Legitimacy of the State of Israel
question of whether Israeli political authority over a part of Palestine is legitimate or not
The legitimacy of the State of Israel has been questioned since before the state was formed. There has been opposition to Zionism, the movement to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, since its emergence in 19th-century Europe. Since the establishment of the State of Israel and the concurrent Nakba in 1948, a number of figures, organizations, and states have challenged Israel's political legitimacy and its occupation of territories belonging to Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. Over the course of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and broader Arab–Israeli conflict, the country's authority has also been questioned on a number of fronts.
Criticism of Israel may include opposition to the belief that the state has a right to exist or, since the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, the established power structure within the Israeli-occupied territories. Israel has also been accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes—such as apartheid, starvation and genocide—including by scholars, legal experts, and human rights organizations. Israel regards such criticism as attempts to delegitimize it. According to Agnès Callamard, the Secretary General of Amnesty International, Israel has maintained "the longest and one of the most deadly military occupations in the world".
On 11 May 1949, Israel was admitted to the United Nations (UN) as a full member state. It also has bilateral ties with each of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.
“Legitimacy of the State of Israel” enters the record as question of whether Israeli political authority over a part of Palestine is legitimate or not. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Legitimacy, State and Israel can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17006179. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1948, 1967 and 1949.
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This entry incorporates text from “Legitimacy of the State of Israel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.