I keep hearing people in the news talking about Israel’s “right to exist,” and how their Islamic neighbors deny it.

But does any regime have a right to exist? Isn’t a “right” conveyed universally, without exception? Did Pol Pot’s Cambodia have a right to exist? What about Nazi Germany? Through the United Nations, the world agreed that Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, bent on ethnic cleansing and conquest, could not continue to exist. And The Bush administration decided unilaterally that the Taliban and Saddam’s Iraq would cease to exist. A regime’s existence is not a right but rather a privelige conveyed upon it by its peers. And this privelige can be taken away, either semi-legitimately by the United Nations, or illegitimately by a bullying superior force. If the United Nations is to have any legitimacy and purpose on this planet, shouldn’t it alone have the ability to decide when a regime has violated international law, and when that regime is no longer valid?

Notice I’m talking about regimes, not nations. A nation is too abstract to have rights or priveliges. The nations of Germany, Cambodia, and the former Yugoslav states today cannot be compared to those nations under oppressive and murderous regimes. Isn’t it the regime, the people in the current government, rather than the nation, who lose their legitimacy when they violate their own, and international, law?

Claiming that Israel, or any regime, has a “right to exist” is claiming that any government, anywhere, can never be subject to review, rebuke, or revocation. If that’s true, we might as well dismantle the United Nations entirely and go back to fighting each other at the first sign of disagreement.

Or we can ask ourselves: when does a regime cross the line? Has the current Sudanese government, masterminding genocide in Darfour, lost its privilege to exist? Has the current Israeli government, stuck in a cycle of oppression and violence, still have a privilege to exist? Does the corrupt and ineffective Palestinian authority still have a privilege to exist? Does Putin’s Russia, slowly and quietly eliminating democratically elected leaders and a nascent free press, retain its privilege to exist?

And shouldn’t we first ask these same questions of the current regimes in the countries where we live?