Apparently, it was not. The specific meaning of the phrase relies a lot on things unsaid or implied: Both the nature of the supposed refusal and the implication that denying Israel’s “right to exist” means denying Jews’. It also depends a lot on the dependent clauses that come after that word: “as a state,” “in peace and security,” or “as a Jewish state”?
In 1993, as a precondition of the Oslo peace negotiations, the PLO recognized the “right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security,” a declaration based on the 1967 U.N. Joint Resolution 242 that affirms every Middle Eastern nation’s “right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” As the peace process collapsed, and Israeli politics moved sharply to the right, the country’s parliament passed its so-called “Nation-State Law,” which declared that “the exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish people.” The goalposts of “existence” had moved considerably. Now Israel’s right to national self-determination—its national right to exist, if you like—seemed to explicitly reject Palestine’s. How could Palestinians accept this right without denying their own?
In a column in October, The New York Times’ Bret Stephens wrote of activists (many of them Jews) protesting Israel’s latest bombardment of Gaza: “‘Anti-occupation’ is opposition to Israel’s right to exist in any form.” Here, the “right to exist” is used to insinuate that those critical of Israel’s policies in Gaza are antisemitic. That is the rhetorical trap that Israel’s “right to exist” has always set for the country’s critics: On the one hand, reject Israel’s “right to exist,” and risk being accused of rejecting Jews’ human rights to exist; on the other, accept Israel’s right to exist and risk accepting whatever interpretation a future audience will choose to make of the phrase’s ever-changing meaning.