‘Should Israel exist?’ Should not be the question

When words are redefined to delegitimize Israel, their actual meaning and power vanish. They instead become specious talking points for those who seek to deny the right of the world's only Jewish state to exist.

As an educator focused on Israel Studies and understanding Jew-hatred, I have spoken with dozens of audiences — some friendly, some hostile — and appeared on panels at multiple schools, universities, and houses of worship since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

In some ways, these panels are a lot like those I’ve done for years, with plenty of finger-pointing, raised voices, dueling accusations, and coded language thrown at me.

But while those tactics were once used to ask provocative questions like “Just how far should Israel go” in any conflict, they are now being used to ask, “Why in the world is Israel here?” 

In the Middle East, the Oct. 7 attacks and the ensuing war have pierced Israelis’ sense of security, destabilized Abraham Accord negotiations, and shattered the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Here in the United States, the impact has been less obvious but just as radical.

Many scholars and students no longer frame their Middle East debates around issues of peace, security, or Palestinian independence, but, instead, around Israel’s very existence. As part of this shift, facts have become secondary, and language has been hijacked.

For many, the starting point for these conversations is that Israel is a colonialist nation that was born in sin and acts in sin. This framing is a quasi-religious belief; a doctrine that is so sacrosanct that those who challenge it are invariably seen as immoral and racist.

How did we get here? To understand that, it helps to explore the intellectual history of the past 80 years.

This “original sin” narrative is anchored by three “posts” — postcolonialism, post-nationalism, and postmodernism. Each has its roots in the aftermath of World War II — the rejection of European hegemony over Arabs, Africans, and Asians (postcolonialism); the rejection of a belligerent European nation-state system (post-nationalism); and the eventual rejection of the enlightenment concept of fixed truths (postmodernism). 

The State of Israel was also founded at that time. But post-theorists generally ignored the Jewish people’s deep ties to the land of their ancestors as well as 19 centuries of persecution, including against Middle Eastern Mizrahi Jews. Instead, they saw Israel as a white, European enterprise planted in the middle of an indigenous region and sought to delegitimize the nation and dehumanize its citizens from its birth.

In the decades since, critics have called any Israeli military response to terror attacks disproportionate or inhumane, repeatedly turning to the United Nations to condemn Israel alone among the world’s nations.

This mindset has been amplified — and quickly normalized — in the past four months.

Those who define Israel through its “original sin” have deliberately denied the humanity of Israelis who were slaughtered on Oct. 7 or are still being held hostage. They have ignored the inhumanity of the terrorists who perpetrated those crimes and continue to use Palestinian civilians as shields, saying that all resistance is justified.

As a co-panelist at an Ivy League campus recently told me, Israel is a “settler colonialist” regime “built on Palestinian land.”

Increasingly in these conversations, facts are denied. That includes the years-long evidence that United Nations Relief and Works Agency employees supported Hamas before and during the Oct. 7 attacks and the incontrovertible evidence of rape and sexual violence during those attacks.

And language is distorted.

“Apartheid” was once defined as a deeply entrenched and codified separation based on skin pigmentation. It is now thrown around to describe an Israeli society that, yes, has too often discriminated against ethnic minorities but that also has Arab Israelis who serve in government and have the same legal rights as Jewish Israelis.

“Genocide” was once defined as the deliberate destruction of an ethnic group. It has now become the accepted shorthand for a human rights tragedy in Gaza and a military campaign that Israel delayed for weeks so 1 million Palestinians could leave their homes.

When these words are redefined to delegitimize Israel, their actual meaning and power vanish. They instead become specious talking points for those who seek to deny the right of the world's only Jewish state to exist. They become a modern-day blood-libel seeking to place Israel beyond the pale — no longer an "acceptable" enterprise that can even exist in the global world order.

When language is changed, and facts are replaced with “competing narratives” in postmodernist thought, it poses real dangers — not just for the conversation about Israel and Palestinians, but for educators like me and anyone else who is invested in engaging with ideas.

This ill-informed discussion about Israel’s existence is not the conversation that should be happening. But it’s the conversation that is happening. And no amount of finger-pointing, raised voices, dueling accusations, and coded language will get us to back down from it.

Rachel Fish, PhD, is special adviser to the president at Brandeis University and co-founder of Boundless, which supports Israel education and combats hatred of Jews.