SHOSHANA BRYEN: Israel Has Rights Beyond The ‘Right To Exist’

NY mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani told listeners of the first mayoral debate, “I believe Israel has a right to exist” — but, according to the NY Post, when the moderator prompted, “as a Jewish state?” he replied merely, “as a state with equal rights.”

Friends of Israel got angry over the wrong part of the answer.

Mamdani wants Israel to be a state with equal rights. And Israel is one, so we’re good. And he doesn’t want it called a “Jewish State.” OK, but although the majority of Israelis are Jewish, Israel has no state religion. Mamdani, by the way, appears to have no similar problem with the twenty-three countries that have Islam as their state religion. So, he’s ill-informed, which is a different problem.

But more worrisome in fact is his casual agreement that Israel has “a right to exist,” which he, and many others, including Jews, believe is the standard for not being an anti-Israel bigot.

That isn’t even a low bar; it is an insult to the international mechanism by which Israel became a state and lives today as a democratic, free, multicultural, multireligious country in which the 20% of Israelis who are not Jewish have full civic and religious rights.

Israel was established by a U.N. mechanism for post-colonial independence in areas that came under League of Nations control in the aftermath of World War I, when it was determined that the Ottoman Empire had no right to exist, having chosen the wrong side of the war. Just because the Arab states of the time didn’t agree with the League and the U.N.’s decision on Palestine didn’t make the British Mandate or the later State of Israel less legitimate in its modern origins.

What about the other countries of the post-Ottoman era? Iraq or Jordan, say, both created out of whole cloth. What about Lebanon or Syria, both former French colonies? From 1945-1960, post-colonial Africa and Asia saw more than