise its right to violence and colonisation.” Rather than adopt a consistent i.e. generalisable position on the principle of self-defence, adds Roberts, the logic of Israel’s response to 7 October is more reminiscent of the discredited apartheid-era doctrine of “hot pursuit,” a notion evoked by South Africa’s P.W. Botha in the 1970s and 80s to provide diplomatic cover for his army’s illegal cross-border raids against ANC outposts and their supporters in Namibia and Angola.

If a colonial occupier has no clearly sanctioned right to defend itself against the inhabitants of the lands it occupies, it is worth remembering, by contrast, that colonised peoples themselves certainly enjoy a widely acknowledged right to resist the military imposition and enforcement of colonial rule. When it approved resolution 2105 in 1965, the UN General Assembly “recognise[d] the legitimacy of the struggle by the peoples under colonial rule to exercise their right to self-determination and independence and invite[d] all States to provide material and moral assistance to the national liberation movements in colonial Territories.” The additional protocols subsequently adopted in 1977 to supplement the Geneva Conventions of 1949 extended their scope to include “armed conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist régimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination, as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations.” Clarifying previous resolutions about anti-colonial struggles for self-determination, in 1982 the UN General Assembly’s resolution 37/43 further confirmed “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.”

Informed by his long experience of anti-apartheid struggles in both South Africa and Palestine, the jurist John Dugard duly recognises that “resistance in militarily occupied countries such as France and the Netherlands during World War II is still highly praised. Palestinians suffer from both a racist colonial regime and military occupation. Why are they not considered in the same way as the oppressed in African colonies, South Africa during apartheid, and occupied France and the Netherlands?” Israel’s adamant refusal to end its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, confirms Ralph Wilde of the University of London’s Faculty of Laws, “gives rise to a right to resist in international law on the part of the Palestinian people,” one “equivalent to the right that the Ukrainian people have to resist” Russia’s recent invasion and occupation.[6]

IV

A fourth, more complicated and certainly more controversial reason concerns the most consequential legal question of all, the question that underlies law-making power itself: in what sense does any state, and in particular a state like the currently constituted and governed state of Israel, have a general right to exist at all? In what sense is a particular group of people, defined by religious or ethnic criteria, who settle on land taken from other people, entitled to invest themselves with sovereign power and then use that power either to attack their neighbours or to defend their state against them? In what sense is the use of such power legitimate? This of course is the real heart of the matter, but since Israel’s right to exist is often taken to be both self-evident and absolute the point is rarely addressed directly. In November 2023 a normally polarised US House of Representatives united to reaffirm “the State of Israel’s right to exist” by 412 votes to 1.

Rather than debate the question it is generally answered in advance, in most western contexts, through combined appeal to the legacy of scripture and remembrance of the Holocaust. The promise of a promised land can be understood in different ways, but most people are familiar with the ancient link between the kingdom of Judah (or the later Roman province of Judea) and the people who eventually came to be called Jews. Most people know something of the long and violent history of European anti-semitism, and most people also know that Hitler’s murderous régime exterminated millions of Jewish people; surely it follows that the survivors and their descendants must have every right to defend themselves in whatever place and by whatever means they deem necessary. This is the logic that underlies most attempts, by Netanyahu and his supporters, to redescribe deliberate acts of aggression and conquest as legitimate acts of self-defence. By dint of repetition, this argument has become so familiar, and so vital to Israeli, American and European interests, that it often seems to brook no discussion at all. Nevertheless this argument too doesn’t hold up, if it’s argued in terms of the rights of a state rather than of people.

Although this isn’t the place to sketch even the most minimal account of states and their rights (let alone any account of the contested historical circumstances that surrounded the creation of the state of Israel) we can at least briefly try to address this basic point of principle. However unwelcome it might be in some quarters, the plain fact is that no state has a general or inherent “right to exist.” As the Australian International Relations scholar Scott Burchill explained in 2011, “a ‘right to exist’ does not exist for states” and no such right “can be found in international law or in any serious theory of international relations.” In particular Israel’s insistence on recognition of its right to exist should not be confused with UN Resolution 242’s recognition, in 1967, of “the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognised boundaries.” A right to live in peace within secure boundaries, Burchill adds, “exists for all peoples regardless of their geographic location: for Israelis and Palestinians equally.” Noam Chomsky likewise regularly reminds his readers that “no state has a right to exist” and ordinarily “no one demands such a right. For example, the United States has no such right. Mexico doesn’t respect the right of the United States to exist, sitting on half of Mexico, which was conquered in war.” Reluctant recognition of the fact that the US exists is one thing, which further obliges Mexico to recognise that it enjoys certain rights in our existing international system; acknowledgement of the legitimacy of those rights is something else.[7] Ordinarily no state demands that others acknowledge its right to exist—with the notable exception of Israel with respect to the Palestinians.

When Israel makes the exceptional demand that the PLO and then Hamas accept its right to exist, continues Burchill, their only reason for doing so is clearly to compel the PLO and Hamas “to acknowledge the legitimacy of the dispossession of the Palestinian people from their homeland.” In other words, as a preliminary condition for peace negotiations Israel insists on a concession tantamount to “pre-emptive surrender.” By making peace talks depend on such an exceptional demand the Israelis and Americans have always been able to prevent “serious negotiations towards a settlement of the conflict from proceeding. Today they are still demanding of a political party something that has never before been required of any state. It should be a surprise to no one that this conflict is now in its seventh decade.”[8]

If a state had a general right to exist, simply by dint of existing as a state, then we’d have to conclude that, no less than Israel or the US or the UK, so too fascist Italy or apartheid Rhodesia or the slave-owning Confederacy also had a right to exist. But did they? What’s at issue in each case is clearly not an abstract right but a specific judgement of legitimacy.

A state cannot claim a legal right to exist for two main reasons. In the first place, no state can appeal to a legal right to exist since states are themselves the source of law. “No provision of international law guarantees a state’s ‘right to exist’”, the former UN official Moncef Khane observes, because “statehood is a political reality not a legal one.” To the extent that its member states respect it, the UN charter may provide a viable framework for international law—but it does not endow either its General Assembly or its Security Council with the authority to “create” a state, in Israel, Palestine or anywhere else. As a law-making body, no state has or could have an inherent or “pre-existing” right to exist; on the contrary, every state must instead earn recognition by acting in ways that solicit legally-binding acknowledgement from other states. “States don’t exist because they have a “right” to,” reiterates Yousef Munayyer. “They exist because certain groups of people amassed enough political and material power to make territorial claims and establish governments, sometimes with the consent of those already living there and, oftentimes, at their expense.” For example the people who established a state in South Korea had enough power to secure it, whereas when some of these same people tried to do something similar in South Vietnam they did not.

In the second place, no particular state can have a legal right to exist since by definition questions of right apply universally and not exceptionally. If (and it’s a big if) we uphold certain human rights then these must apply to all humans, and if states or people have rights then these must apply to every state and all people. The rightfulness of a state depends on whether it adheres to universalisable norms or not. Rather than enjoy an inherent right to exist any state or would-be state is obliged, rather, to justify its existence, by demonstrating how this existence is indeed legitimate. It is obliged to show how it is actually and in practice entitled to invest itself with commanding or law-making power.

The key term here is obviously the word “legitimate,” and again there are several ways of understanding it. If you take the very idea of a sovereign state to be illegitimate then of course any and every state can be written off as a violent oppression of collective life. On the other hand, if instead you reduce the question of legitimation to the simple exercise of power then you can fall back on the oldest and most consequential principle in political history: might makes right. As Thucydides already understood perfectly well, by this logic the strong can do what they will since the weak shall suffer as they must.[9] By this logic, any group of people that is actually strong enough to assert itself as a sovereign force is ipso facto entitled to establish the institutions of state or law-enforcing power.

No one denies that Israel, having won the support of allies in Europe and the US, was indeed strong enough to do this in 1948, as were the various American colonies that won their independence from European powers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The same goes, for instance, for the Algeria that won its independence from France in 1962, as it also does for France itself, when it began to constitute itself as a revolutionary state in 1789. The same logic applies too, it should be added, to states like the southern Confederacy that broke away from the United States in 1860-65 or the apartheid states that temporarily established themselves a century later in parts of southern Africa. What each of these very different cases have in common is the fact that they acquired the capacity to organise themselves as a nation and then did what had to be done to invest themselves with sovereign or commanding power, including of course the power to wage a war of national liberation or defence. None of these new states could appeal to a legal right to exist, however, since each of them created itself by breaking away from the law-making power that had previously governed it.

If the legal question is straightforward, the political question asks which of these cases might be considered legitimate and why. One familiar way of summarising this endless argument is to refer to the basic principle that divides Rousseau from Hobbes. Along Hobbesian lines we might say that the fact of victory is what secures the power and thus the “right” to form and defend a state. The very fact of being able actually to secure and defend itself is what further authorises a Hobbesian sovereign to judge and do whatever its “self-defence” might demand. “Irresistible power” compels obedience as a matter of course. Might makes right and (as Hobbes says of God) to have all might is also to make all right; by the same token a sovereign that proves too weak (like Hobbes’s own king Charles) to enforce the law also thereby forfeits their right to make law at all. By this criterion, Israel secured its existence as a sovereign state by force of arms in 1948 and again in 1967 and 1973, and its neighbours have been duly reminded of this existence with its every subsequent military operation. By this same criterion the Palestinians might also be refused statehood for the simple reason that they and their supporters have not yet proved strong enough to insist on it.

As Rousseau explains in the opening chapters of his Social Contract, however, to reduce right to might is simply to eliminate the question of right altogether. “Force does not create right, and we are only obliged to obey legitimate powers.” The question of right isn’t whether a group of people have the sheer capacity to institute a state or to invest themselves with sovereign authority; the question is whether this state can indeed prove itself to be legitimate by criteria that might extend beyond the immediate concerns of this particular state, i.e. that might extend universally or without exception. When for instance in 1789 the French revolutionaries published their Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, they said that since “the law is the expression of the general will” so then “all citizens have the right to take part, personally or through their representatives, in its making” (art. 6). The immediate question during and after 1789, as in so many constituent moments ever since, was simply this: who exactly is to count as full and “active” citizens of this emerging polity? Is it to be only people born in a particular place? Only adherents of a particular religion? Speakers of a particular language? Owners of a particular amount of property? Members of a particular sex or race? Arrivals from a particular metropole? In short: should citizenship in the new revolutionary nation be restricted to free white male French Catholics who pay a certain amount of annual tax? Or, on the contrary (as many of Rousseau’s followers would soon argue), should the category of citizen be open to all the inhabitants of the place in question, without exception or discrimination?

This argument has raged in different places at different times, and can only ever be decided on moral and political grounds. The violent legacies of dispossession and exclusion are all too obvious in divided countries ranging from Ireland and the former Yugoslavia to Sudan and India/Pakistan. In each case, however, the question of right is itself stark. Should a legitimate state have an inclusive and egalitarian concept of citizenship? Can any colonising settler state be legitimate?

As a matter of international right, ethno-nationalism must be either be judged legitimate everywhere or nowhere. By these criteria, as currently constituted the state of Israel is illegitimate for the same kinds of reason that made the apartheid states of Rhodesia and South Africa illegitimate. As the new “Basic Law” adopted in 2018 stipulates, in Israel “the right to exercise national self-determination is unique to the Jewish people.” In keeping with long-standing Zionist practice, the law limits a right of return or immigration to Jewish people and “views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value.” The steady expansion and consolidation of such settlements in the West Bank is only the most obvious expression of the state’s ethnocratic and apartheid character.

Characterisation of Israel as an apartheid state is not a provocative charge fuelled by recent polemics or outrage at recent atrocities, it is the carefully documented and considered judgement of the region’s most informed and respected human rights groups, to say nothing of a long and long-suffering series of UN officials. Already in the years leading up to 2023, one such group after another (including Human Rights Watch, Al-Haq, B’Tselem, and Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic) lined up to condemn what Amnesty International called “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians,” exposing “how massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law.”

No state, and least of all an apartheid state, has a legal or inherent right to exist. By contrast, to the extent that we uphold universal declarations like those proclaimed by the UN in 1948 or by revolutionary France in 1789, we recognise that all people do indeed have a right to live and thus a right to security or self-defence. This right applies to Jewish people no less and no more than it applies to all other people. If we uphold universal rights then by definition everyone everywhere has a right to protection from harm—everyone in the same way as everyone else. It should then go without saying that such a right cannot possibly be used to justify occupying other people’s lands or expelling them from their homes, all while depriving them of the means required to prevent this from happening.

The right to self-defence applies to Jewish people in the same way as to Muslim people or Arab people or Christian people, but it cannot apply to Zionists claiming to defend lands they have stolen from someone else. As Naomi Klein wrote during Passover in April 2024, the choice between Zionism and emancipation is another stark alternative. “Zionism is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery—the story of Passover itself—and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide. It is a false idol that has taken the transcendent idea of the promised land—a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across multiple faiths to every corner of this globe—and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate.”[10]

 

The Fact of Conquest

 

Legal theory is one thing, of course, and political practice is another. As with any international conflict what’s really at issue here is less a matter of abstract rights or legalities per se than of political objectives, moral priorities and military power. Reviewing the legal arguments for and against Israel’s recourse to logics of self-defence, in a suggestive blogpost from November 2023 Marko Milanovic (Professor of Public International Law at the University of Reading) concludes that by itself, international law is neither adequate nor especially relevant here. “This is one of those cases in which ethics provides a clearer answer than the law.” Even on bare utilitarian grounds, Milanovic argues:

“morally, Israel can only justify taking the lives of innocents by saying that doing so would save more lives in the future. The burden is on Israel to show that, even if it is not killing civilians intentionally, it is somehow still acting in such a way that will save more lives in the long run. This is not a burden that, in my judgment at least, Israel has so far met or is likely to meet. When confronted with this moral question, whether Israel has the right to self-defence under Article 51 of the Charter is largely beside the point.”[11]

In any case, however you might understand the principle in theory, what Israel itself means in practice by its “right of self-defence” has been clearly and regularly illustrated by what it has actually done to its neighbours, from Lebanon in 1982 through Gaza 2008-09, 2012, 2014  and 2021 on to the end-game of 2024-25.

What should now be equally clear—even to the most ardent supporters of the Israeli war machine—is that however else they might want to justify it, Israel’s assault on Gaza can have nothing to do with even the most expansive understanding of self-defence. However generous your interpretation of a right to self-defence might be, the very idea makes no sense if there isn’t an “other” who might somehow threaten that self. Even in theory, Israel can only claim to defend itself against the people of Gaza if there are indeed people in Gaza.

In the immediate wake of 7 October no doubt it was still possible to believe, if you wanted to, that when Israeli officials referred to Palestinians as inhuman “monsters” or “animals,” the genocidal implications of such references were not meant to be taken literally. On 9 October 2023, Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant notoriously announced that his troops were “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” A couple of days later, the UK’s prime minister in waiting, Keir Starmer, reiterated in an equally notorious interview that “Israel has the right to defend herself. Israel has the right to do everything it can to get those hostages back safe and sound,” and so it follows that “Israel has the right” even to withhold power and water from Palestinian civilians. Around the same time, Gallant’s advisor, retired Major General (and former head of the Israeli National Security Council) Giora Eiland recommended that by depriving them of food and water Israel should force the residents to make a simple choice, “to stay and to starve, or to leave”:

“In order to make the siege effective, we have to prevent others from giving assistance to Gaza […]. People might ask whether we want the people of Gaza to starve. We do not. Therefore, the people of Gaza will have to leave—either temporarily or permanently—via the border with Egypt. When the people have evacuated, and the only ones left in Gaza are Hamas, and when food [and] water have run out—and we can also bomb the water facilities in Gaza so there will be no water—then at some point Hamas will either be completely destroyed or surrender or agree to evacuate Gaza […]. Any other measure short of this will not be effective.”

The consequences of no food, no water and no fuel are not subtle, but perhaps when Gallant and Starmer implied genocide they really meant self-defence? As everyone knows, the point has been debated at length ever since at the International Court of Justice, in the press, in meetings at universities, schools and community centres, in rallies, encampments and protest marches, etc., all over the world.

As of May 2025, it seems that this particular debate, at least, is definitively over. All sides now appear ready to agree about what is actually going on. Instead of continuing to claim that they are defending themselves against Hamas, Israeli officials now seem quite happy to admit the obvious truth of the matter—that their army is conquering Gaza and killing or expelling all its inhabitants. It is accelerating its colonisation of the West Bank with a view to imminent annexation. It is neither remotely plausible or necessary to justify such conquests in terms of a right of self-defence. Older, more emphatic and more illuminating maxims can return to the fore: woe to the vanquished, since unless something changes the weak can indeed be made to suffer as they must.

V

In early March 2025, buoyed by Trump’s unqualified support for depopulating the strip, Netanyahu’s government completed its enforcement of Gallant’s initial threat and imposed a total blockade on what remains of the territory, cutting off the supply of food, medicine and other humanitarian aid. “Not even a grain of wheat will enter Gaza,” promised finance minister Smotrich in early April. A few weeks later, Israel’s current defence minister, Israel Katz, again confirmed that “no humanitarian aid will enter Gaza.”

As anticipated, the consequences of no food and no water are not hard to predict. “It is impossible not to see this as an intent to exterminate,” observed the EU’s former foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell in late April,[12] while aid agencies long ago ran out of words and numbers to describe the “nightmarish” conditions that now prevail all across the strip. These same agencies are also rapidly running out of workers; a Guardian investigation published a few weeks before Israel unilaterally recommenced its bombing campaign in March 2025 found that the IDF had already killed more than 1,000 medical staff in Gaza (with scores more imprisoned and tortured) since Hamas launched its attack on 7 October.

A further step towards what the US Ambassador to the United Nations has pointedly (if unintentionally) called a “final solution” to Israel’s Gaza problem began on Monday 5 May 2025, when Netanyahu and Katz announced Operation Gideon’s Chariots. Its purpose is to finish the job they started so long ago. Israeli officials now readily acknowledge that their goal has become “conquering Gaza and holding the territories,” complete with a suitably “voluntary transfer programme for Gaza residents.” On the same day, echoing his repeated calls for the imminent extension of Israeli “sovereignty” over the West Bank, Smotrich reiterated that “we are finally going to occupy the Gaza Strip. We will stop being afraid of the word ‘occupation.’” The next day, 6 May, he was a little more forthright about how this might happen. “Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to […] the south to a humanitarian zone without Hamas or terrorism, and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries. […] They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.” This approach, added Smotrich later in the month, is indeed “entirely different from anything in the past. No more raids or in-and-out operations—now we conquer, cleanse, and stay […]. What remains of the Strip is also being wiped out,” until, escorted by the IDF, “the population will reach the south of the Strip—and from there, with God’s help, move to third countries under President Trump’s plan. This is a change in the course of history. Nothing less.” As for the West Bank, if Smotrich and his faction get their way its fate was sealed several months ago. Soon, Smotrich announced on 11 February, “Tulkarm and Jenin will look like Jabalia and Shujaiya. Nablus and Ramallah will look like Rafah and Khan Younis. They too will be uninhabitable ruins, their residents will be forced to migrate and seek a new life in other countries.”

On 5 May Netanyahu himself posted a video on X in which he explained with equal candour that the logic of self-defence had effectively been turned inside out. From now on, Israeli soldiers would no longer launch preventive or avenging raids into Gaza and then withdraw. “The intention is the opposite of that,” he said. “Population will be moved, for its own protection.” After so many thousands have been killed and maimed, is there any need still to ask: protection from whom?

As of early May 2025, “more than 70% of Gaza [was] under Israeli control or covered by orders issued by Israel telling Palestinian civilians to evacuate specific neighbourhoods,” and it’s clearly only a matter of time before such orders are applied to the entire strip and its entire population. As things stand the IDF is herding the population south by choking off the supply of food and then temporarily allowing a small amount to be handed out by a so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a new organisation set up and run by armed American security contractors. Set up “to bypass the UN as the main supplier of aid in Gaza,” GHF ties the temporary provision of subsistence to the pursuit of longer-term Israeli war aims. So far its provision is limited to just four militarised distribution points, whose purpose is clearly indicated by their location—one is located south of the IDF’s so-called Netzarim corridor, with the other three at or near the southern border of the territory. “This is surveillance humanitarianism,” notes Alex De Waal, “the food-targeting counterpart to the IDF’s algorithms that select whom to bomb. […] It’s also an individualised version of late colonial counterinsurgency, as practised by Britain in Malaya in the 1950s, when the army defeated Communist guerrillas by controlling the entire food supply, feeding those in protected villages and starving those outside.” On 27 May Netanyahu explained that, by distributing aid in this way, the plan was “eventually, to have a sterile zone in the south of Gaza where the entire population can move for its own protection.” Similar concerns may explain why IDF soldiers simultaneously ordered a “forced evacuation” of all patients and staff from the last hospital still operating in northern Gaza; director of the Al-Awda hospital Dr Mohammed Salha told the BBC on 30 May “we’re really sad that we evacuated the hospital, but the Israeli occupation forces threatened us that if we didn’t evacuate, they would enter and kill whoever is inside.”

On 1 June 2025, the IDF fired on crowds of desperate Palestinians as they gathered outside the GHF’s southernmost distribution point, killing at least 31. On 3 June they killed another 27 people in similar circumstances, and at the time of writing there is no end in sight. In his zeal to defend and “save the lives of Israeli solders,” on 5 June Netanyahu even admitted that under his command the IDF had begun supplying weapons to an anti-Hamas clan in southern Gaza that has been widely accused of “attacking and looting aid convoys.”

Once the current strategy of mass starvation has achieved suitably impressive results, clearly the further expectation is that a scattering of nations will be compelled to accommodate at least a few of the survivors, thereby achieving the long-cherished goal of dispersing the indigenous population.

As one of Netanyahu’s speech-writers (Uri Elitzur) proposed some twenty years ago—in a statement cited for its continuing relevance by his Justice Minister in 2015—the interests of Israel’s longest-serving prime minister have always been best served by making his government’s relation to the people of Palestine as explicit as possible. What is ultimately at stake is not merely a matter of “targeted killings” or destroying “terror infrastructure,” wrote Elitzur. “Enough with the oblique references. This is a war. Words have meanings. This is a war. It is not a war against terror, and not a war against extremists, and not even a war against the Palestinian Authority. These too are forms of avoiding reality. This is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people.”[13]

Today’s agenda-setting politicians cannot be accused of avoiding the reality they seek to impose. “Everyone has got used to the idea,” Smotrich’s parliamentary colleague Zvi Sukkot said during a televised debate on 17 May, “that we can kill 100 Gazans in one night during a war and nobody in the world cares.” On 19 May Smotrich himself celebrated the fact that “over the past year and a half, we have been striking Hamas and reducing Gaza to ruins unprecedented in modern warfare—and yet the world has not stopped us. We are navigating this with prudence and determination.” On 22 May 2025 one of Netanyahu’s rivals on the right, Moshe Feiglin (a former Likud member of the Knesset who now leads the libertarian-nationalist party Zehut) told an Israeli morning TV programme, “the enemy is not Hamas, nor is it the military wing of Hamas. Every child in Gaza is the enemy. We need to occupy Gaza and settle it, and not a single Gazan child will be left there. There is no other victory.” Responding to internal accusations that her government was committing war crimes (and perhaps forgetting that collective punishment is itself a war crime), on 27 May 2025 Netanyahu’s social equality minister May Golan likewise insisted that the only “innocent people in Gaza” are the 58 hostages still held captive in the territory.

As Israel’s genocidal war became ever more emphatic in both word and deed, however, in early May 2025 even some of the country’s most unconditional allies finally began to stir uncomfortably in their seats. The UK is a case in point. True to form, in March prime minister Keir Starmer still refused to back up his foreign minister David Lammy when the latter condemned Israel’s blockade of food and aid as illegal, saying only that Israel ran the “risk” of breaching international humanitarian law. Two months later, however, as Gideon’s chariots began rolling across the rubble of Gaza, the ramparts of British censorship also began to crack. The visible and anecdotal consequences of Israeli policies are now too harrowing to ignore, and recent reporting on the genocide has been accompanied by an expanding chorus of disapproval. In late May condemnation ranged from Tory MPs and the current foreign minister to hundreds of prominent lawyers and judges, writers and aid organisations, international Jewish groups, and so on, to say nothing of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War and the other organisations that have helped to organise more than twenty-five massive national demonstrations over nineteen exhausting months. British and European opinion polls show that public support for Israel has now reached the lowest levels yet recorded. On Monday 26 May, even the German government felt obliged to add a word of censure, when chancellor Friedrich Merz said that the harm visited upon civilians “can no longer be justified as a fight against Hamas terrorism.”

VI

However flimsy its logic and legality might have been, Israel’s initial appeal to a right of self-defence provided the one and only legitimating strategy for those foreign governments and corporations still enabling its conquest and destruction of Gaza. That strategy, along with imponderably many other things, has now gone up in smoke. All pretences have been dropped. The bald fact of a successful conquest provides its only possible justification, and any organisation and any government still aiding and abetting Israel’s current administration is now simply complicit in the political equivalent of mass murder. If we are remotely serious about the rule of law they must be judged accordingly.

Again this isn’t the brash conclusion of a partisan fanatic, it is the judgement reached, among many others, by the U.N. special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese. In November 2023, Albanese echoed the broad legal consensus that “Israel cannot claim the right of self-defence against a threat that emanates from within a territory it occupies, from a territory kept under belligerent occupation.” Ever since March 2024, when she published a substantial report detailing the ways “genocide [i]s inherent to settler-colonialism,” Albanese herself has lived in the shadow of constant threats. Like her equally courageous colleague Philippe Lazzarini, Albanese has witnessed for years the consequences of Israel’s avowed policies and she is scandalised by the fact that leading figures in the EU continue to support them. “The fact that the two highest figures of the EU continue business as usual engagements with Israel is beyond deplorable,” Albanese told The Intercept in early May 2025. “I’m not someone who says, ‘History will judge them’—they will have to be judged before then. […] All those implicated and involved in the unlawful occupation, in providing it with support, are aiding and abetting violations of international law and human rights violations and a number of these amount to crimes,” she said. “There can be individual responsibility and individual liability for those who have been aiding and abetting or enabling such crimes.” There can be, and there must be.

VII

On its own terms, a state’s right to defend itself against other states is indeed perfectly intelligible as a right sanctioned by an inter-state system, and thus as a principle that applies to any state—to the extent that it is deemed legitimate. That is what a right means. If then you give up on the universal right, all you are left with is the allegedly particular or exceptional quality of a self, along with its particular or exceptional means of defence.

Ever since 1967, it’s been obvious to everyone that Israeli governments can operate on the assumption that, so long as they enjoy the unconditional backing of the US, their means of “defending themselves” (or attacking others) will indeed remain impressively exceptional. Every aspect of the current government’s Palestine policy is predicated on the material fact of its unchallenged military supremacy, along with its equally unqualified legal impunity. As Edward Said liked to remind his readers back during an earlier phase of Israel’s war, in Palestine and the wider region, the elementary and enduring “problem is Arab powerlessness.”[14] One side in this conflict shelters behind an iron dome, a nuclear umbrella and an inexhaustible supply of money and munitions; the other is reduced to fighting with the strategic equivalent of sticks and stones. From 8 October 2023 through to 21 May 2025, Israel killed at least 55,000 Palestinians in an operation that has so far cost the lives of 416 of its own soldiers.

Still the only state in the Middle East that refuses to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Israel is also unusual in the way it conceals its ultimate weapon of “defence”—those nuclear weapons that it “neither confirms nor denies” having in its possession. Israel expects Iran, needless to say, to behave rather differently.

It takes some imagination to picture how different the whole situation might appear if the balance of forces were less lopsided, or if it was the Ottoman Empire rather than Britain and its allies that had emerged victorious from the First World War. However durable it might seem for the time-being, however, current Israeli military strength is no less historical and thus no less variable a factor than Ottoman weakness. Israel’s crushing superiority depends on the continued support of the US, the UK and the EU. Voters in these countries can no longer evade the choice posed by the fact of this support: Are we to continue enabling a policy of mass murder, yes or no?

Since any sincere talk of a right to self-defence would have to extend that right to other and neighbouring selves as well, the state of Israel itself has only one remaining legitimation strategy—the characterisation of its own unique self, so to speak, along with its past history and its future mission, as an exception in relation to universalisable conceptions of right. The Balfour declaration of 1917, the partition of 1948, the ethnocratic conception of citizenship, the demolitions and expulsions, the refugee camps, the occupations, the settlements, the blockades, the snipers, the killings “targeted” and indiscriminate—though they had plenty of imperial analogues elsewhere, all were conceived and imposed in Israel as exceptional measures to establish or defend an exceptional state. If by definition every settler-colonial state encourages settlements, only Israeli politicians can justify them by reference to the Book of Maccabees on the one hand and the Holocaust on the other. By the same token, if by definition every colonised people finds itself exposed to colonial violence, Palestinian exposure remains exceptional to the extent that, compared with any other colonised group, they still find themselves trapped in the position that Edward Said famously described as the “victims of the victims.” Palestinians “have had the extraordinarily bad luck,” Said observed in 1979, “to have a good case in resisting colonial invasion of their homeland combined with, in terms of the international and moral scene, the most morally complex of all opponents, Jews, with a long history of victimisation and terror behind them. The absolute wrong of settler-colonialism is very much diluted and perhaps even dissipated when it is a fervently believed-in Jewish survival that uses settler-colonialism to straighten out its own destiny.”[15]

It goes without saying that during Hitler’s war, European Jews, after centuries of exposure to violence and discrimination, were the victims of utterly exceptional crimes. It should also go without saying that Palestinians bear none of the responsibility for those crimes, and that past horrors in one place cannot justify present and future ones in another. It’s important to acknowledge why concepts and practices of self-defence might have deep roots both in Jewish history and in Zionist experience, but as we’ve seen no people has an inherent right to create a state; the more fundamental question is whether a state is itself rightful or legitimate. Rights either apply universally or not at all, and however much it might be evoked to characterise a people, no logic of exception can legitimate the consolidation of a state, let alone an apartheid state. At the cost of enormous effort and sacrifice this rule was eventually made to apply across Southern Africa and it must be made to apply everywhere else too.

Since discriminatory states like Smith’s Rhodesia or Botha’s South Africa or Netanyahu’s Israel cannot appeal to universal principles, they can validate themselves only as a permanent exception to which more general norms don’t apply. However unique and traumatic it might be, however, the history of Jewish people cannot entitle an Israeli government to establish a conquering apartheid state any more than might the history of any other people. By the same token, to condemn Israeli war crimes or settler colonialism cannot by itself be conflated with prejudice against Jewish people, i.e. with anti-semitism. As anti-Zionist Jewish thinkers like Ilan Pappé, Moshé Machover, Judith Butler, Avi Shlaim, Naomi Klein or Etienne Balibar have argued for a long time, to conflate the defence of Israel in particular with the defence of Jewish people in general is itself an offence against Jewish people. For the time being, Israel and many of its allies continue to rely on partisan definitions of anti-semitism so expansive that in their determination to outlaw any censure of “the state of Israel conceived as a Jewish collectivity,” they effectively condemn the current Israeli government’s own conception of itself. At least in some places, however, over-reliance on unwarranted accusations of anti-semitism as a means of discrediting or criminalising protestors, students, and activists of all stripes may soon prove counter-productive, and may start to dilute their formerly devastating effect.

VIII

While the prolonged conversion of Gaza from an “open-air prison” into an “open-air graveyard” continues apace, it is becoming more and more obvious that a just peace will once again require—in Israel today as previously in some other places—an unqualified break with the whole exceptional logic of apartheid and its zero-sum priorities. The circumstances of Israel’s creation are certainly unique, but by definition any settler-colonial project can only be sustained by violence and war. As historians like Avi Shlaim, Rashid Khalidi and Tareq Baconi have shown in compelling detail, the ceasefire that must one day end this latest phase of Israel’s assault on Palestine will not stop its much longer war unless its government is compelled to stop waging it, by Palestinian resistance or international pressure or both. As many analysts have recognised, what is at stake in Israel’s war on Palestine is all the more enormous since it is easy to see how it compresses, in catastrophic miniature, a possible future for our zero-sum world as a whole.[16]

For a long time, much of the world held that peace in the region depended on the eventual creation of a separate Palestinian state on those fragmented remnants of historic Palestine—at most 22% of the territory administered under the British Mandate before Israel seized the rest of it in 1948. In the 1990s an isolated and demoralised PLO was persuaded to accept the promise of such statehood as an incentive for participating in “final status” negotiations, and many other states continue to rely on it to this day. By 1999, however, it was widely acknowledged “that Palestinian self-determination in a separate state is unworkable.” By 2010 veteran PLO activists like Karma Nabulsi could see that “every institution or overarching structure that once united Palestinians has now crumbled and been swept away.” By some calculations Israel today controls 96% of historic Palestine.

If diffuse international outrage over starvation in Gaza forces Netanyahu and Smotrich to slow down their “cleansing” of the Strip we can expect that the next few months and years may again be consumed by distracting discussions of a “two-state” solution. Never mind the fact that Israel has never yet proposed any remotely acceptable plan for such a state, not in 1993 nor in 2000 nor at any point since then—what’s now blindingly obvious is that current and recent Israeli governments have already and definitively demolished any lingering prospects for two-state partition. “All my life I supported a two-state solution,” admitted Avi Shlaim in 2015, “but now I believe that the two-state solution is dead. It is dead as a dodo […] Israeli governments destroyed the two-state solution, [they] systematically destroyed the basis for a viable Palestinian state.” There is no longer any material foundation upon which Palestinians might secure their rights unless they and their supporters can change the material contours of the situation as a whole.

Over the past thirty years, successive Israeli governments and their backers have systematically answered all of the questions that once framed two-state negotiations—the status of Jerusalem, the right of return, the future of settlements, access to water, control over borders, and so on—in the most unequivocal terms. The decisive question that remains is whether future Israeli governments will be enabled to persist in this project of conquest and war, or finally be compelled to accept peace on the basis of equality and respect. By forcing his project of conquest to its logical conclusion Netanyahu is also forcing the rest of the world to confront its proverbial moment of truth. Peace now or forever war? Israel has to choose, notes Shlaim, between being “either a racist Jewish state or a democratic state for everybody,” i.e. “one state with equal rights for all its inhabitants.” As Ilan Pappé has likewise repeatedly explained, there is indeed a clear alternative to Netanyahu’s vision: “A de-zionised, liberated and democratic Palestine from the river to the sea; a Palestine that will welcome back the refugees and build a society that does not discriminate on the basis of culture, religion or ethnicity. This new state would labour to rectify, as much as possible, the past evils, in terms of economic inequality, the stealing of property and the denial of rights. This could herald a new dawn for the whole Middle East.”

By definition peace means an end to violence on all sides, but first and foremost it means an end to Israel’s occupations, its settlements, its blockades, its assassinations, its bombings, its incursions, its impunity. It means an end to apartheid. It means an end to Zionism as a colonising project. It means equal rights and equal security for everyone who lives in the historic territory of Palestine. It means a single egalitarian state or federation on terms freely decided, as equal participants, by all the inhabitants of the region.

[1] I’m very grateful to Jessica Whyte for sharing some of her recent writing and research, and to Jessica, to Ayça Çubukçu, to Ronald Roberts and to Tiger Liu for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this text.

[2] Ghazi Hamad, BBC interview, 27 October 2023. In January 2024, the Hamas media office released a substantial account of the operation, entitled “Our Narrative.” While acknowledging that “maybe some faults happened” in the midst of the “chaos” of their assault, Hamas asserts that “avoiding harm to civilians, especially children, women and elderly people is a religious and moral commitment by all the Al-Qassam Brigades’ fighters. […]. The Palestinian fighters only targeted the occupation soldiers and those who carried weapons against our people […]. If there was any case of targeting civilians, it happened accidentally and in the course of the confrontation with the occupation forces” (pp. 7-8). Even if you consider this a preposterous attempt at damage-limitation after the event, such declarations of intent at least complicate the analogies that are often made between 7 October and 9/11. For an early discussion of the Hamas operation as a strategic and thus purposeful operation see Abdaljawad Omar’s reply to Adam Shatz, “Hopeful Pathologies in the War for Palestine,” Mondoweiss, 8 November 2023.

[3] Alex Karp, initially posted on X, https://x.com/DailyPalantir/status/1788963206075129999, cited in Patrick Mazza, “On the Campuses and Around the World, a Revolution of Empathy,” Counterpunch, 17 May 2024.

[4] Finance minister Smotrich returned to this point on 19 May 2025. “Truthfully, until the last hostage is returned, we should not even be sending water [to the people of Gaza]. But if we act that way, the world will force an immediate halt to our war. It would be a tactical win but a strategic defeat. I am committed to winning the war”, and such a commitment may still require some transitional tactical compromises.

[5] Ronald Roberts, email to the author, 7 May 2025; see for instance Kader and Louise Asmal and Ronald Roberts, “When the Assassin Cries Foul: The Modern Just War Doctrine,” in Looking Back, Reaching Forward: Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, ed. Charles Villa-Vincencio (Bloomsbury, 2000), chapter 8. Needless to say, a substantial literature on this question rapidly accumulated in the wake of 7 October and in the run up to the legal arguments that began in and around the International Court of Justice in January 2024. In addition to the PHROC paper cited below, see for example Ralph Wilde, “Israel’s War in Gaza is Not a Valid Act of Self-defence in International Law,” 9 November 2023 and Kunal Purohit, “Does Israel Have the Right to Self-Defence in Gaza?,” 17 November 2023. For the opposing view, see for instance Israel Kasnett, “How International Law Supports Israel’s Right to Defend Itself,” JNS, 11 October 2023.

[6] For a more detailed critique of the international legal basis of Israel’s appeal to a right of self defence, see the position paper published by the Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council (PHROC) in December 2023, entitled “Israel’s Military Offensive on the Gaza Strip Breaches Law on the Use of Force”. “Israel’s argument that it is engaging in self-defence following the Al-Qassam Brigades and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operation on October 7 is a fallacy,” conclude Al-Haq and the other members of PHROC, “as the October 7 operation did not signify a new onset of hostilities. Rather, Israel’s pre-emptive armed attack and consequent military occupation of the Palestinian territory in 1967 continues to be an illegal act of aggression, [one that…] cannot be retroactively justified by reference to the right of self-defence. As such, the right of self-defence under international law has not been available to Israel with respect to its dealings with the West Bank and Gaza Strip populations since 1967. […] Third States and the international community are therefore obliged to: 1. Intervene to bring Israel’s acts of aggression to an immediate end […]; 2. Address Israel’s illegal occupation and apartheid as the root cause of the current continuing hostilities, and intervene to ensure Israel’s total, immediate and unconditional withdrawal from the entire Occupied Palestinian Territory as provided for in numerous UN General Assembly and UN Security Council resolutions and the dismantling of the occupying administration; 3. Ensure the realisation of the right to external self-determination of the Palestinian people as a whole, including refugees and exiles, and the right of the Palestinian people to return.”

[7] As Chomsky again explained in 2007: “No state demands a ‘right to exist,’ nor is any such right accorded to any state, nor should it be. […] To my knowledge, the concept ‘right to exist’ was invented by US-Israeli propaganda in the 1970s, when the Arab states (with the support of the PLO) formally recognised Israel’s right to exist within secure and recognised borders (citing the wording of UN 242). It was therefore necessary to raise the bars to prevent the negotiations that the US and Israel alone (among significant actors) were blocking, as they still are. They understood, of course, that there is no reason why Palestinians should recognise the legitimacy of their dispossession—and the point generalises to just about every state.”

[8] Scott Burchill, “Israel Has No ‘Right To Exist’—And Neither Does Any Other State,” The Conversation, 5 June 2011. For further online discussion of this point see for instance Gregory Shupak, “States Have No Inherent ‘Right to Exist’—But It’s a Media Fixation on Israel/Palestine,” FAIR, 12 February 2021; Peter Beinart, “States Don’t Have a Right to Exist. People Do,” New York Times, 27 January 2025.

[9] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, book 5, chapter 89.

[10] “Our Judaism,” Klein continues, “cannot be contained by an ethnostate, for our Judaism is internationalist by nature. […] We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name. Freedom from an ideology that has no plan for peace other than deals with murderous theocratic petrostates next door, while selling the technologies of robo-assassinations to the world. We seek to liberate Judaism from an ethnostate that wants Jews to be perennially afraid, that wants our children to be afraid, that wants us to believe the world is against us so that we go running to its fortress and beneath its iron dome, or at least keep the weapons and donations flowing.

That is the false idol. And it’s not just Netanyahu, it’s the world he made and that made him—it’s Zionism.

What are we? We, in these streets for months and months, are the exodus. The exodus from Zionism.”

[11] Marko Milanovic, “Does Israel Have the Right to Defend Itself?”, in EJIL: Talk! Blog of the European Journal of International Law, 14 November 2023. As Jessica Whyte and Ihab Shalbak have shown, foundational “Palestinian attempts to affirm themselves as a people, or a ‘distinct polity,’” first had to “counteract their prior negation by international law. […] This task was existential and political before it was legal. At stake was the very existence of a Palestinian people, with a right to self-determination and a right to return to their land” (Shalbak and Whyte, “The War Against the People and the People’s War: Palestine and the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions,” in Making Endless War: The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts in the History of International Law, ed. Brian Cuddy and Victor Kattan [Michigan, 2023], p. 149).

[12] “Despite numerous resolutions adopted by the United Nations and decisions by the International Criminal Court,” continues Borrell, “during my tenure as High Representative of the Union, I found it impossible to compel the EU Council and Commission to act in response to the massive and repeated violations of international and humanitarian law by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government; in stark contrast to the bloc’s robust response to Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. […] For some European countries, historical guilt over the Holocaust has arguably been transformed into a ‘reason of state’ that justifies unconditional support for Israel, risking engaging the EU in complicity with crimes against humanity. One horror cannot justify another. Unless the values the EU claims to uphold are to lose all credibility, the bloc cannot continue to passively observe the unfolding horror in Gaza and the ‘Gazaification’ of the West Bank.

Contrary to common perception, and despite the apparent lack of empathy shown by some of its leaders, the EU holds significant leverage over the Israeli government. It is Israel’s leading partner in terms of trade, investment, and people-to-people exchanges. The EU supplies at least a third of Israel’s arms imports and has concluded its most comprehensive association agreement with the country which is, like all such agreements, conditional on respect for international law, particularly humanitarian law. If the political will exists, the EU possesses the means to act. And the time for EU action is long overdue” (Josep Borrell, “Gaza’s Descent Into Catastrophe Tests Europe’s Conscience,” Social Europe, 25 April 2025).

[13] Ishaan Tharoor, “Israel’s New Justice Minister Considers All Palestinians to Be ‘the Enemy,’” Washington Post, 7 May 2015, cited in Shalbak and Whyte, p. 166.

[14] “Whereas Israel can roll its tanks across borders, its air force can bomb civilians at will […], the Arabs for their part can only bleat out little squeaks of anger […]. Today the problem is Arab powerlessness […]: we must all of us ask why it is that for the past five decades we have watched Israel violate our sovereignty, massacre our civilians, humiliate our soldiers and generals, colonise our land” (Edward Said, “Arab Powerlessness,” Al-Ahram Weekly, 25 April 1996).

[15] Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (NY: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 119.

[16] See for instance Naomi Klein, “The Iron Dome Is Global—And So Is the Resistance,” Red Pepper, 2 March 2024; Andreas Malm, “The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth,” Verso blog, 8 April 2024; Adam Hanieh, “Framing Palestine,” Transnational Institute, 13 June 2024; William T. Robinson, “Global Capitalism’s Extermination Impulse,” The Philosophical Salon, 19 August 2024.