Right to exist

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Right to exist is a phrase referring to the question of whether the Jewish people, acting through the modern government of Israel, have a right to maintain a homeland for the Jews in the Land of Israel.

Right to Exist is also the title of a book by the director of the archives at Yad Vashem, Yaacov Lozowick.

Menachem Begin to the Knesset upon assuming the premiership in 1977:

“

Our right to exist--have you ever heard of such a thing? Would it enter the mind of any Briton or Frenchman, Belgian or Dutchman, Hungarian or Bulgarian, Russian or American, to request for its people recognition of its right to exist? Mr. Speaker: We were granted our right to exist by the God of our fathers at the glimmer of the dawn of human civilization four thousand years ago. Hence, the Jewish people have an historic, eternal and inalienable right to exist in this land, Eretz Israel, the land of our forefathers. We need nobody's recognition in asserting this inalienable right. And for this inalienable right, which has been sanctified in Jewish blood from generation to generation, we have paid a price unexampled in the annals of nations. Mr. Speaker: From the Knesset of Israel, I say to the world, our very existence per se is our right to exist!^[1]

”

Lawrence L. Whetten writes that In late 1967, after the Six Day War, the official Egyptian government spokesman Mohammed H. el-Zayyat "stated that Cairo had accepted Israel's right to exist since the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli armistice in 1949, but added that this did not endorse the recognition of Israel (raising the distinction, frequently cited since then by Arab leaders, between acceptance of the de facto existence of a state and the establishment of diplomatic relations with it)."^[2]