Words do more than describe reality. They shape it.

Few phrases demonstrate this better than questioning or supporting “Israel’s right to exist.”

At first glance, it sounds like a reasonable principle. Until one pauses to think about it. It is a question asked of no other nation. Countries are criticized for their policies or leaders. Their continued existence is not routinely presented as a subject for debate.

Only Israel is.

Because the question isn’t about particular policy. No country has an inherent right to exist. Not Spain, not South Sudan, not Somaliland.

The issue is not whether Israel has a right to exist. The issue is whether people support destroying an existing country, specifically, destroying the only Jewish State.

While Holocaust Survivors are still alive to recount the horror of the genocide of one-third of world Jewry, people discuss the destruction of Jews in their homeland where nearly half of world Jewry resides.

It is an abomination.

And the irony is that the unresolved question of statehood is not Israel’s; it is Palestine’s.

Israel declared independence in 1948 and has been a member of the United Nations ever since. The Palestinians declared the State of Palestine in 1988, and while many countries have recognized that declaration, neither the United States nor Israel has done so. Further, Palestine is not a full member state of the United Nations. Palestine still fails to meet many of the basic criteria for statehood.

If there is a legitimate debate about a state’s existence, it concerns whether a Palestinian state should be established. After the October 7 massacre, the abduction of civilians, and the persistence of violent extremism and antisemitism within Palestinian society, many people argue that recognition of Palestinian statehood should depend on profound political and cultural change.

Instead, the narrative has been inverted. And weaponized. Rather than asking whether yet another Arab and Muslim state should be created under present circumstances, the debate is reframed as whether the one existing Jewish state has a “right to exist.”

The “right to exist” narrative should be placed squarely on Palestine, not Israel. And the current verdict is not positive.