What is Meant by Israel’s Right to Exist as a Jewish Nation

In recent weeks, a chorus of podcasters and political candidates has affected confusion about what it means for Israel to exist as a Jewish state. The question is posed as though it were profound, even disqualifying. It is neither. The answer rests on principles the international community has spent a century embedding into law: indigenous rights and national self-determination. In honor of Israel’s Independence Day, let me explain what those principles actually say.

Self-determination is the collective expression of the same liberty we recognize in individuals. If a person has the right to shape his own life, a people bound by shared history, culture, language, religion and memory has a parallel right to shape its common life. A civilization is not a random collection of individuals. It has a legitimate interest in preserving and governing itself where it is rooted.

That claim is stronger still when the people in question seeks self-rule not in some arbitrary territory, but in the land bound up with its origins, sacred texts and national development over millennia. And it becomes urgent when the alternative is permanent dependence on others who do not share, and may not protect, that people’s interests, .i.e. when it is a safeguard against erasure.

The Jewish people fits this framework exactly: an ancient and continuous civilization with a distinct language, religion and culture, tied to a homeland that has remained central in law, liturgy, and collective memory for thousands of years. This is not a claim of Jewish exceptionalism. It is a claim of Jewish equality. The same principle has been recognized for dozens of peoples in the modern world. It is black-letter international law.

Article 1(2) of the U.N. Charter identifies among the organization’s central purposes respect for “the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.” Article 1 of both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights states plainly: “All peoples have the right of self-determination.” In fact the International Court of Justice, in East Timor, called self-determination “one of the essential principles of contemporary international law.”

The U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples makes the point even more directly. Article 3 affirms that indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. Article 26(1) ties that right explicitly to the land: “Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired.”

The Jewish people have maintained continuous presence in the Land of Israel since antiquity. The Hebrew language, now spoken again as a living tongue, originated there. The entire structure of Jewish religious life is organized around that geography: the holidays track its agricultural calendar, the prayers face its holy city, the texts are saturated with its landscape. When the modern Zionist movement sought to reconstitute Jewish national life in the late-19th century, it was not a foreign power planting a flag in someone else’s soil. It was a people, displaced repeatedly by empire, from Babylon to Rome to the Ottomans, exercising the same indigenous right to return to traditional lands that the international community recognizes for peoples everywhere.

When the modern Zionist movement sought to reconstitute Jewish national life in the late-19th century, it was not a foreign power planting a flag in someone else’s soil.

The League of Nations confirmed this explicitly in the 1922 Mandate for Palestine, which acknowledged “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and called for securing the establishment of the Jewish national home there. That was not the invention of a new right. It was formal recognition of an ancient and legally cognizable one. As Winston Churchill, then secretary of state for the colonies, explained, “When it is asked what is meant by the development of the Jewish National Home in Palestine, it may be answered that it is not the imposition of a Jewish nationality upon the inhabitants of Palestine … but the further development of the existing Jewish community … [I]n order that this community should have the best prospect of free development … it is essential that it should know that it is in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance.”

A Jewish state is simply a state in which the Jewish people exercises self-determination: where the national language, calendar, symbols, and public culture reflect Jewish civilization, and where Jews everywhere have a guaranteed refuge. It does not mean a state without minorities, without civil rights, or without obligations to all its citizens. Israel’s Declaration of Independence promised “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”

Of course, self-determination must be balanced against minority rights and other legal obligations. No serious defender of Israel disputes that. But the need for balance does not erase the underlying right. It merely defines its lawful exercise.

That is why the supposed confusion is not really confusion at all. The question is asked not to clarify but to delegitimize, to suggest that Jewish nationhood is uniquely suspect and must clear a moral hurdle no other nation is asked to face. No one demands that France justify its French character, or Japan its Japanese one, or the many states whose constitutions privilege a national religion explain their basic legitimacy. Only the Jewish state is routinely required to defend the very idea of its existence. The demand for a special accounting is itself the obvious tell.

So the answer is the same as it has always been: A Jewish state means what international law has long recognized, what the moral logic of self-determination requires, and what the law of indigenous rights confirms. The two-thousand-year-old hope of a free people, indigenous to its land, governing itself there. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Mark Goldfeder is CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center and a law professor at Touro Law School. Follow him on X @markgoldfeder