While it’s undeniably true that Israel has been militarily successful and is "winning" wars fought on its territory, the blunt assertion that ‘the right to victory and the spoils’ is the oldest and most fundamental right reduces a deeply complex, tragic conflict to a crude hobbesian cliche. War is not justice; it is the failure of justice. To claim legitimacy solely through conquest overlooks the moral and historical grievances that persist and fester, and that no amount of ‘victory’ can erase. Yes, Israel ‘won’ wars, but winning the land does not mean winning the peace, nor does it constitute a blank check to dismiss the legitimate aspirations and sufferings of others as ‘bitching.’
This tragic and complex conflict is like all the others in history. They all happened to real people for confused, painful reasons. But I wrote this largely in contestation to claims of Israel's legitimacy being the product of theft, dishonesty, trickery, or somehow that Israel was less legitimate for being established as it was. This is the bitching I was talking about.
All states get founded on violence and appropriation, and I meant to establish that Israel has established its legitimacy in the manner of all states, and it had maintained it and demonstrated its governance and mastery of its territory. Israel is not even exceptionally nationalistic, tribal, or violent considering its strategic situation and highly contested legitimacy. Countries with Israel's diversity in that region crumble into crude, familial autocracy almost as surely as the sun rises in the East. It's a real, respectable state that is not a blight on human development, or a repressive cage destroying the destiny of its citizens. It is by some ethical standards for war frequently mistreating a hostile alien refugee population in its borders that is clearly politically organized towards Israel and its sponsors' destruction. I do not care at all about Palestinian nationalism and see it as a sad, doomed affair fought for no reason by an intransigent group of nihilistic cultists of one stripe or another holding a small territory hostage, determined to sink the ship and take everyone with them.
More broadly on the point of political history--I don't know of a political prehistory that explains the nature of states without getting down to the crude Hobbesian cliches. Legitimacy at some fundamental level is related to force, directed internally to the polity to have order, and externally to other polities to secure survival. States make war, war makes states. States do do other things of course, but like peace, states are the product of war, formed out of necessity when organizing men and arms for violence at a sufficient scale and intensity. There are other, different forms of peaceful and violent complex human association that are likely much older than states, that are political and associative and voluntary--clans, tribes, warbands, markets, trades and handicraft, art, language, agriculture, all of these things appear to predate any records of states. Of course extant history is limited by the durability of materials records are left on, but clearly humans went from a period of no states to many, powerful, states with exceptional privileges over all other human organizations, and a key aspect is that these organizations are founded on force and guaranteed through coercion in many dimensions, sustained by indefinite expropriation. States are a particular period in the whole span of human history, perhaps not eternal, but they are definitely founded by violence and justified by violence and sustained by violence, though the violence is restrained increasingly in liberal states. Israel's campaign so far in Iran has been surprisingly bloodless, precision warfare is much more ethical than the indiscriminate bombing of the past.
