Israel's right to exist does not mean its government can act with impunity

10 June 2011, The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk (UK)

Legitimacy in international relations relates not to a single idea but to overlapping concepts, one of which is appropriate conduct

Peter Beaumont

Last year the Israeli Reut Institute published a report examining what it said was the agenda for eroding Israel's legitimacy in the international arena – an aim, it argued, whose end was to turn Israel into a "pariah" state and challenge its "very legitimacy of its existence as a Jewish and democratic state".

It was not alone. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz remarked at the same time, "delegitimisation of Israel" has become the "new buzzword in the world of pro-Israel activism." So much so, Haaretz noted, that prominent organisations including the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee had all outlined plans how to fight it. On Friday a story in the same paper detailed Israeli officialdom's worries that UN recognition of a Palestinian state in September would "delegitimise Israel and foil any chance for future peace talks".

Others have gone further, contending that "delegitimisation" has become the face of the new antisemitism, manipulated, as the Reut Institute claimed, by a minority.

All of which, however, leads to a question: precisely what is meant by legitimacy in an international context?

It is unclear enough as a concept that Robert Kagan was able to argue in the New York Times in 2004 that "the struggle to define and obtain international legitimacy in this new era may prove to be among the critical contests of our time".

One of those who has studied this field is Ian Clark, author of Legitimacy in International Society. "The core principles of legitimacy," he writes, not only "express rudimentary social agreement about who is entitled to participate in international relations" but also – critically – "appropriate forms of their conduct".

The reality is that the notion of legitimacy in international relations relates not to a single idea but to overlapping concepts that defy the simplistic definition being applied by those Haaretz describes as being involved in "pro-Israel activism".

First is the notion of the sovereign integrity of countries as states recognised by the international community and enshrined in international law. It is this legitimacy that recognises Israel's right to exist and participate in international forums.

It is the same legitimacy that Egypt or Tunisia or even Libya enjoys within its international boundaries.

A second notion of legitimacy – familiar and well-studied from Hobbes onwards – is the legitimacy a government claims through the support of its citizens, in the case of a democracy via an electoral mandate, to represent for a period of time the policies of a given state. In other words, an internal legitimacy represented on an international stage.

But simply because a government and state is "democratic", however – or because it enjoys a large mandate – does not mean it is immune from committing questionable and illegal acts.

The third crucial notion of international legitimacy is Clark's category of "appropriate forms of ... conduct".

It is in precisely in this area that the government, a regime or series of governments of a state can be seen to relinquish legitimacy both through its acts and how they are perceived over a period of time.

For Israel, that means specifically illegal occupation, settlement building and a disproportionate use of force that historically has claimed the lives of too many Palestinian civilians in the name of defence.

The distinctions are crucially important because in the deliberate conflation of the competing spheres of legitimacy by some of those who support Israel, they are making an essentially undemocratic argument utilising Israel's right to exist as an argument for impunity.