well that escalated quickly! Business as usual or the tip of the iceberg?

No one typed the words Israel doesn't have a right to exist. If you think that's winning, fine. I never stated that anyone did, did I? I repeatedly stated what you actually said.

But let me ask a question.

Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?

And if yes, how can you have that belief if you don't believe any nation has the right to exist?

All of these things are separate from whether Israel should exist.

No.

Saying I'm not sure the concept of rights applies to nations at all is completely different.

I asked one specific question, nothing broader. The only possible answers were to name posters or acknowledge no one had.

Fudging in the middle isn't going to wash when people are paying attention.

Seems like fudging to me right here. If a nation doesn't have rights, how can you name any right it has?

Does Israel have a right to exist? Yes or no. Seems pretty easy - if you aren't fudging. If the answer is yes, then I guess you were wrong about nations not having any rights.

If the answer is no, seems a lot of fuss over wordplay, don't you think?

And as I never stated you typed in the specific words you are fixated on, you can move the goal posts to your heart's content.

I don't think that is fudging. Exactly the opposite in fact.

I'm suggesting the very question is potentially misleading when we use terminology intended for individuals rather than political entities.

Does Israel have a right to exist? I have no idea how to answer that.

Do both individual Israelis and Palestinians have exactly the same rights as anyone else? Yes, although what those rights are and how mutable they are is another set of questions altogether.

Crucially no comments on the rights of those individuals can really be said to hold for the larger nations however.

Accepting that any member of those larger entities has the right to life, freedom, self expression, family life, whatever does not lead us there. If it did then we would be left with a lot of very thorny problems about how we treat rival nations and their regimes. Do we extend a nation's hypothetical rights to their governments? Their political and economic systems? Does that not challenge that nation's right to self determination?

What happens when the nation's rights collide with the individual's?

Where are those rights when we undermine our ideological rivals without existential cause?

What we know is that Israel does, in fact, exist and that it's existence is the product of people making exactly the sort of determinations we are discussing again now.

Clearly the Palestinians view Israel's existence as an affront and it's not hard to see why. That land wasn't an "ancestral homeland" to them, it was simply "home". We as foreign powers took it from them.

If we are to talk about nations having "rights" where does that leave Palestine?
How about the Ottoman Empire?

Let's be clear. Israel should exist. But that is contingent on the will of the people living on a certain patch of territory. It is not some inviolable right that is afforded to an incorporeal institution.

And it is undermined by Israelis themselves creating a stateless underclass living in the same territory.

Sorry, I'm on a crappy laptop at the moment because of a PC issue, and both Spot and Rick's responses are worthy of a longer reply. I'll try to do so tomorrow - indeed, if you have no objection's Spot, I'd like to break out your questions to its own thread.

Couple of quick thoughts though -

1) Rights exist because of political institutions. They can't be separated from them. There is no such thing as an inviolable right. Certainly not from the creator. Individual rights are also granted by polities - they are just assertions of desires that are enforced by any polity. If a nation state falls to another, it will not return unless it manages to do so or it is freed by an outside nation state. But then, if you are killed by others, then you remain dead regardless of the legal status of the killer - and many, many killers in fact go free, even in countries that claim a right to life.

2) Polities are not 'incorporeal institutions'. The fact of Israel is more than the idea of Israel. Land, infrastructure, weapons, citizens - all of these things are very corporal.

3) The lack of polities having rights seems to be at odds with multiple assertions in this thread to the right of a nation to self-defense. The question of how far that right goes is one that's up to debate. Clearly many people feel Israel goes too far in its interpretation and actions.

4) In the modern era of nation-states, there has never been a similar situation where a partition of land was expected between two groups more fundamentally opposed. As far as I know, no other nation on Earth has an extant population that was significantly derived from survivors of a relatively recent genocide. And no other nation has had the community of nations tell it that it needed to cede its land for an immigrant group. And finally no other nation has stated as its goal the murder of an entire populace.

I am also on a shitty device, and not likely to be otherwise for a few days.

But just to note, this is getting to underlying philosophical differences.

The original concept of rights was that they derive from the creator. For this reason, Voltaire stated that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

The competing view that rights are simply the creation of human institutions is intolerable. They become nothing more than a reflection of power relationships. This comes to us via neo-Hegelian philosophy, has become associated with extreme statism and does not have a positive history. It allows any governing group to summarily remove the rights of other groups within it's power.

For this reason, I hold a modified view of the original one, that rights are innate and derivable in some way from an objective morality. This is the view of virtually all human rights organisations and it's the basis of all human rights law.

The assigning of rights to states, to corporations and to other legal fictions usually is at the expense of natural people, to whom they ought to exclusively apply.

I struggle with the idea of innate rights, not because they aren't desirable but rather because desirability is no guarantee of truth.

Nowhere in the laws of physics or chemistry do we find expressions of morality or ethics. At their most fundamental they could be argued to be an extension of biology insofar as humans structure their interactions with principles which strive to elevate us from our animal natures.

To elevate us, arguably, from nature itself.

I find it difficult to follow that train of thought to a place where the actual content of those principles can be said to be anything other than man made. We may choose to treat them as inviolable but that requires vigilance. It requires that we maintain those structures in order to guard the principles they enshrine.

They are only inviolable when we uphold them.

Rights, therefore, are neither innate nor dispensed by the state but rather a product of the human desire to impose values on an uncaring reality. Societies represent the means by which we enact those principles, how we make them real, but they do not infer higher authority.

Agreed, but that ultimately is why these structures are so important. It's the organization of humans in order to ensure these choices we make as to what every human in that polity should have the benefit of.

Hard to take that line without saying that rights are literally created by institutions. It's just a polite fiction in the west that this is not true.

Which by definition means they are not inviolable. Anything else is just bantering with semantics.

And there you go amiss. Without the state, or some form of institution, rights can't be said to exist other than as a philosophical principle that you wish to be true. A mental construct, not an enforceable reality. Anyone with more force, or even more organization to influence a polity, can change what rights are protected by that polity. If you say you have the right to a big-screen TV, unless you can bring physical or political force to bear to ensure that right, it literally doesn't exist. Same goes with healthcare, voting, anything.

This fragility is what makes the concept of rights so precious, because they can be lost.

I'm not sure we're disagreeing here to be honest, except for the necessity of physical force.

Sometimes consent is not a polite form of coercion.

I'm all in favour of protecting the notion that people have rights as granted by the social structures we've created, I'm just very uncomfortable with the leap so many seem to make from that fairly innocuous position to asserting that rights are innate and thus not subject to review.

By the logic which argues an innate or natural right is immutable (a surprisingly commonplace piece of received wisdom in much of the developed world) we would still have men with rights over their wives bodies, or slave owners making similar claims.

Yes protect and cherish human rights but don't ever allow that to become so dogmatic as to render any questions about those rights heretical.

I don't think either of us need look too far to see the practical applications of that thought process at play in our modern world.

As for nation states I'm open to any thoughts you might have.

Suppose we could effectually grant similar rights to political entities under a framework of global consent, would such a framework not already have been rendered obsolete by definition?

Would unprovoked killing be wrong if there was no state?

Define "state".

Interpret it as broadly or as narrowly as you wish. It's you who are linking the concept with that of rights.

Or to simplify, let's say you and I are the only humans left alive. There are no wider social structures of any kind. Is your killing me wrong?

Then we ARE a social structure, the only one left.

We define right and wrong between us.

Assuming I've read your character correctly these past few years killing you would be wrong as we are both people who value human life.

Clearly if you were about to kill me, you wouldn't agree. Would you be wrong?

If I were about to kill you then the scenario becomes invalid, because it does not reflect my values as stated. Clearly in that situation we are discussing an alternate version of me who views killing as acceptable under some circumstances.

Given that there are only two of us it would be difficult to reach a consensus view but Darwin would decide our fates.

There's the rub.

Nation states are not the unique concept we treat them as, they are simply one current expression of the human tendency to form groups with both formal and informal structures. Once upon a time it was the tribe, the family but population sizes and complexity both grew. We have friendship circles, religious groups, familial ties, racial groupings, political tribes, special interest groups, clubs, fandoms, whatever.

All of these things are social structures with associated values, norms and rules. The nation simply happens to be the one whose rules and values we usually label as having legal force.

For some nations the shared values are largely implicit in their rules and customs, for others there are documents codifying those values.

Ever pondered the irony that the self proclaimed most individualistic nation in history puts such stock in a document stating exactly what the shared values of its populace are? That's an incredibly communal behaviour for a people so wary of the dangers of a group identity.

I have and see it as no coincidence, because less individualist nations make their values implicit in shared customs and behaviours. There's less incentive to formalise them.

Hence my asking for a definition of "state", because the norms and values of all these groups (states?) may well be very different. Some may view killing as acceptable (see the current example, also Israel/Palestine), others as murder in any scenario.

Some may not externally recognise each other as valid at all, but they are valid to their members.

In amongst all this where do we find space for absolute morality?

The designations "you" and "I" are arbitrary. If there's Person A and Person B, no wider social structure and one decides to kill the other, is he doing anything wrong?

To simplify greatly, we find it by suggesting that some of these positions are ultimately in error, just as we might do with any other area where there are mutually exclusive positions. Otherwise, what basis has anyone for expressing the view that the IDF or Hamas are behaving badly? Why bother if these are all equally valid norms?

Depersonalising the scenario doesn't change anything IMHO. In any case we end up with two individuals whose relationship represents the only extant social structure.

Either they are in disagreement about their values or accord.

In the former case we have the world's smallest civil war, in the latter a murder.
Right or wrong still derive from human perceptions and attitudes scaled up to broader in group acceptance.

As for determining error, how exactly do we do that?

How do we objectively verify the moral correctness of a belief?

After all these thousands of year's recorded history have we come even close to global consensus?

The state is not the ultimate arbiter of morality, as questions of morality are not the same thing as legality.

It is however the first and most powerful guaranteer of rights, if the philosophy and political strength of the population can get a state to agree.

Ultimately a state is organized power. That power can be political, cultural, social, or sanctioned violence.

And if you aspire to the destruction of the state, you aspire to helplessness against other groups with superior organization. This isn't because of mankind's innate feebleness, it's because the organized power of mankind is the most powerful force on the planet.

Hard to believe anyone still doesn't understand the basic lessons of Hobbes' Leviathan, yet here we are.

That's because it's the one that expresses the most power because it organizes the most people.

As to being a 'unique concept', I'd say it's a very unusual concept and one that occurs relatively late in human development. I think Yuval Noah Harari gets several things wrong in Sapiens, but one aspect that very much rings true is the concept of narrative.

We don't have the ability to organize cognitively at the level required for nation-states. Our tribal upbringing makes it difficult to assign belonging to those so far outside the range of our personal perceptions. The nation state, and religion, are the two primary organizers that give us the ability to work together across vast distances and maintain a concept of 'us.' When this identity of us breaks down, that is normally when nation states break down. One of the dangers of modern politics, and quite frankly the concept of multiculturalism.

Personally I find the concept of polyculturalism to be far more useful in allowing for socially distinct cultures to survive in a greater polity.

Not only that, but to deify and treat it as an object of veneration - this is the narrative. All countries have myths about their origins though. The US also has greater issues with disparate cultures and ethnicities than many. The customs and behaviors aren't as intrinsic, because of the number of different cultures. But the Soviet Union and China both do the same thing. It's about overcoming that individuality to work together, and all three of these superpowers have had great difficulties with that at times, the Soviets failing entirely.

This I agree with, though I don't know if Rick is promoting absolute morality.

So, the killing would not be wrong as such?

I think that we have a large degree of consensus on the fundamentals, most of the time - but that's not really relevant. It was much less so in the past - let's say when slavery was commonly accepted. But that still didn't make slavery other than a moral evil.

I entirely agree that the state is a "guarantor" of rights, these being understood as antecedent to the state. But that is not at all what you stated upthread when you said that "rights exist because of political institutions".

If that were the case, then states (or other political institutions, call them what you like) do not merely act as gaurantors, they originate such rights, without which they would not exist. At which point my question becomes pertinent. Because by your logic, if there is no state, I have no right to life and if I have no right to life, it is not wrong to kill me.

I don't aspire to the destruction of the state, so this is pure invention on your part - not for the first time in this thread or elsewhere.

How do rights exist outside of the state? In practice they exist only as thought constructs without the force of legal guarantees. They were conceived by the security and protection afforded by the first city states, going back to Cicero. I understand you want to think that there are inalienable rights, but that has always been a fiction. No outside force exists that guarantees it. It's simply you saying 'I want X', and if enough people agree, then societies try to make that happen, and because human societies are imperfect, they are always enforced imperfectly.

There is no creator. Most 'rights' come from enlightened self-interest, and those are the ones through philosophy and indoctrination we've managed to convince people should exist and no state should be able to take away. While I agree with that principle because it clearly benefits the greater good, clearly all of these rights are subject to termination if a stronger polity intervenes.

The 'right to life' and the morality of murder are not the same concept. For one, you can clearly deprive people of the right to life in many ways that doesn't include killing. In the other, the state routinely sanctions killing in the name of the state - I'm unaware of any that has not at some point. But clearly, if it was an inviolable natural right, it wouldn't be violated so frequently. An imperfect state attempts to prevent murders, or at least punish murderers, because all of the individual citizens desire not to be murdered, and have agreed to that concept. But then, the nature of narrative of us and them inevitably creates a 'them'. Sometimes it's an external foe, sometimes it's an internal group, ideology or ethnicity. But clearly there have been constant violations of the inviolable rights when the state doesn't enforce them, or worse yet, actively organizes its citizens to violate them.

Indeed, for the greater history of mankind, most of the things we consider rights most certainly were not present.

This doesn't lesson the need for protection of rights, but increases it. They aren't natural, and once take away there's no guarantee they will be brought back.

My apologies if I misconstrued your statements. You are not an anarcho-syndicalist by preference? Or am I mistaking you for someone else?

Oh, and going back to the original topic, the Holocaust was very much an important part of the formation of Israel even after the war, as Nazi figures were fundamental in the creation of the opposition to the state of Israel.

The person Egypt put in charge of Gaza when it seized control in '48 was the former Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini. He was already considered a war criminal by the UK at the outbreak of the war, as he was responsible for a series of assassinations of moderate Muslims because they sought a peaceful resolution with the Jews.

He was a collaborator with the Nazis during WWII, being paid $12 million a year to broadcast radio messages calling for the Arabs to overthrow the British and murder all the Jews. He personally knew Hitler, Himmler and Eichmann, and was given a tour of the first concentration camps in '42 and is on record as being well pleased with them. In '43 he was told of the Final Solution, and that over 3 million Jews had already been killed. When factions in the Reich tried to get Jews out of conquered territories, he personally intervened and said they should be sent to the death camps of Poland instead, and ultimately got his wish. We have 18 of his letters stating that no Jew should be sent to Palestine, when he freely admitted he knew what the death camps were and what they were doing. He also led the charge to recruit Bosnian Muslims, and over 26,000 of them served in the Waffen-SS.

So naturally he's put in charge of Gaza.

Why would Egypt do that? Well, they were being advised by SS officers at the time. Several dozen made their way to Egypt, many taking on Egyptian names to flee their war crimes. They worked for the Egyptian military. Most notably this included Otto Skorzeny, Hitlers favorite commando. Skorzeny became an advisor to an Egytpian general, then to Nasser himself when he took over the country. He trained Palestinian fighters for Egypt, and is known to have planned many raids by PLO fighters into Israel in 52-53 personally.

Skorzeny of course was the man Hitler had chosen to create the Werewolf corps of insurgents. He decided Hitler's plan was untenable, and moved to Egypt instead, where hed be protected and could train people to kill Jews in literal Nazi tactics. One of the men he trained was Yasser Arafat.

And ironically, after fighting Israel for 40 years, even Arafat tired of the violence and ultimately tried to make peace with them, to give his people a better future.

So naturally Hamas rose up and started a civil war in Palestine because they weren't dedicated enough to killing Jews, and that's who is in charge of Gaza now.

Just like the Mufti would have wanted, even though he'd been dead for 45 years by that point.

I see slavery as a moral evil.

You see slavery as a moral evil.

As moral agents we tend to perpetuate our viewpoints to improve the world according to our perspective.

Ergo we oppose slavery.

It does not follow that there is a unified consensus or that the morality of slavery exists outside of our value judgements.

Ultimately the universe is made of atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, various unifying forces and a plethora of other uncaring stuff which has no opinion on the matter.

It is intrinsically and quite notably lacking in moral perspectives of any stripe right up until you introduce intelligence into the mix.

If morality is innate to nature does a quokka throwing it's children to a predator deserve our judgement for observing it's nature? Should we label a desert as cruel for the suffering imposed on those traversing it?

Morality (and by extension rights) is a human construct. It does not exist outside of human interactions and those interactions are the bricks and mortar of society. The largest and most complex iterations of that are the abstract entities we call nation states and thus those nation states are intrinsically concerned with questions of what is moral, what is ethical, what is a right which should be enshrined within their legal jurisdictions.

You cannot have rights as we understand them without first having human beings. You cannot codify those rights without the social structures to discuss, regulate and enforce them.

So in your example of the two people on the planet yes killing would be wrong in my view. Someone else's view may differ and would have no lesser worth.

If this is accurate (and I make no claims that it is, but the people commenting certainly believe it to be), then there’s a problem brewing since the beginning.

Yeah, Irgun is definitely a problem.

Of course, they were a response - the aforementioned Groupenfuhrer al-Husseini (his other title granted by Hitler personally other than Mufti of Jerusalem, ie the highest Muslim religious figure in that Holy City) started inciting riots against Jews for peacefully buying land Arabs wanted to sell all the way back in 1920. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920_Nebi_Musa_riots

And there are supposedly letters written by a guy in the late 30s who would later become an Israeli PM, saying that they'd just kick the Arabs off the land since the Arabs weren't capable of making proper use of it. When the Balkans imploded, all sides were pointing to incidents going back to the 10th century as justification for their actions. In the case of Palestine, they can push that back another 200 years, at least.

At some point, if people want the conflict to stop, they have to stop pointing to things that happened in the past and start addressing ways to live in peace in the present.

Sure. Feel free to let me know when Hamas changes its charter from stating that it's a religious duty to Allah to destroy the Nation of Israel and kill all the Jews.

How do you make peace with that? When the forbears of these people literally allied themselves with Hitler and attempted to do just that? When Muslims who called for peace were assassinated and civil war broke out among them because the faction now in charge wouldn't make peace with Israel?

And if they don't, then the Jews should feel free to do as they please?

If you'd have asked me back in the 80s how we could make peace with the USSR, I'd have said that I didn't see a way. Didn't see a way for there to be an end to the shit going on in Northern Ireland, either. In these kinds of situations, peace tends to come when one side wipes out the other, both sides get tired of fighting, or outsiders come in and take steps to force the warring factions to the negotiating table.

The Saudi's hold a lot of sway around the world because of their oil and wealth. What happens when the world doesn't need so much oil? That'll tip a lot of power in the world when the various oil states (and their dictators) aren't propped up by one of the most important resources. Will it lead to peace? I dunno, but if it's handled properly, it certainly could.