This is the typical throwaway line used by liberals when it’s pointed out that Israel should stop doing war crimes, but I’m not sure what it’s trying to convey.
Rights are always a tricky abstraction, doubly so at the international level, so I’m not sure what asserting the existence of some right is supposed to do. Israel obviously has the capability to defend itself1, so what good is asserting some intangible right to do so? Are they actually saying “We should not stop Israel from doing what it wants to defend itself”? I imagine even they would object to Israel use of sarin or nuclear weapons, so I don’t think that’s what they mean. Is it “Israel should be given wide but not unlimited latitude by the US to respond as it sees fit”? Cause if that’s what they mean, the easy answer is “not with our tax dollars”.
Anyway this just seems like one of those empty pat expressions used during arguments I hate.
- When they aren’t busy doing racialist dismissiveness of Palestinian military capability.
Bonus: There’s further complications on how the terms country/nation/state changes things. People like to use those terms interchangeably, too, but they can mean different things depending on who you ask. I used “state” with a pretty rigid definition above. While some people use “nation” in the same way, it can alternatively connote more of a group of people with a common region, ethnicity, religion, and so forth. In that context, a nation CAN have rights, as despite the supposed universality of rights they often must be specifically expressed for vulnerable groups. That’s the prime contradiction of rights as it happens—if a right needs to be enumerated like that, it’s not really universal, is it?