Israel’s right to exist is just a leading question

Have we become so fearful of criticising Israel that reality no longer exists? Is it time to challenge, what is at it’s heart, a leading question designed to deflect legitimate scrutiny?

PREFACE | PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE

After I saw the above video clip, and given that I am in the middle of a series of pieces on the ‘Palestinian question’, I thought it might be a good opportunity to take a small diversion from my planned piece today, which I’ve pushed to tomorrow. Mehdi Hasan’s commentary might seem incendiary to some, but if you’re bold and brave enough to take a step back and study history and the facts, the only conclusion you can draw from his assessment is that he’s making a valid and very important point that deserves to be heard.

Given the torrent of criticism and abuse I’ve received in my email inbox since I started writing this series. Abuse, might I add, from those who apparently don’t have the balls to air their assaults in the public comments of my pieces, I conclude I might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. So let me add some gasoline to the fire, because unless people are prepared to burn down the insidious false narrative that is so pervasive on this issue, we will all be forever held hostage by the propaganda from Netanyahu and his thugs.

Image - Tom Keeter

Full disclosure, I have long been a big fan of Mehdi Hasan’s work and his commitment to telling the truth regardless of the cost. He doesn’t just talk the talk; he walks the walk, delivering his often brutal but accurate factual observations. I support Zeteo News both in the U.S. and the UK and am proud to do so. They are one of the few news networks prepared to speak truth on the third rail that is the ‘Palestinian question’.

The ‘right to exist’ at its heart is a fundamental HUMAN right, not an ethno-nationalist state right. As such, it applies to ALL PEOPLE. In contrast, history teaches us that the right to exist as a country simply does not exist, as Mehdi correctly points out. Borders change, even countries’ names change as a result of conflict. If Israel seized Gaza, Southern Lebanon and the current occupied territories, as is the ambition of many in the Israeli government, all would disappear and become part of Israel as the conquering power. So the question is already asked and answered.

There’s no doubting that Israel and its behaviour are in many ways unique and provoke high emotion, especially given that Israel is a country created to provide a homeland for the Jews following the horrors of the Holocaust. They are in the unique position of never having been given set borders, but rather being given free rein to set them themselves. In this respect, it’s easy for them to expand and grab land, then claim it as their own. I certainly can’t think of any other nation that has the same advantage. Can you?

The world stands rightly outraged by Russian attempts to seize Ukraine in an attempt to absorb it as part of Russia. Yet Israel has ambitions to create a ‘Greater Israel’, and nobody dares say a word. As you would expect, Netanyahu would claim this ambition does not exist, but there’s too much evidence to the contrary, even down to the patches worn by some in the military denoting their expansionist aims.

This is the same reason Israel has nuclear weapons, which have NEVER been inspected or even admitted to exist, a point which we’ll also explore this week. They have become the geopolitical ‘teacher’s pet’, constantly being given ‘special treatment’ by dominant Western powers, without whose aid they would not be able to engage in a fraction of their abhorrent behaviour.

Prior to 1948, they’ve flagrantly weaponised the extermination of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust to shame the US and Britain into agreeing to the unconditional creation of the state of Israel. A state which has since become a country in a perpetual state of war for what it claims is good reason; they are constantly under threat from a brutal enemy that brings a pea shooter to a gunfight. The uncomfortable truth is, Israel is a nation built on stolen land previously occupied by Arabs who coexisted with a minority contingent of Jews under the Ottoman Empire for four centuries. The demographics of the population of Mandated Palestine in no way reflected a population-based entitlement to a sovereign state for the Jews. They were simply the longstanding minority. It’s like the US government being told to give up its rights and transfer power to the minority Hispanic community. It would never happen; the US military would crush any attempt at such an absurd attempt at a hostile takeover.

Image - Israeli Defence Forces

Israel has been able to repel pissed-off Arabs since 1948 not because of their strength, but rather because of the global dominance of their friends, the US military and, to a lesser extent, the receding power of the British army from the days of empire. This is an amendment to the original post regarding Israel’s friends. It’s easy in the context of what is happening today to think of Israel’s natural allies as Western nations, when at the time the zionist movement was working towards statehood it looked way beyond the US and the UK. Between 1941 and 1948, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion courted Soviet diplomats such as Ivan Maisky and Andrei Gromyko in an effort to support the Jewish state and force the British to withdraw from Mandated Palestine.

In short, just as now, Israel would sell its soul in pursuit of its objectives. Nothing has changed. If we look at the timeline between 1941 and 1948, Chaim Weizmann invested a great deal of time and effort in getting the Soviet Union onside, not least for its vote at the United Nations, which he knew it would need. In 1943, Ivan Maisky visited Palestine and met David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir; it was this meeting that prepared the ground for Soviet support of Israeli statehood that would follow.

The level of geopolitical jiggery pokery was off the chart, but Zionist leadership back then was as efficient and effective as Netanyahu is today. If you want to dig into the details, I would highly recommend reading this piece from Le Monde by Gabriel Gorodetsky, published in February 2016, which documents the then-Soviet ambassador to Britain, Ivan Maisky. It provides a fascinating insight into negotiations which led in 1947 to Soviet support for the Partition of Palestine and support for the creation of the Israeli state we know today.

In my original assessment, I focused on US and British support, which, while not wrong in a wider context, failed to highlight the Soviet connection, which was pivotal to the Zionist leadership achieving its goal; because the truth does matter, this adjustment to the piece was important for the record.

There’s no question that Israel could NOT have survived Arab aggression without external military and diplomatic support, much as they could not have committed genocide without the complicity of Israeli allies. What was not mentioned in the original piece was the importance of Soviet military support, including the supply of military aid totalling $14.5 million. Adjusted for inflation, this would be $200 million. As reported in the Jerusalem Post, the arms package included:

‘some 400 tons of mortars and other heavy machinery, aerial bombs, rifles, ammunition, machine guns, flamethrowers, explosives, tanks, and combat vehicles from the Czechs. A separate deal promised twenty-four Czech-built Avia S-199 fighters, a lesser version of the German Messerschmitt.

It should be noted that at the time there was a Middle East arms embargo in operation by both the US and the UK, so as David Ben-Gurion later admitted,

“Czechoslovak arms saved the State of Israel, really and absolutely. Without these weapons, we wouldn’t have survived.”

The fact is, it was communist support that saved the day for Israel, but this had the unintended consequence of providing the new Israeli government with leverage to secure what was ultimately billions of dollars of continuous military aid from the US, which persists to this day. Russia has long been the wily old fox in the geopolitical hen house, and at the time it played both sides in the Arab Israeli tensions, supplying MIG jets to Egypt. JFK found himself under pressure domestically to counter the Soviet threat by supplying Hawk anti-aircraft missiles to Israel in 1962. At the same time, he refused to establish a formal military alliance to avoid alienating Arab states on which the US relied for oil.

This is where we get into the complex choreography of nuclear proliferation and the issue of Israel’s acquisition of a nuclear deterrent, which we’ll discuss in the next episode.

As a result of constantly waging war on them under the guise of ‘self-defence ’, Israel has created a perpetual pipeline of terrorist adversaries who, absent comparable military capability, wage asymmetric war using the age-old tools of insurgent terrorism. Suicide bombs and deliberate attacks on soft targets, i.e., civilians, have become their resistance of choice. This results in a never-ending cycle of conflict. As a consequence, Israel ‘mows the lawn’ periodically to stamp its authority on the region to remind the cockroaches who’s in charge.

To be very clear, I do not condone violence from ANY source; it’s wrong, and it’s abhorrent; as such, I unreservedly condemn it. Sadly, in such unregulated conflict all too often civilians are caught in the middle and suffer the highest losses. In any situation where there is a mighty military force imposing pain on a perceived much weaker enemy, the victims of their assault have little choice, as illustrated by Iran, but to engage in an asymmetric response which is often crude but highly effective.

The broad kill ratio in terms of conflicts was, until 2023, upwards of 22:1. (For every Israeli killed, the IDF killed 22 Palestinians). However, in 2023, after the US gave Netanyahu a free pass to murder as many Palestinians as he liked following October 7, all while turning Gaza into an uninhabitable pile of dust, that ratio now stands at a minimum of close to 60:1 (that’s assuming we accept Israel’s admission of the numbers). I actually believe the numbers are significantly undercounted, given the deliberate policy of denying the international press access to the crime scenes. Indeed, as outlined in a report by Sophia Sheera for Novara Media on August 14th 2026:

Israel is removing rubble caused by demolitions and bomb blasts in Gaza to wipe away evidence of the ongoing genocide, rights groups say.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor estimates that 10 million tonnes of rubble have been carted away from the 66% of Gaza under Israeli military control.

That means evidence of war crimes is being destroyed before forensics teams can investigate, the group says – and the remains of victims under the rubble are being taken away.

The report quotes Amnesty International as stating:

“The bulldozing is an integral part of all attempts to destroy the lands in Gaza City and in the Gaza Strip in general,” Amnesty International researcher Budour Hassan told Al Jazeera.

“The real fears are that these operations are taking place with the aim of obliterating and hiding evidence.”

As an aside, Novara Media does outstanding work and is well worth your support; you can find their mission statement here, if you're interested.

Moving on, it’s a little-reported fact that Netanyahu personally authorised $1.3 billion in funding to be delivered IN CASH to Hamas by Qatar for the sole purpose of preventing even a conversation about a two-state solution. Unfortunately, the experiment escaped the lab, costing 1200 Israelis their lives on October 7 2023. We WILL examine this in more detail in the next episode.

There was no downside in this act of terrorism for Netanyahu; he simply used the events as a welcome opportunity to wage vengeful and unbridled retribution in order to feed red meat to the Israeli far right. All while attempting to deliver a long-held ambition to rid Israel of the remaining Palestinians in Gaza from homes they had lived in for generations. The ocean of Palestinian blood that he gleefully bathed in has kept him in power, and he believes more Palestinian blood spilt will also see him re-elected in the upcoming elections at the end of October.

Image - JACK GUEZ / AFP

So, in answer to the question, ‘Does Israel have the right to exist?’ There’s no question that the PEOPLE of Israel have a collective right to exist. As to the country of Israel, it’s not a special case and is subject to the same spoils of war theory that Ukraine is being forced to endure largely without American military assistance. The only winner in that war is the US, which is profiting from arms sales to Europe, which are then passed on to Ukraine. We may have some romantic idea that Ukraine has the right to exist, but if Russia wins, that right will disappear in the blink of an eye, as will the Ukrainian language and culture, just as it did when Russia absorbed it in the late 1700s.

No country has the right to exist; it has only a right to defend its borders, which is, for Israel, a gift, given they appear to be subjected to no requirement to define borders, providing flexibility to achieve its ambitions. I support Jews having a land they can call home. Just as I support the Palestinians who have lived on the same land for the last four centuries to have the same. The problem we have with Israel is that few people are prepared to call bullshit on their propaganda-driven victimhood.

Someone made a valid point when commenting on yesterday’s episode:

Please be aware of the difference.I know you know, but it didn’t not come across well in this article. The “Jewish community” does not have a government. Jews are in every country! However, Israel does have a govt. Fuck BB and his genocide.

It’s important to acknowledge that the Jewish diaspora is scattered around the world, which accounts for a little over half of the Jews in the world (8.6 million). They are all too often tarred with the same brush as the Zionist hardliners, and that’s truly unfortunate. I do not and have not condemned the wider ‘Jewish community’ for the actions of the Israeli government. While many Jews living outside of Israel have a deep emotional and/or ancestral connection to the state of Israel, they overwhelmingly condemn the actions of Netanyahu and his far-right government.

Polling suggests that between 75% and 80% of American and British Jews do not support the actions or policies of Benjamin Netanyahu and the likes of far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Many support a two-state solution and the right of Palestinians to self-determination. I unreservedly apologise to any member of the Jewish community who might have misinterpreted the clumsy wording I used in the last piece. It reminded me of the clip below from Kayla Shrader, which I thought worth including for context. I have recently started following her work, which is highly informative and easy to relate to.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZN8FcxdTq/

Empires rise and fall, as we are witnessing in the US. There are no guarantees, so I believe that while Mehdi’s words may be perceived as incendiary, they are ultimately correct, however uncomfortable that might feel for some. When I started this series of posts, I really had no idea where it would lead, other than to share my findings as I unravelled the cloak of invisibility Israel has surrounded itself with when it comes to accountability for its actions. We are only halfway through, and if you feel half as well informed as I do, it’s a resounding success so far.

The ability to think outside the box and challenge what doesn’t feel right is truly liberating, and despite the hate flooding my inbox, it’s proving well worth the effort. I’d like to conclude by pointing you to the video below. I know that those who appreciate my work will certainly feel what I felt when I watched it. In my view, it’s essential viewing. It’s from someone I have been a longtime admirer of for a whole host of reasons. Reasons that go beyond how aligned we are on politics and our shared desperate desire, through our work, to deliver a better tomorrow for our children and our grandchildren. Matthew Cooke has created what I believe to be a groundbreaking project, which is well worth a moment of your time to check out. It is a project I will be joining later this week as a founding circle member; that’s how much I believe in what Matthew is doing.

Finally, I’d like to give a big shout-out to those who have started to use the Buy me a drink link below in recent weeks. In particular, I want to thank those who showed their generosity following yesterday’s episode in this series. Some readers suggested I include the link a little while ago, and it’s proved to be a big success, so thank you. While paid subscriptions provide continuity and monthly or annual revenue, I fully appreciate that some simply can’t afford to make that level of commitment. This is why the Buy me a drink link was created. I’m not one for sending out begging emails with ever-deeper discount subscription offers; if you can’t afford to subscribe or buy me a drink that’s fine, it really is, there’s no pressure from me. Those who, through their kind generosity, have long supported my work remain my guardian angels; you help keep the show on the road and help provide my work for free to everyone. For that I’m truly grateful, and it’s not just by me, I’m sure.

I love writing, but delivering the type of content I create requires a wealth of expensive research resources to ensure it meets the exacting standards I demand and that people here have come to expect. I never want to compromise that. As a pensioner, I don’t have access to unlimited resources to cover the costs; if I did, rest assured I would. In the absence of that luxury, every little helps, and it’s simply reinvested into delivering high-quality content you can rely on.

Martin