Denial of Israel’s Right to Exist

The denial of Israel’s right to exist—either as a nation-state at all, a self-identified Jewish state or Jewish-majority state—is one of the most common antisemitic concepts today, and at the same time one of the most controversial. The denial of Israel’s right to exist, or the denial of the Jewish right to self-determination should be distinguished from criticism of the Israeli government, any specific policy of the Israeli state or the general trajectory of the Israeli state and society more broadly. Central to this concept is the idea that Jews, unlike virtually every other group of people in the world, have no right to make collective national territorial or political claims—either in general or in the Middle East in particular. Expressions of this idea commonly centre on attempts to delegitimise the existence of the State of Israel as a whole, often by describing it as an ‘entity’ rather than a state, or through negative and at times incendiary historical analogies with Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa or European colonialism.