Eretz Israel or Ersatz Israel? A Conceptual Critique of Zionist State Legitimacy

Abstract

Since the escalation of violence in Gaza after October 2023, public discourse has increasingly questioned the legitimacy of the State of Israel, both as a matter of historical fact and international law. This conceptual paper interrogates four claims that have historically underwritten the Zionist movement's assertion of legitimacy over historic Palestine: (1) the settler-colonial premise that Palestine was “a land without a people,” and the racialized logic of erasure and dehumanization that sustained it; (2) the invocation of a divine promise of the land, considered against the criteria of statehood and sovereignty recognized under modern international law; (3) Israel's conditional admission to the United Nations in 1949 under General Assembly Resolution 273, read together with Resolutions 181 and 194 and Security Council Resolution 242, against Israel's sustained record of non-compliance, culminating in the International Court of Justice's July 2024 advisory opinion; and (4) the state's claim to embody Jewish peoplehood and its invocation of Holocaust memory, set against its conduct in Gaza and against principles central to Jewish ethical tradition. Drawing on settler-colonial theory, international law, and critical scholarship on Holocaust memory politics, the paper argues that these four dimensions constitute a cumulative legitimacy deficit conceptualized here through the heuristic contrast between “Eretz Israel,” the imagined nation of Zionist ideology, and “Ersatz Israel,” its empirical record. The paper closes by distinguishing this critique of the state from claims of antisemitism, and by proposing the legitimacy-deficit framework as a basis for further comparative research in settler-colonial and Palestine studies.