The idiot’s guide to states – and their ‘rights’: 1. States exist. Some 200 of them. 2. States are the political arrangement in which a people express their self-determination. That arrangement can and does change. 3. States enjoy rights, but only against each other. They have the right, for example, not to face unprovoked aggression from another state. 4. No state has some enduring, abstract “right” to exist. Otherwise bad ones like apartheid South Africa would be unreformable. 5. Peoples, by contrast, do have a right to exist. That’s why states that commit apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide are so gravely violating international law. Because they are violating a people’s right to exist. 6. When people argue Israel has a “right” to exist, they are trying to dupe you into believing international law is fine with apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide. It isn’t. For obvious reasons, international law prefers the rights of peoples over those of states. Otherwise, no state could ever be illegitimate. Its rights would trump those of the people it rules over. 7. When someone refuses to agree that Israel has a “right” to exist, they are not being antisemitic, whatever the media keeps telling you. They are upholding international law: the precedence of peoples’ rights over those of states. 8. The claim that Israel has a “right” to exist is not what it seems. It’s really the claim that the current reality of extreme inequality between Israelis and Palestinians be set in stone. It’s the diabolical claim that Israel has a right to commit apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinian people.

Because it's a question asked in bad faith about a state that refuses to declare its borders, defines itself in ethnic terms like apartheid South Africa, and is ethnic cleansing and slaughtering the native Palestinian population. Oh, and then there's the small matter of international law making clear that only peoples, not states, have a "right to exist".

A double lie here from Ed Miliband: 1. He doesn't need to wait for the Supreme Court to rule on Palestine Action's proscription. The Burnham government could overturn the decision tomorrow if it so chose. 2. Miliband says no one's intent was to criminalise "grannies and vicars" for holding up signs. He's right. That's because the Starmer government imagined it could misuse terrorism laws to intimidate the respectable, white middle classes into silence on genocide. The plan was to leave "brown" people isolated and exposed to the full force of the law if they raised their voices in protest. The Labour government hoped to associate in the public's mind opposition to genocide with supposed Islamic extremism. It massively underestimated public revulsion at the genocide and the UK's complicity. Don't expect anyone in the establishment media, including Andrew Marr, to highlight either of these very obvious and salient points.