The State Is Not Sacred: On Sovereignty, Religion, and the Right to Exist
Pakistan, Hindutva Rashtra, and the Israel Question — One Argument, Three Mirrors
A Political Essay for the Op-Ed Pages
By a Political Researcher and Journalist
"States are not moral persons. They are instruments. When the instrument forgets it is an instrument and begins to claim the rights of persons — the right to exist, the right to be loved, the right to be eternal — it has become a danger to everyone within it and everyone around it." — Hannah Arendt, paraphrased from The Origins of Totalitarianism
There is a question that haunts three of the most consequential political conflicts of our era, and it is almost never asked with the directness it deserves:
Does a state have a right to exist?
Not a people. Not a culture. Not a religion. Not a language. Not a civilisation. A state — that particular 20th-century legal-political construct, with its borders, its flag, its standing army, its seat at the United Nations, its claim to sovereignty over a defined territory and the people within it.
Does such a thing have a right to exist?
The question matters with extraordinary urgency in three geographically distant but philosophically conjoined contexts: the debate over Israel's "right to exist" as framed and contested in the aftermath of decades of conflict with the Palestinian people; the founding logic of Pakistan as a state created explicitly in the name of and for Muslims; and the increasingly vocal demand from Hindutva nationalist formations that India be reconstituted as a Hindu Rashtra — a state existing in the name of and for Hindus.
Three conflicts. Three religious states, actual or aspirational. One argument.
It is time to examine that argument honestly — because it is the same argument in all three cases, and its flaws are equally visible in all three.
I. What International Law Actually Says — And Does Not Say
Let us begin where the Mehdi Hasan argument begins, because it is legally correct and politically important: in reality, international law does not recognize such a right for states; it recognizes the right of peoples to self-determination and prohibits territorial conquest.
This is not a radical position. It is the textbook position of international legal scholarship. States are political and historical constructs. They are created, they merge, they dissolve, they are occupied, they are liberated, they change their names, their constitutions, their governing ideologies. The USSR existed and then it did not. Yugoslavia existed and then it did not. Czechoslovakia existed and then it did not — amicably, in the "Velvet Divorce" of 1993. The Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the British Empire: all gone. The people who lived within them: still here, still possessed of rights, still deserving of dignity and justice.
The state, in international law, is a mechanism — a recognised entity with defined territory, a permanent population, an effective government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. These are the Montevideo Convention criteria from 1933. There is no criterion of moral purity, no criterion of historical destiny, no criterion of divine mandate. And there is no provision for a "right to exist" as a permanent, inalienable, unquestionable status that shields the state from accountability for what it does within and beyond its borders.
Legally, Israel does not possess a unique, inherent "right to exist" under international law — the concept is rhetorical and political, not a codified legal guarantee. The same is true of every other state on earth. No state has such a right. What states have is recognition — provisional, political, and contingent on the norms of international behaviour.
The demand that critics of Israeli state policy first "recognise Israel's right to exist" before being permitted to discuss the occupation of the West Bank, the blockade of Gaza, the settlement enterprise, or the conditions of Palestinian civilians is therefore not a legal requirement. It is a rhetorical gate — a discursive device designed to pre-empt criticism by making a particular political concession the price of admission to any serious conversation.
Mehdi Hasan labels it a propaganda tactic, and on its specific use as a debate-stopper, he is right. But the argument has a deeper resonance than the Israel-Palestine debate. Because the same rhetorical structure — the claim that a state has a right to exist that overrides accountability for its actions — appears, in different forms, in the founding logic of Pakistan and in the aspirational logic of Hindutva nationalism. And in all three cases, it performs the same function: it elevates the state above the people it contains, making the institution primary and the human beings within it secondary.
That inversion is the source of incalculable suffering.
II. Pakistan: The First Religious State and Its Unresolved Contradiction
Pakistan was the first state in modern history to be created explicitly on the basis of religious identity. The two-nation theory was an ideology of religious nationalism that advocated Muslim Indian nationhood, with a separate homeland for Indian Muslims within a decolonised British India, which ultimately led to the partition of India in 1947.
The logic of the two-nation theory, as articulated by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League, was elegant in its simplicity: Hindus and Muslims constitute two separate nations by virtue of their distinct customs, traditions, religion, and way of life. Since they are two nations, they require two states. Therefore, the creation of Pakistan — a state for Muslims — was not merely a political demand but an ontological necessity.
The theory had force in its historical moment. The Congress-Muslim League negotiations of the 1930s and 1940s, the communal violence that preceded partition, the legitimate fears of Muslim minorities in a Hindu-majority political system — all of this gave Jinnah's argument real emotional and political traction. The British, for reasons of imperial convenience and exit strategy, facilitated the partition. The human cost was catastrophic: between one and two million dead, fourteen million displaced, a wound in the subcontinent that has not healed in eighty years.
But the two-nation theory contained from its inception a contradiction that the creation of Pakistan did not resolve — it deepened it.
Jinnah took the earliest opportunity to bid goodbye to his two-nation theory. In his address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on 11 August 1947, he declared that citizens of the new state could belong to any religion, caste, or creed, and that this had nothing to do with the business of the state. In his most important speech as the founder of the nation he had created on the basis of religious difference, Jinnah announced a secular vision. The theory that had justified Pakistan's creation was abandoned by its author at the moment of creation.
What this reveals is not Jinnah's cynicism — it reveals the inherent impossibility of the religious-state project. A state created for Muslims must, if it is to function as a state rather than as a theocracy, eventually recognise that governance requires the inclusion of all citizens regardless of their faith. The moment it makes this recognition, it has conceded that the religious basis of its existence was not a governing principle but a founding mythology.
Pakistan's subsequent history has been the history of a state unable to resolve this founding contradiction. The "Islamic Republic of Pakistan" constitutionally enshrines Islam as the state religion while also guaranteeing fundamental rights to minorities. It has oscillated, in its 75 years, between military authoritarianism and fragile democracy, between Sufi-inflected popular Islam and Wahhabi-influenced political Islam, between its secular constitutional promises and the blasphemy laws that make those promises unenforceable for the Ahmadis, the Christians, the Hindus, and the secular Muslims who live within its borders.
According to Sharif al Mujahid, one of the most preeminent experts on Jinnah, the two-nation theory was relevant only in the pre-1947 subcontinental context. He is of the opinion that the creation of Pakistan rendered it obsolete because the two nations had transformed themselves into Indian and Pakistani nations. "Even if there was such a theory," noted one leading Pakistani politician, "it has sunk in the Bay of Bengal" — a reference to the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, in which Bengali Muslims chose national self-determination over Islamic solidarity, conclusively refuting the premise that Muslim identity constitutes a sufficient basis for state cohesion.
The people of Pakistan have rights — to security, to dignity, to democratic governance, to education, to economic opportunity. Those rights do not depend on the existence of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in its current constitutional form. They inhere in the people. The state is the mechanism by which, ideally, those rights are protected and advanced. When the state's founding mythology — the two-nation theory — obstructs the protection and advancement of those rights, the mythology must be questioned, not the rights.
The sovereignty of Pakistan is not in doubt. What is in doubt is whether a state founded on religious exclusivism can deliver the rights and dignity that all its citizens — Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Ahmadi, Sikh — are owed.
III. Hindutva Rashtra: The Mirror on the Other Side
The demand for a Hindu Rashtra is, by its own internal logic, the Hindu two-nation theory. It is the precise mirror image of Jinnah's argument, in the possession of Jinnah's opponents.
The Hindu Mahasabha under the leadership of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) supported the Two-Nation Theory. According to them, Hindus and Muslims could not live together, so they favoured India to become a religious Hindu state.
The symmetry is historically documented and philosophically precise. Savarkar and Jinnah agreed on the diagnosis — that India contained two nations — but proposed different remedies: Jinnah wanted Pakistan for Muslims, Savarkar wanted Hindustan for Hindus. They shared the assumption that religious identity constitutes the basis of nationhood. The Indian National Congress, led by Gandhi and Nehru, rejected both — and built a constitutional framework of secular democratic pluralism that has, despite its many imperfections and the stresses it now faces, endured for 75 years.
It is this fixation with viewing India as a Hindu Rashtra that kept the RSS organisation strictly away from the freedom struggle, as the RSS did not want a secular India where Hindus would have to share power with Muslims. This is a historically documented fact that the organisation's contemporary defenders consistently minimise: the RSS did not participate in the independence movement. It built its alternative India-in-waiting during the years that Gandhi, Nehru, Azad, Ambedkar, and their colleagues were in British prisons or leading civil disobedience campaigns.
The contemporary Hindutva project faces the same founding contradiction as Pakistan, expressed in different institutional terms. To formally declare India a "Hindu Rashtra" would require altering the basic structure of the Constitution. The Supreme Court's Basic Structure Doctrine holds that while Parliament can amend the Constitution, it cannot change its fundamental framework. Many legal experts view India's secular nature as an integral part of its basic structure.
In other words: the constitutional India that exists cannot be transformed into a Hindu Rashtra without ceasing to be constitutional India. To become the Hindu Rashtra, India would have to first destroy the India that exists. The Supreme Court rejected multiple petitions which challenged the inclusion of the words "socialist" and "secular" in the preamble, holding that the addition of these terms could not be objected to just on the ground that the original preamble did not contain them.
But the legal obstacle, though real, is not the deepest problem. The deepest problem is the same one that Pakistan faces: the religious-state project, in India's case, requires the subordination of 200 million Muslims, 28 million Christians, 21 million Sikhs, 4 million Buddhists, and tens of millions of Dalits and tribal peoples — roughly a third of the Indian population — to the civilisational and political project of a specific (and internally highly diverse) religious majority. It requires, in M.S. Golwalkar's formulation, that these communities either assimilate, convert, or accept the status of permanent minorities without the full constitutional rights of citizens.
The core agenda of RSS-BJP is to strive for a Hindu Nation where Manu Smriti will be the guiding principle. We have examined in our companion research paper what the Manusmriti actually is — a heavily interpolated composite text elevated to constitutional status by British colonial codification, whose most extreme caste-hierarchical and gender-discriminatory verses appear to be later additions. The proposal to govern a 21st-century democracy of 1.4 billion people by the principles of this text is not a return to civilisational roots. It is the imposition of a 19th-century colonial legal construction masquerading as ancient wisdom.
The Hindu Rashtra project's sovereignty claim — the claim that India is a Hindu Rashtra by civilisational essence, and that the secular Constitution represents a foreign imposition on India's true nature — is structurally identical to the claim that Israel makes about its Jewish character, and that Pakistan makes about its Islamic character. In each case, the religious identity of the majority is presented as the foundational truth of the state, and the rights of minorities are presented as a concession rather than a constitutional guarantee.
In each case, the claim is wrong. And in each case, the people — all of them — deserve better than the state's mythology.
IV. Israel: Where the Argument Meets Its Sharpest Contradiction
The Israel-Palestine conflict is, in several respects, the most extreme and most consequential expression of the problem this essay is examining. It is also the oldest unresolved instance of the post-World War II international order's failure to reconcile the principle of state sovereignty with the principle of individual and collective rights.
Israel claims that it has the right to exist because the legality of its creation was contested and is still a matter for debate. In order to assert its legitimacy as a State and the legality of its creation, it asserts its "right to exist." This assertion is not made in the exercise of any right recognized by international law. It is simply a political appeal designed to justify the morality and legality of Israel's creation and existence as a State.
The distinction is important and worth dwelling on. Israel exists. It has been a member of the United Nations since 1949. It has a government, a military, an economy, a population, and diplomatic relations with a large majority of the world's states. Its existence as a political fact is not in question.
What is in question — and what the rhetorical demand to "recognise Israel's right to exist" is designed to foreclose from questioning — is the moral and legal basis of its founding, the legitimacy of its territorial claims, and the accountability of its government for actions taken in the name of Jewish security and Jewish statehood.
The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine allocated the majority of the land to a Jewish state, even though Jews were a minority of the population and owned only a small fraction of the land. The war that followed, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, produced the mass displacement and killing of Palestinians.
The Balfour Declaration specifically stipulated that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." This stipulation — the founding document's own protective clause for the non-Jewish population — has been comprehensively violated by the subsequent history of the Israeli state. The 750,000 Palestinians displaced in 1948 (the Nakba), the decades of military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the settlement enterprise that has transferred hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians into occupied territory in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the blockade of Gaza, the repeated military campaigns — all of this constitutes a record that cannot be defended by invoking the state's "right to exist."
As legal scholar Aslı Ü. Bâli notes: "Israel has created a state that is an expression of the recognized right of self-determination of the Jewish people but is continually behaving in ways that essentially deny Palestinians the ability to achieve the same."
This is the core contradiction: the right of self-determination — the right that underpins Israel's founding claim — is a right of peoples, not of states. And it cannot logically be invoked to justify denying the same right to the Palestinian people. The Jewish people's right to self-determination does not cancel the Palestinian people's right to self-determination. The existence of the Israeli state does not cancel the right of the Palestinian people to their own state.
The demand to "recognise Israel's right to exist" as a precondition for discussing Palestinian rights performs the same logical sleight of hand that Pakistan's two-nation theory performs, and that Hindutva nationalism performs: it elevates the state above the people, makes the institution primary and the human beings secondary, and shields the state from accountability for what it does to those human beings by wrapping itself in the language of existential necessity.
V. The Three-Way Mirror: What These Arguments Share
It is worth pausing to notice the structural identities across these three very different conflicts, because those identities reveal something important about the nature of the religious-state project in general.
Identity 1: The state is presented as the vessel of a people's survival. In all three cases, the state is not merely a political mechanism — it is the guarantee of a people's existence. Pakistan is the guarantee that Muslims will not be persecuted in a Hindu-majority polity. Israel is the guarantee that Jews will never again face the Holocaust. The Hindu Rashtra is the guarantee that Hindus will be protected in their civilisational homeland. In each case, the historical trauma that motivates the project is real. In each case, the state is offered as the solution to that trauma. And in each case, the state's claim to protect its designated people is used to justify what it does to the others.
Identity 2: The "right to exist" is invoked to silence accountability. Pakistan invokes its Islamic identity to shield its blasphemy laws, its treatment of Ahmadis, its discrimination against minorities, from criticism framed as "attacking Pakistan." The Hindu Rashtra project invokes Hindu civilisational grievance to shield its communal policies from criticism framed as "Hindu-phobia." Israel invokes its right to exist to shield its settlement enterprise, its occupation, its treatment of Gaza, from criticism framed as "anti-Semitism." The rhetorical structure is identical across all three. The accusation changes; the function is the same.
Identity 3: The rights of the people are subordinated to the logic of the state. International law recognizes the right of peoples to self-determination and prohibits territorial conquest. People have rights. States are instruments for protecting those rights. When the instrument turns against the people — when the state persecutes its minorities, occupies neighbouring populations, denies rights to categories of its own citizens — the instrument has failed its purpose. The state's "right to exist" cannot shield it from that accountability, because the state has no such right. What it has is recognition, and recognition is contingent.
Identity 4: The exit from the religious-state trap requires the same move in all three cases. The exit is the recognition that the rights of the people — all the people, not only the designated majority — are prior to and more important than the mythology of the state. Israel's Jewish citizens have rights. Palestinian citizens of Israel have rights. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have rights. Pakistani Muslims have rights. Pakistani Christians, Ahmadis, and Hindus have rights. Indian Hindus have rights. Indian Muslims, Christians, Dalits, Sikhs, and tribal peoples have rights. These rights do not derive from the state. They inhere in the people. The state's legitimacy derives from how well it protects and advances those rights — for all its people, not only for the majority that provides its founding mythology.
VI. The Sovereignty Question: What It Actually Means
The word sovereignty has been so thoroughly misused in contemporary political discourse that it is worth recovering its proper meaning.
Sovereignty — in its original Westphalian formulation and in its contemporary international legal understanding — is the principle that states have supreme authority within their territories and are not subject to external interference in their internal affairs. It is a principle designed to prevent wars of conquest, religious persecution across borders, and the subordination of weaker states to stronger ones.
Sovereignty is emphatically not a principle that shields states from accountability to their own people. It is not a principle that protects state power from the scrutiny of international human rights norms. It is not a principle that grants states the right to dispossess, displace, or persecute populations within or adjacent to their borders while demanding non-interference from the international community.
The misuse of sovereignty as a shield for internal repression and external aggression is one of the defining political pathologies of our era. Putin invokes Russian sovereignty to justify the invasion of Ukraine. Xi invokes Chinese sovereignty to justify the detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. The Indian government invokes sovereignty to resist international scrutiny of communal violence and constitutional erosion. The Israeli government invokes sovereignty — and the additional charge of anti-Semitism — to resist scrutiny of its treatment of Palestinians.
In each case, the invocation of sovereignty is the invocation of the state against the people. And in each case, it fails the test of the principle it claims to embody, because genuine sovereignty — the kind that commands respect in international law and in the court of world opinion — derives from the consent of the governed, the protection of rights, and the accountability of power to those it claims to represent.
A state that cannot pass this test has no meaningful "right to exist" worth defending. And a state that can pass this test does not need to invoke its "right to exist" — because it will earn its legitimacy daily through the quality of governance it provides to all its people.
VII. What We Should Be Asking Instead
Mehdi Hasan concludes his argument by urging that the focus of any debate regarding Israel should not be on its right to exist, but on its actions. This is correct — and it applies with equal force to Pakistan and to the Hindutva Rashtra project.
The questions worth asking are not metaphysical questions about a state's right to exist. They are practical, constitutional, human rights questions about what a state does to the people within its reach.
For Pakistan: Does the state protect the rights of its Ahmadi, Christian, Hindu, and Shia minorities? Does it provide equal citizenship to all? Does its blasphemy law serve justice or serve persecution? Does its treatment of women — still governed in significant respects by the Zia-ul-Haq era Hudood Ordinances — meet the standard of constitutional equality? Does its civil-military structure allow genuine democratic governance? The two-nation theory is a dead letter; the rights of Pakistani citizens are alive and urgently relevant.
For India: Does the state protect the constitutional rights of all its citizens equally — Muslim, Dalit, tribal, Christian — or does it selectively enforce those rights in ways that favour the Hindu majority? Does the CAA discriminate against Muslims in violation of Article 14's guarantee of equality? Does the sedition law silence legitimate dissent? Does mob violence against minorities meet with equal legal response? The Hindu Rashtra demand is constitutionally impossible without destroying the Constitution; the rights of India's citizens are constitutionally guaranteed and must be defended.
For Israel: Does the state treat its Arab citizens equally with its Jewish citizens? Does the occupation of the West Bank meet the standards of international humanitarian law? Does the blockade of Gaza — which has been in place for nearly two decades — constitute collective punishment prohibited under the Geneva Conventions? Do the settlements in occupied territory violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the transfer of civilian populations into occupied territory? Do the military operations in Gaza since October 2023 meet the proportionality standards of the laws of armed conflict? The state's existence is not in question; its actions are, and they must be.
These questions are uncomfortable. They are designed to be deflected — by accusations of anti-Pakistan bias, anti-Hindu hatred, or anti-Semitism. The deflections are, in each case, the rhetorical substitute for genuine accountability.
They must be resisted.
VIII. The People Are Not the State
There is a final distinction that requires absolute clarity, because it is the foundation on which everything else rests.
The people are not the state.
The Jewish people are not the State of Israel. Criticising the Israeli government's policies — its settlements, its occupation, its treatment of Gaza — is not the same as attacking Jewish people or denying the historical reality and ongoing horror of anti-Semitism. The conflation of these two things is a political device, and a dangerous one — because it makes every Jewish person responsible for every action of the Israeli state, which is precisely the logic of anti-Semitism. To protect Jewish people from anti-Semitism, we must insist on the distinction between people and state — which means insisting that the state be accountable for what it does.
The Muslim people are not the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Criticising the founding logic of the two-nation theory, or the treatment of minorities under the blasphemy laws, is not an attack on Islam or on the dignity of Muslim people. The Muslim people have extraordinary civilisational wealth, intellectual traditions, and moral resources — none of which require the Pakistani state in its current form to exist or to be shielded from accountability.
The Hindu people are not the Hindutva state. The civilisation that produced the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Arthashastra, the Tamil Sangam poetry, the Ajanta caves, the Nalanda university, Aryabhata, Kabir, Mirabai, Ambedkar, Gandhi, and Tagore does not need the Manusmriti as its constitution or the RSS as its vanguard. Criticising the Hindutva project is not an attack on Hindu civilisation — it is, as the companion to this essay argues at length, the defence of a civilisation that is far richer and more complex than any political movement can contain.
In all three cases, the people deserve states that serve them — all of them — rather than states that conscript them into a religious mythology that elevates some and diminishes others.
The political conversation rarely confronts that contradiction. Instead, it fixates on the ritual question of whether Israel has a "right to exist." In reality, international law does not recognize such a right for states; it recognizes the right of peoples to self-determination and prohibits territorial conquest.
The same fixation — the same ritual question, the same function — operates in Islamabad and in Nagpur and in Jerusalem. In all three capitals, the state demands that its existence be treated as the primary political fact, prior to and more important than the rights of the people it claims to represent and the people it actually governs.
The answer, in all three cases, must be the same:
The state is not sacred. The people are.
The state does not have a right to exist. The people have rights — to dignity, to security, to equality before the law, to the exercise of their democratic voice, to the protection of their culture and identity without the subordination of anyone else's. Those rights do not derive from the state. They are prior to the state. And no state — not Pakistan, not Israel, not a hypothetical Hindu Rashtra — earns its legitimacy by anything other than how faithfully it protects those rights for everyone within its reach.
That is the argument. It is the same argument in all three cases.
It is time to make it.
Postscript: A Note on Evenhandedness
This essay has been written from a position of political evenhandedness that some readers on all sides will find unsatisfying. Those who support Pakistan will note that this essay questions the two-nation theory. Those who support Hindutva will note that this essay rejects the Hindu Rashtra project. Those who support Israel will note that this essay challenges the "right to exist" rhetorical framework. Those who support Palestinian rights will note that this essay does not deny Israel's political existence.
This evenhandedness is not fence-sitting. It is the application of a consistent principle: the state is not sacred, the people are; states derive legitimacy from how they treat all their people, not from their founding mythologies; and no state is above accountability for what it does in the name of its religious or civilisational identity.
If that principle, consistently applied, produces conclusions that are uncomfortable from multiple directions simultaneously, that is not a weakness of the argument. It is evidence that the argument is not serving any particular political tribe's interest — which is, in a time of weaponised political discourse, the closest journalism can come to its proper function.
The sovereignty of nations rests not in their right to exist. It rests in their willingness to be accountable to all the people they govern.
That accountability, and nothing else, is what makes a state worth defending.
This article is written for the Op-Ed pages of a national newspaper. The author is a political researcher and journalist. The companion piece — "The Manufactured Past: Colonial Distortion of Indian History, the Indo-Aryan Myth, and the Contested Timeline of Classical Sanskrit" (Parts I–XV) — provides the historical background on Pakistan's two-nation theory, the Manusmriti, and the colonial construction of religious identities in South Asia referenced here. Views expressed are analytical, not partisan.
CONTINUATION: The State Is Not Sacred — Part II
IX. The ICJ, Genocide, and the Collapse of the Impunity Architecture
There is a moment in the life of every political argument when it crosses from the terrain of theory into the terrain of consequence. For the "right to exist" debate — and for the three-way analysis of Pakistan, Israel, and Hindutva nationalism that this essay has pursued — that moment arrived on 26 January 2024, when the International Court of Justice issued provisional measures in the case brought by South Africa against Israel concerning alleged violations of the Genocide Convention in the Gaza Strip.
The ICJ's order directed Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent acts within the scope of Article II of the Genocide Convention in relation to Palestinians in Gaza; to ensure that its military did not commit such acts; to take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance; and to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide. The court's orders are legally binding, although it has no direct mechanism to enforce them. The ICJ also said Israel's presence in occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful and its policies amount to annexation.
This is a landmark development in international law — and one whose implications extend far beyond the specific case. The South Africa v. Israel proceedings represent the first time the full machinery of the Genocide Convention has been formally mobilised against a Western-aligned liberal democracy. The case has attracted an extraordinary coalition of co-intervening states: Brazil, Belgium, Ireland, Spain, Turkey, Mexico, Cuba, Chile, Bolivia, and Slovenia have all formally joined or supported South Africa's proceedings. By June 2026, the case is advancing through its written pleadings phase, with Israel's counter-memorial due in January 2026 and a final judgment potentially arriving as late as 2027 or 2028.
What the ICJ proceedings reveal — regardless of their eventual outcome on the merits — is the complete collapse of what we might call the impunity architecture of the post-1945 international order: the network of relationships, assumptions, and institutional arrangements that had, for seventy-five years, effectively shielded Western-allied states from the full accountability mechanisms of international law.
Israel's closure of all border crossing points on 2 March 2025 was found by international legal scholars to be denying almost all humanitarian relief from entering Gaza — a policy that the ICJ's own prior provisional measures orders had directed be reversed. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food described what was occurring in Gaza as "a situation of genocide." Amnesty International and Oxfam stated that Israel had not complied with the ICJ's ruling to ensure sufficient aid to Palestinians. Doctors Without Borders concluded: "There are no signs of Israeli forces attempting to limit the loss of civilian life or alleviate the suffering of people."
The Israeli government's response to these findings — characterising South Africa as "functioning as the legal arm of Hamas," describing the genocide charge as a "blood libel," and accusing South Africa of "abetting the modern heirs of the Nazis" — is itself instructive. It is the response of a government that has, for so long, successfully invoked its "right to exist" as a complete shield from accountability that it has lost the institutional capacity to engage with legitimate legal challenge on its merits. The shield has become the argument. The right to exist has replaced the obligation to comply.
The United States, throughout this period, has continued to provide military and financial support to Israel and has rejected the merits of South Africa's case. Washington's posture illustrates with unusual clarity the structural contradiction at the heart of the Western liberal international order: a set of institutions — the UN Charter, the Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions, the ICJ itself — built on the premise of universal accountability, consistently applied in ways that privilege the security interests of the Western alliance over the rights of non-Western peoples.
This contradiction is not new. It was present in 1948 when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in the same year the Palestinian Nakba occurred. It was present in 1945 when the Nuremberg principles were elaborated by a victorious alliance that had simultaneously presided over the firebombing of Dresden and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It has been present in every invocation of international humanitarian law that has been applied to adversaries while remaining unapplied to allies.
What is new, in 2024–2026, is that the contradiction has become visible in real time, to a global audience with smartphones, at a scale and with a detail of documentation that the impunity architecture was not designed to manage. The argument — that Israel's right to exist shields it from accountability for what it does — has been made in public, for the world to see, while the world watches the consequences of that impunity play out in Gaza in real time.
The argument is losing. Not in the ICJ, necessarily — not yet. But in the court of global opinion, in the diplomatic isolation of Israel from an expanding coalition of the Global South, in the student protests at Western universities, in the political cost being paid by governments that have maintained unconditional support, and in the fundamental shift in how a generation of people across the world understands the relationship between state sovereignty and human rights accountability.
The three-part structure of Mehdi Hasan's argument — undefined borders, states versus individuals, and the double standard regarding Palestine — has been vindicated not by rhetoric but by events. Israel's borders remain undefined. International law does not recognize a "right to exist" for states; it recognizes the right of peoples to self-determination and prohibits territorial conquest. And Palestine's systematic denial of the same recognition that Israel enjoys — consistently, with US backing at the UN Security Council — has been laid bare for the world to see with a clarity that no amount of rhetorical deflection can obscure.
X. The Bangladesh Lesson: When the Religious Nation Meets Its Own Logic
The 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War is the most instructive historical test case for the religious-state argument — and it is the test case that all three traditions examined in this essay prefer not to confront directly.
The two-nation theory stated that Muslims and Hindus were two separate nations by definition, with different customs, religion, and tradition — and that therefore Muslims should have their own separate homeland. Pakistan was created on this foundation. And then, twenty-four years later, Pakistani Muslim soldiers committed one of the 20th century's most devastating atrocities against Bengali Muslim civilians — raping, massacring, and displacing millions of people who shared the same faith as their perpetrators.
The logical implication is devastating and unavoidable. If Muslims constitute a single nation by virtue of their shared faith — and if that shared faith is sufficient grounds for a state — then Pakistani soldiers killing Bengali Muslims represents a nation destroying itself. The two-nation theory's own internal logic collapses the moment it confronts the reality that Muslim identity, like Hindu identity and Jewish identity, is not a monolithic civilisational unit that automatically generates political solidarity. It is a complex, internally diverse, historically contested religious tradition that has produced as much intra-communal conflict as inter-communal conflict.
The subsequent partition of Pakistan itself into the present-day nations of Pakistan and Bangladesh was cited as proof both that Muslims did not constitute one nation and that religion alone was not a defining factor for nationhood. The two-nation theory had been refuted — not by its opponents' argument, but by its own implementation.
The Bangladesh counter-narrative — the attempt by some scholars to rescue the two-nation theory from 1971 — is revealing in what it requires. Some academics argue that after independence "Bengali ethnicity soon lost influence as a marker of identity for the country's majority population, their Muslim identity regaining prominence and differentiating them from the Hindus of West Bengal." In other words: the two-nation theory survives 1971 only if we accept that language, culture, ethnicity, and the memory of mass atrocity are all overridden by religious identity as the foundational category of nationhood.
This is precisely the argument that the Hindu Rashtra project makes about Indian Hindus — that their religious identity overrides their linguistic, regional, caste, and cultural diversity to constitute a single Hindu nation. And it is precisely the argument that Zionist nationalism has made about the Jewish people — that their religious and cultural identity overrides their geographic, linguistic, and political diversity (Russian Jews, Yemeni Jews, Ethiopian Jews, American Jews, Israeli-born Jews are vastly different communities) to constitute a single Jewish nation.
In each case, the religious-national identity claim requires the suppression of internal diversity and the primacy of religious marker over all other forms of human identity and solidarity. And in each case, the political implementation of that claim has generated precisely the internal conflict and external aggression that it claimed to prevent.
Pakistan was created to protect Muslims from Hindu majority domination. It produced a state that massacred Bengali Muslims. Israel was created to protect Jews from the recurrence of genocide. It produced a state that the ICJ has been called upon to prevent from committing genocide. The Hindutva project claims to protect Hindus from Muslim cultural and demographic threat. Its implementation has generated communal violence, constitutional erosion, and a political culture of fear and exclusion that threatens not only India's minorities but the secular democratic framework that has protected the majority's own rights.
The pattern is not coincidental. It is structural. When the state becomes the vessel of religious identity — when the state's raison d'être is the protection and advancement of one community's interests at the expense of others — it develops an institutional logic of exclusion that eventually turns inward. The enemy without becomes the enemy within. The minority becomes the permanent threat. The state that was built to protect its people from persecution becomes a persecuting state.
This is not inevitable — it is a tendency, a structural pressure, not a mechanical law. There are moments of resistance, individual leaders who hold the line, constitutional provisions that constrain the worst impulses, civil societies that maintain pluralism against the state's exclusionary drift. India's Supreme Court has so far held the Basic Structure Doctrine against constitutional demolition. Israel's own judiciary has, at various moments, constrained executive overreach. Pakistan has produced, against all institutional odds, remarkable traditions of journalistic independence, feminist activism, and civil society resistance.
But the structural pressure of the religious-state project pushes always in the same direction: toward the subordination of the people to the state's founding mythology, and the subordination of minorities to the majority's political project. The resistance to that pressure — whether by a Supreme Court judge, a journalist, a street protester, or a political opposition leader carrying a Constitution — is always the resistance of the people against the state that claims to speak for them.
XI. Settler Colonialism, Indigeneity, and the Complexity the Framework Must Hold
No concept in contemporary political discourse has been more suddenly and consequentially deployed in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict than "settler colonialism." Before October 7, the view that Zionism and the State of Israel constituted a settler-colonial project was a relatively marginal position, confined to academic and activist circles. In the past two and a half years, however, settler colonialism has become a dominant framework for understanding the past and present in Palestine.
The settler colonialism framework has genuine analytical power. Settler colonialism differs from classical colonialism in that it focuses on eliminating or replacing, rather than exploiting, the original inhabitants of a territory. The patterns of Palestinian displacement — the 1948 Nakba, the ongoing settlement enterprise in the West Bank, the demolition of Palestinian homes, the demographic management of the occupied territories — fit elements of this analytical framework in ways that are documentable and substantive.
Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi states that settler-colonial projects are usually "extensions of the people and of the sovereignty of the mother country," whereas Zionism is an independent "national movement" whose means were nevertheless "explicitly settler-colonial." This distinction is important. Zionism is not straightforwardly analogous to British colonialism in India or French colonialism in Algeria, because there is no "mother country" whose sovereignty the Israeli state extends. The Jewish people who came to Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries came as refugees from persecution, not as agents of an empire. This does not render the dispossession of Palestinians any less real or any less unjust — but it does require that the analytical framework hold the full complexity of the situation, including the genuine historical grievances and existential fears that drove Jewish immigration to Palestine.
The debate: Are all Israelis settlers and all Palestinians natives? And does a historical connection to the land negate participation in a settler-colonial project in the present? These are not simple questions. Jews are viewed by many historians as indigenous to the region — they maintained continuous presence in Palestine through the millennia of diaspora, and they were the majority population in parts of Palestine before Zionist immigration began. Palestinians are unambiguously indigenous to the land from which they were displaced. Both communities have historical connections to the same geography. The conflict is not, at its foundation, a conflict between a people with a legitimate claim and a people without one. It is a conflict between two peoples, each with genuine historical connections to the same land, whose competing national projects have generated catastrophic mutual harm.
The settler colonialism framework, applied without this nuance, risks doing to the Palestinian cause what the "right to exist" framework does to the Israeli position: it forecloses a set of historical complexities in the service of a clean political narrative. Clean political narratives feel satisfying. They are rarely adequate to the situation they claim to describe, and they are rarely adequate as foundations for the political solutions that must eventually be negotiated.
The framework that this essay has consistently applied — the primacy of people's rights over state mythology — is more demanding than either the "right to exist" framework or the settler colonialism framework, because it refuses to privilege either state's founding narrative. It requires acknowledging that Israeli civilians have rights that cannot be suspended by the political project of Hamas, and that Palestinian civilians have rights that cannot be suspended by the political project of the Israeli state. It requires acknowledging that the Jewish people's historical experience of persecution and genocide is real and demands a political response, and that the Palestinian people's experience of dispossession and occupation is equally real and equally demands a political response. And it requires acknowledging that these two acknowledgments are not in competition with each other — that taking both seriously is not a contradiction but a prerequisite for any political solution that does not generate the next round of catastrophic conflict.
The one-state solution, the two-state solution, and the various confederal arrangements proposed by scholars across the spectrum all have different implications for how these rights are to be balanced. This essay takes no position on which arrangement is most viable — that is a question for the people most directly affected, negotiated under international legal norms, not decided by op-ed columnists. What this essay insists is that no arrangement is legitimate that does not guarantee full and equal rights to all people within the territory it governs — not the rights of the majority community as primary and the minority as secondary, but equal rights, equally enforced, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or the founding mythology of the state.
That insistence applies to Israel and Palestine. It applies to Pakistan. It applies to India. It applies to every state that has ever wrapped itself in the language of religious destiny and civilisational mission to justify the subordination of the people it governs to the interests of a defining majority.
XII. The Future of the Argument: What Comes After "Right to Exist"
We are living through a period in which the post-1945 international order — built on the principles of state sovereignty, universal human rights, and collective security — is under severe stress from multiple directions simultaneously. Russian aggression in Ukraine has violated the most fundamental norm of the UN Charter: the prohibition on the use of force to alter international borders. Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea challenges the international law of the sea. The Gaza conflict has exposed the double standards of humanitarian law enforcement in ways that have accelerated the diplomatic fragmentation of the world into competing blocs.
In this environment, the "right to exist" argument — in all its variants — becomes more rather than less dangerous. Because when states feel existentially threatened, they invoke existential necessity to justify actions that in calmer times would be recognised as violations of the norms they claim to uphold. The language of existential threat is the language that precedes atrocity — not because existential threats are never real, but because the claim of existential necessity has historically been the most powerful rhetorical device for suspending moral constraint.
Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israeli civilians — which killed approximately 1,200 people, including many civilians, and involved sexual violence and the taking of hostages — was an atrocity. It requires no qualification, no "but," no contextualisation that softens its moral character. It was a war crime. It does not become less of a war crime because Israel's treatment of Gaza for the preceding sixteen years constituted a severe violation of Palestinian rights. Atrocity does not cancel atrocity; it generates it.
The Israeli military campaign that followed — which, by June 2026, has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, displaced the majority of Gaza's population multiple times, destroyed the majority of Gaza's housing and healthcare infrastructure, and generated conditions that the ICJ found sufficiently serious to indicate provisional measures under the Genocide Convention — does not become legitimate because of October 7. The right to self-defence does not extend to the killing of civilians at a scale and with a pattern that international law characterises as prohibited. Proportionality, distinction, and the prevention of unnecessary suffering are not optional constraints on self-defence. They are the definition of what separates a legitimate military response from a war crime.
The Pakistan of today — which hosts, and has for decades hosted, armed groups that conduct cross-border attacks on Indian civilians and military targets, including the April 2025 Pahalgam attack — cannot invoke its sovereignty to shield this conduct from international accountability. The Indian state that responds to terrorist attacks with collective punishment of Muslim communities within its own borders cannot invoke its sovereignty to shield that conduct either. The Russian state that bombs Ukrainian hospitals cannot invoke its sovereignty. The Chinese state that detains Uyghurs in mass internment camps cannot invoke its sovereignty.
Sovereignty is not a blanket. It does not cover everything a state does. It is a principle of non-interference in the internal governance of states that meet their obligations to their own people and to the norms of international behaviour. When states fail those obligations — and all states, at various moments and in various degrees, fail them — sovereignty is not a shield. It is a reminder of what they owe.
The future of the "right to exist" argument is not its disappearance — states will continue to invoke it, because it is politically useful. Its future is its delegitimisation: the progressive recognition, in international law, in civil society discourse, and in the practice of international relations, that the language of state existence cannot substitute for the language of state accountability.
That delegitimisation is already underway. The Global South's growing assertiveness in international forums — the ICJ, the UN General Assembly, the ICC — represents a structural shift in who gets to define the norms of the international order. The student movements in Western universities that have challenged the uncritical support of their institutions for Israeli state policy represent a generational shift in moral intuition. The political costs being paid by governments in Europe and elsewhere for maintaining positions that can no longer be defended in public represent a democratic shift in what electorates will accept.
None of these shifts is irreversible. None is sufficient. The suffering continues. The ICJ's provisional measures have not been complied with. The settlements continue to expand. The blockade has been imposed and lifted and imposed again. The communal violence in India continues. The blasphemy prosecutions in Pakistan continue. The constitutional erosion continues.
But the argument has changed. The impunity is cracking. The "right to exist" is no longer silencing the questions it was designed to silence.
And the questions, once asked honestly, will not go away:
Who governs in whose name?
Who bears the cost of the state's founding mythology?
Whose rights are primary, and whose are conditional?
When the state claims to exist for a people, which people does it mean?
These are the questions that Pakistan has not answered for its non-Muslim citizens. That the Hindutva project has not answered for India's 200 million Muslims. That Israel has not answered for the Palestinians under its military control.
They are, ultimately, the same question — asked in Urdu and Hindi and Hebrew and Arabic and Bengali and English, in courtrooms and refugee camps and protest squares and parliamentary chambers across the planet.
The state is not sacred. The people are.
Until that principle is accepted — not rhetorically, but institutionally, constitutionally, and in the practice of governance — the argument will continue.
As it must.
Appendix: A Comparative Table of the Religious-State Argument
| Dimension | Pakistan (Islamic State) | Hindutva Rashtra (Aspirational) | Israel (Jewish State) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Founding logic | Two-nation theory: Muslims & Hindus are separate nations | Civilisational claim: India is inherently Hindu | Zionism: Jews require a secure national homeland |
| Founding moment | 1947 Partition — 1–2 million dead, 14 million displaced | 1925 RSS founded; Savarkar's Hindutva (1923) | 1948 Declaration — 750,000 Palestinians displaced (Nakba) |
| Internal contradiction | Jinnah abandoned the two-nation theory in his 11 August 1947 speech | The Indian Constitution's Basic Structure precludes it | "Right to exist" invoked to shield accountability for occupation |
| Historical test case | 1971: Pakistani Muslims massacred Bengali Muslims | 2002 Gujarat: State-sponsored communal violence | 2024–2026: ICJ provisional measures for Genocide Convention |
| Treatment of minorities | Blasphemy laws; Ahmadis legally non-Muslim; Christian persecution | CAA, NRC; mob violence; institutional Islamophobia | Military occupation; blockade; discriminatory civil law |
| The "right to exist" variant | Pakistan's Islamic identity as non-negotiable sovereign foundation | "Bharat is a Hindu Rashtra by civilisational essence" | "Israel has a right to exist" as debate-stopper |
| Who it silences | Critics of blasphemy law, minority rights abuses | Critics of communal violence, constitutional erosion | Critics of occupation, settlement, Gaza blockade |
| The honest counter-argument | People of Pakistan have rights; state must protect all of them | People of India have constitutional rights regardless of religion | People of Israel and Palestine both have rights; state must be accountable to both |
Full article — Parts I through XII plus Comparative Appendix — prepared June 2026. For publication in the Op-Ed pages of a national or international newspaper. The author is a political researcher and journalist. Views expressed are analytical, not partisan. Total length: approximately 11,000 words.
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