Is Israel a legitimate state

Answer 1

The matter has not been argued in a court of international law, so in some sense, you're asking a matter of individual opinion, and you might well receive different answers from different people, or even from the same people at different times.

Resisting the inclination to regurge my own opinion, which will put you no farther ahead than you are now, I'll just point out that out of the 193 member nations of the United Nations, 161 of them recognize and maintain diplomatic relations with Israel, and that Israel also has full diplomatic relations with The Holy See and with the European Union ... both non-members of the UN.

It so happens that I'm personally quite convinced of Israel's legitimacy, but there's no reason why you should give a fig about what I think. It's more important for you to contemplate the 161 UN member nations and the two non-members that also think so.

Answer 2

Of course it is. There are usually three main arguments advanced by those who reject the validity of the State of Israel: (1) Israel's origins are legally murky, (2) Israel is a colonial state, (3) Israel is illegitimate because of human rights violations. All these three are fallacious for the following reasons.

Legal Origins of Israel
The legal trail towards the establishment and maintenance of the State of Israel is actually one of the most complete and defensible of the 200+ countries in the world. Most countries have a discontinuous legal history because of revolutions, changes in power, and other militant procedures. Conversely, Israel has received its authority through treaties and international legal documents.

By international law, the Ottoman Empire took the territory of the Southern Levant from the Seljuks and Abbassids by internationally recognized conquest in 1517. The territory was ceded to the British as a Mandate by the Ottomans as a term of surrender in World War I in 1919. (Even though the British had promised the territory to both the Arabs and Jews during the War, neither promise is legally binding.) According to the terms of the Mandate, even though the British were in control, the League of Nations had official jurisdiction and Article 6 of the Mandate argues that the purpose of the Mandate is to facilitate the creation of a "Jewish National Homeland". In 1947, the British gave direct authority to manage the Mandate to the League of Nations' successor, the United Nations, in accordance with the terms of their Mandate. The UN passed the 1947 Partition Plan (UN Resolution 181 (II)) that gave both a Jewish State and an Arab State the Right to Declare Statehood. The fact that the Arabs decided not to immediately declare such a state does not make the Israeli declaration any less valid. (It is important to note that Palestine did declare statehood on these grounds in 1988, which further cements the legality of this view, especially according to the International Court of Justice.)

Israel as a Diasporic State
The first thing to notice with the colonial argument is that it is exclusively applied to Israel and never to the countries of the Americas or Australia and Oceania which were predominantly settled by European colonists. There is also no objection made by most of these colonial proponents of "third-world colonization", such as the Moroccan population transfers to Western Sahara, the Turkish population transfers to Occupied Cyprus, the Vietnamese population movements in the last 400 years to the Mekong River Delta and out-reproducing the local Khmer, etc. The exclusivity of using it against Israel demonstrates that those who advocate for it do not actually believe that this colonialism is an issue, but are looking for a reason to go after Israel.

However, demonstrating the exclusive application to Israel does not serve to counter the argument. What does serve to counter the argument is to note that it is not applicable in the Israeli case. Jews are a Semitic people whose origins track back to the lands of Israel and Palestine. Genetic tests have proven repeatedly that both Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews have genes that are uniquely found in the Middle East and even that there are close links between Jewish genes and Palestinian genes. In this way, Israel is a regrouping of a diaspora in its historic homeland. This is fundamentally different than colonials who are not ancestrally from the place where they come to live. Additionally, all colonial states were developed in an imperial system and connect back to a metropole (US and Canada to UK, Mexico and Argentina to Spain, Brazil to Portugal, etc.). Israel connects to no metropole and is completely independent.

Israeli Human Rights Violations
Accepting for the sake of argument that Israel commits human rights violations to the degree alleged by most international organizations, this cannot be a serious bar to Israel's legitimacy. The most liberal estimates (that are taken seriously) of Palestinian suffering put the body count at 30,000 and 1.2 million who have fled since 1900. (I believe the numbers to be much closer to 22,000 and 1.05 million, but...) Compare this to Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cambodia, Rwanda, Somalia, Turkey, Algeria, etc. whose governments have killed hundreds of thousands of people and made millions of people flee their homes and yet do not have their legitimacy questioned. Clearly, simply violating human rights is insufficient to be denied legitimacy as a state.

Conversely, while the West Bank is under military occupation and the Gaza Strip is blockaded because it is a terrorist-state, Israel actually provides its citizens of all colors more rights than most other former colonized territories. Women, homosexuals, religious and ethnic minorities, refugees (usually from Muslim-majority countries) and numerous other minorities have legal protection and benefits. Gay marriage performed abroad is recognized in Israel. Sexual Harassment protections are incredibly extensive in Israel. Every citizen above 18 can vote and there are parties that represent minority viewpoints. Most other human rights and freedoms are respected within Israel's borders.