The Right of a Nation to Exist

The idea of rights is in the nature of evasive fireflies. Difficuilt to pinpoint, capture and determine. In the context of international affairs, there are conflicts, and in some of these conflicts, the rights of some nations to exist has come under the scanner. The right of Israel to exist has been qustioned by a number of Arab states and a considerable portion of the Palestinian people. Zionism has been considered discriminatory and it is asserted that a nation created by people moving into a nation already someone else's, is unjust.

But conflicts are so much more complicated than that. And hard as it may seem, the only way anything can possibly move (given that time travel still has a few glitches to be sorted out, in the scientific sense) is forward.

If you don't recognize Israel, the reason you give is that the creation of the nation meant unfair occupation of Palestinian land. Can you accept the United States of America, a land Europeans took from Native Americans? Can you accept Pakistan - created of a partition along communal lines? Can you accept Australia - which pushed the aborigines to make way for European settlers? Can you accept the dozens of African nations whose boundaries were drawn up in straight indifferent lines by the Imperial powers? Nealy every single nation of the world today has in its past a war, invasion, manufactured boundaries and fractured ethnicities.

Would you deny the right of these nations to exist? Then why deny that right to Israel? Only because it was created in living memory and the conflict has escalated in the recent past? Annihilitic doctrines cannot resolve a situation of clash between politics, interests and identities. These are sensitive things and must be sorted out realistically and in a manner that creates justice, not destroys the opposition.

Think about it. What nation has the right to exist? Then again, what nation has a compelling enough reason to be singled out to be not recognized?