“Do you support Israel’s right to exist?” is a reactionary, dishonest question. The fact that it gets thrown in your face at nearly any criticism of Israel shows what it’s for. As a matter of argument, it’s a device for changing the subject. You raise settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank, where the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs counted 397 such attacks in the first 26 days of October, the most in any month since it began keeping records in 2006. Suddenly the conversation is about why Palestinians won’t stop hating Jews and accept Israel’s legitimacy, and why that has to come first, before anything else.
Notice what drops out when the subject changes. During the week ending October 26, OCHA recorded 62 settler attacks that caused casualties or property damage across 49 communities, 38 of them tied to the olive harvest. Settlers reportedly cut down about 130 olive trees in Tammun. Families in Hebron Governorate went out to pick their groves and found that someone had already harvested them, part of roughly 1,100 kilograms of olives stolen in four incidents. In Khirbet Ras al Ahmar, in Tubas Governorate, 24 herding families, about 94 people including 40 children, were displaced “amid increasing access restrictions and repeated settler attacks and intimidation.” None of those people had asked anyone to affirm or deny anything about the State of Israel. They had asked to keep their trees.
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The question works because it sounds like a request for a position, and a position is the kind of thing an honest person is supposed to have. It is not a request for a position. A request for a position would accept the answer. This question exists to be asked again, and its purpose is fulfilled the moment you start answering it, because the person who raised the settlers is now defending himself instead of describing what the settlers did.
Before the stolen olives can be discussed, the critic must establish that he is not an enemy of the Jewish state, and before the Jewish state can be asked to restrain its settlers, the Palestinians must establish that they accept its legitimacy. It is a loyalty test administered by someone with no intention of grading it. Nobody arguing about French farm subsidies is told to affirm France’s right to exist first. The demand is reserved for this subject because this is where the facts are worst for the people asking.
I have answered the question myself. In February, when I withdrew my support for the strategic alliance, I wrote that I was doing so “not because Israel has no right to exist” but because its government had shown it did not share the constitutional values the alliance was supposed to rest on. The disclaimer bought nothing, and it was never going to. A question asked in bad faith cannot be satisfied by a good-faith answer. It can only be satisfied by your silence on the subject you raised.
It’s the same move the right makes on immigration: no reform until the border is sealed and the people here illegally are gone. Only then can we fix the broken bureaucracy. The precondition never gets met, because it isn’t meant to be. I made the case in June that Democrats lose when they concede the premise and quarrel over implementation. By the administration’s own account, the precondition has been met. In its preliminary numbers for fiscal year 2026, the Department of Homeland Security reported that the Border Patrol had recorded fewer than 99,000 southwest border apprehensions, which it called the lowest annual encounters in American history. Days before the election, at a candidate forum in the Rio Grande Valley, Ken Paxton told voters that before any work program, “fundamentally we have to make sure we secure the border first, and if it gets unsecure, then the rest of the deal is off.”
The second half of that sentence turns a precondition into a veto that never expires: the deal dies the moment anyone decides the border is insecure again, so it is never safe and therefore never made. A record low does not satisfy the condition, because the condition was never about the number. It keeps the conversation about the millions of people who live and work here without papers on the far side of a door that only one party is allowed to open.
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The Israeli version has the same structure, and it has a paper trail that makes the bad faith easier to see. On September 9, 1993, Yasser Arafat sent Yitzhak Rabin a letter, and its first commitment reads: “The PLO recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security.” In the same letter the PLO accepted Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, renounced terrorism, and declared that the articles of its charter denying Israel’s right to exist were “inoperative and no longer valid.” The question was answered, in writing, by the organization the world recognized as speaking for the Palestinian people, 33 years ago.
Rabin’s reply, the same day, is shorter. In light of the PLO’s commitments, he wrote, Israel “has decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and commence negotiations.” Israel recognized an organization as a negotiating partner. The letter did not recognize a Palestinian right to a state, and the present government has ruled one out. In July 2024 the Knesset voted 68 to 9 to reject the establishment of a Palestinian state, “even as part of a negotiated settlement.” In September 2025, at the settlement of Maale Adumim, Benjamin Netanyahu signed off on construction in the E1 corridor east of Jerusalem and said, “we said there would not be a Palestinian state, and without doubt there will not be a Palestinian state.”
So the precondition was met in 1993, and the side that demanded it has spent the years since announcing that the reciprocal will never come. Still the question gets asked, of Palestinians who were not born when Arafat signed and of Americans who have never seen the West Bank. The answer on file does not matter, because the question was never asking for information.
By this logic, one could say: “I’m not following the law until everyone else does.” No court would accept that from a defendant, and no parent would accept it from a child. It is, in substance, what the question asks the world to accept about the West Bank: that Israel’s obligations to the people living under its occupation are suspended until those people meet a standard that is moved every time they approach it.
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Michigan just ran the experiment in public. Abdul El-Sayed, who would be the first Muslim elected to the Senate, has spent the general election being called a “jihadist“ by the president, who told a rally in Port Huron that El-Sayed should have to pass through a metal detector before entering the Senate. Ted Cruz called him a “jihadist leprechaun.” The Senate Leadership Fund paid for ads displaying the logos of six Muslim nonprofits and claiming that “six radical extremist groups“ had backed him with more than a million dollars. None of them had given him anything.
AIPAC‘s super PAC, United Democracy Project, did not need that vocabulary. It spent about $20 million opposing El-Sayed in the primary, more than it spent against any other candidate this cycle, and lost. In October it came back with mailers to 130,000 Jewish voters built around the Hezbollah-inspired attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield in March, with the line “Abdul El-Sayed’s response: ‘Hurt people hurt people.’” He did say that, in a video in which he also said “there is never a justification for attacking innocent people or houses of worship.” In August he apologized to the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus. “I made a mistake,” he said. The apology was on file for more than a month when the mailers went out. It did not matter, for the same reason the PLO’s letter does not matter.
Then Haley Stevens, the candidate United Democracy Project spent more than $10 million to elect, set her own precondition. Before she would appear with the nominee at a unity event, she wanted him to apologize for suggesting “that Israel is the reason Michigan cannot afford schools, healthcare, and childcare.” He can begin, she said, “by getting Israel out of his explanation for everything Michigan cannot afford.” El-Sayed’s explanation is that Michigan pays more for gas and groceries because of a war fought “at the behest of“ Israel’s government. On Saturday he disavowed the outside ad she had also asked him to condemn. On Sunday she endorsed Mike Rogers, the Republican who agreed with a post calling El-Sayed a terrorist.
That is the right-to-exist question, adapted for a campaign. A Muslim candidate must first prove he is not a threat to Jews, and every proof he offers, the condemnation in March, the apology in August, the disavowal on Saturday, is filed away and the question asked again. The subject he wanted to raise, what an American-backed war is costing Michigan, never gets its turn. That is what the precondition is for.
It’s a trap, and you should never take the bait. When it’s thrown at you, don’t answer it. Go back to the settlers.
Go Deeper into the Circus
An Oasis in the Desert
Editor’s note: An unedited draft of this essay was inadvertently published on earlier. It contained garbled passages, two misquotations and factual errors, including the wrong dates for Germany’s reactor moratorium and Hong Kong’s national security law. Those errors have been corrected.
No Right Without a Remedy
In 2010, a Border Patrol agent named Jesus Mesa Jr., standing on American soil between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, fired across the border and killed Sergio Adrián Hernández Güereca. Sergio was fifteen. He was standing in Mexico. His parents sued, and ten years later the Supreme Court told them, by a vote of five to four, that they
I'm guessing that asking if Nazi Germany had a right to exist would be seen as tactless, and rather tasteless?
arguably simpler to point out that no nation has a right to exist.