Nothing, it’s a thought-terminating cliche. It was devised as such.

It means history started the 7th of October 😒

It’s an indirect way of stating they support an apartheid state because they view Palestinians, and really Arabs, as subhuman.

Israel has a right to defend itself but Palestinians do not have a right to resist their occupation, oppression, displacement, dispossession, and humiliation by Israel. Palestinians are surplus humanity, especially those living in the Gaza strip, and deserve - in Western eyes - nothing but to accept their own extinction and erasure.

Right to defend itself is a euphemism for right to uphold white supremacy, the interests of western capital, and to dominate the oil producing gulf states.

They mean that can react to any threats as they see fit, while are paranoid human rights abusers

If I punch you, but then you punch me back, I have a right to defend myself by punching you back. But you don’t have a right to punch me if I punch you. Only me. Basically.

I watched some video the other day and somebody mentioned “Israel has a right to defend itself” problem. Adam Johnson?

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Ninja edit

I need to not break my brain trying to find that video. It was only ~30 seconds of passing comments. And I have work to do anyway.

Instead of making myself a crazy person - I googled. I only scanned this article but it seems pretty good.

Israel Doesn’t Have a “Right to Exist” — But Israelis and Palestinians Do

We’re often told that creating a single secular democratic state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians would violate Israel’s “right to exist.” But no nation-state has an inviolable right to exist — especially not an ethnostate based on exclusion and ethnic cleansing.

[…]

The real issue is clarified when you append the phrase “as a Jewish state” to “Israel has a right to exist.”

If “Jewish state” just means “state that happens to have a Jewish majority,” then it’s fine for Israel to exist “as a Jewish state,” just as it’s fine for the United States to be a “white Christian state” in the sense that it’s a state that happens to have a white Christian majority. But if an American friend told me they thought it was very important that America always have a white Christian majority, and that, for example, our immigration policies should guarantee that black and brown people never became a majority, I would probably call them a fascist.

it means they buy into inaccurate biblical narratives about history, fully believe that white brooklyn jews are the original and exclusive indigenous people to the region, and see israel as the small bean anti-colonial indigenous resistance fighting for its survival against hordes of inhuman antisemitic barbarians on all sides.

The funny thing is, according to the UN’s ICJ, it doesn’t have a right to defend itself (in the occupied palestinian territories).

Another hexbearianistite (can’t remember who, sorry) mentioned the 2004 ICJ advisory that was regarding Israel building a wall on the green line, which is the border decided at the 1949 armistice (and often referred to as the 1967 or pre-1967 border). Here they agreed that the wall was illegal, due to quite a few reasons: it restricts freedom of movement and self determination of Palestinians, it also went beyond the agreed green line and extended into Palestinian territories. Since then, Israel ignored the ruling and continued construction.

What I gather from this is that even the ICJ thinks that Israel is an occupying power, and does therefore not have the right to defend itself.

Omega armchair response here, mostly drawing on college courses from a few years ago

Basically, rights in the context of international law are very specifically entitlements to something (like clean water) or entitlements not to be subjected to something (like discrimination). These rights are meant to apply to every person universally (as long as the state governing you has ratified the relevant charter), and they can never be taken away. No one can legally take away your right to clean drinking water, for instance. States do not have rights because they are neither people or a group of people, but rather an apparatus operated by people.

A state can use force in self-defense against another state or entity, but this is NOT a right, because there are limits and conditions enforced by international law*, and rights are meant to be inalienable and unconditional. You as a person can’t be (e: legally) prevented from drinking water, but a state CAN be prevented from retaliating violate law regarding self-defense if they’re not doing it in the right way.

This is tricky terminology wise because people like to use terms interchangeably when they don’t have the same meaning, either by accident or as rhetorical sleight of hand. To say Israel has a “right” to defend itself would be to say that it can conduct those military operations without concern for international law. Based on what we’re seeing right now I guess that’s correct in a realist sense…

*Of course, these conditions are rarely applied consistently. Take the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia for instance, which was declared to be “illegal but justified” by the Independent International Commission on Kosovo (funny how most of the members of that commission were from NATO states".

It means the same thing when confederate southerners say they have the right to defend their property

It’s not really an empty phrase. Its incredibly loaded. “Israel has a right to exist” is literally saying “Settlers have a right to colonize,” but said in a way to make opponents of settler colonialism appear exterminationist when the Colonizers are the ones commiting genocide.

I would argue they have as much right to defend themselves as the guy who breaks into your house, murders members of your family, boots others out, and forces you to live in a toilet, dependent on them to provide you with food, water and medication, and on top of that they get angry about any criticism; in this scenario as well, if you defend yourself, they call the cops and the cops beat you up. They have some half-assed reason for why they supposedly own your house (something about their war of independence great great great grandad having owned the land), but you also know they’d been talking about invading the people living down the street and doing the same to them. You go on the internet and you find out some losers from half a world away are also seriously saying the home invader does indeed have a right to the house and to defend themselves and to add grievous injury to injury they’re also funding him getting new guns too while they call you a savage for not even trying to get along with your home invader, who by the way punches you in the face and shoots whichever of your kids you still have in the knees if you so much as look at them funny. They invite members of their own family over to live in your house, but your own family members can’t come back, and if you leave you won’t be allowed to come back either, and that’s if they let you leave.

If any of this sounds ridiculous it’s because anti-home invaderism is racism, never mind that the original home invader has literally stated that no no, we’re actually doing a home invaderism and has expressed a hatred for his own race when they oppose the home invaderism.

It’s a dogwhistle.

Like how stealing passports at OR Tambo Airport in 2009 was “exposing Hamas agents” and “counter-terrorism”.

Permanently Deleted

States have recognised to have rights to do violence under international law under various circumstances.

They are saying that Israel is a legitimate state and that it has the right to do violence in defence of that state.

The opposite position to this is it is instead a “zionist entity”, not legitimate, and therefore does not have that right and is just a violent terrorist entity occupying the rightful Palestinian land.