While he was being grilled by CNN over his positions on Israel this past Thursday, candidate for the Democratic nomination for Michigan’s Senate seat, Abdul El-Sayed, was asked the bog-standard cable news question for anyone not on program with the pro-Israel Washington consensus—*Do you think Israel has a right to exist?—*three different times. It’s a ritual so routine one could hardly notice the exchange, but there was something in El-Sayed’s reply that exposed how facile this line of questioning is and that is worth examining in its own right. He responded, in part, by noting that “nobody has ever asked [him] if [he] thinks Palestine has a right to exist.” Watch the full exchange below.
Hunt: Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?
El-Sayed: Now the question about a right to exist is interesting because nobody's ever asked me whether or not I believe Palestine has a right to exist. Israel exists. The question is whether or not we want a politics where our… pic.twitter.com/Utr3kRQKJd
— Acyn (@Acyn) July 2, 2026
It was a throw-away line before he moved on to his long, fairly pointed, reply, but it’s an essential point, and worth making. And it is an empirical question one can survey and analyze. So, does US media ever ask politicians if they think Palestine has a right to exist? The answer: never.
A survey of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Politico, USA Today, Fox News, MSNBC/MSNOW, and CNN over the past 10 years shows that not a single candidate for office has ever been asked by a cable news anchor or reporter if “Palestine has a right to exist,” nor has their position on Palestine’s “right to exist” ever been interrogated or examined in print media. Indeed, the phrases “Palestine has a right to exist” and “Palestine’s right to exist” have only been written in or spoken on New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Politico, USA Today, Fox News, MSNBC/MSNOW, and CNN a total of six times over the past 10 years: 3 on MSNBC/MSNOW (one mention brought up in the context of EU powers recognizing Palestine last year, and two brought up by guests), once on CNN (brought up by Palestinian-Canadian guest Diana Buttu in 2018), and once each in USA Today and the New York Times when they quoted the Prime Minister of Spain Pedro Sánchez upon his recognition of a Palestine state earlier this year.
In other words: Palestine’s “right to exist” has not, in the past 10 years, been brought up as a question to a guest, politician, or candidate on cable news, nor has it ever been a point of journalistic interrogation or discovery. It has been a total non-issue.
By contrast, the phrases “Israel’s right to exist” and “Israel has a right to exist” have been used in the above outlets 1,001 times, 334 times more often, in the same 10-year timeframe. The New York Times has evoked Israel’s “right to exist” 189 times, Washington Post 119, the Wall Street Journal 59, Politico 121, USA Today 65, MSNBC/MSNOW 106, CNN 144, and Fox News 198 times. If we remove Fox News as a standard deviation (many, of course, don’t consider Fox News a legitimate news organization), then the total is 803 versus 6, or 133 times more than its been brought up for Palestinians. The data and links to the findings can be found here.
Candidates are asked if they support “Israel’s right to exist.” Politicians affirm it, often unsolicited, as a matter of ritual. And refusing to do so is turned into a multi-day media-curated scandal.
The affirmation and centering of this supposed ‘right’ for Israel is a central driver of major outlets’ coverage of politicians and candidates’ positions on Israel. Candidates are asked if they support “Israel’s right to exist.” Politicians affirm it, often unsolicited, as a matter of ritual. And refusing to do so is turned into a multi-day media-curated scandal, as evidenced by CNN following up El-Sayed’s refusal to play their gotcha game by questioning his supporter, Rep. Ro Khanna, over the issue. Khanna was asked by CNN’s Dana Bash the very next day if he believed Israel has a “right to exist” as an ethno-supremacist state. A framework Khanna dutifully affirmed, claiming––paradoxically––he supported Israel as a “Jewish state” and as a “state with equal rights” without spelling out how that would be remotely possible:
Ro Khanna caves to pressure and takes the nonsensical position that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish-supremacist state AND "a democratic state with equal rights". He says Israel's guilty of genocide, but the only consequence of this is it should be "secure"?? 🥴 pic.twitter.com/5vStn0l1R6
— gato fumante (@KweenInYellow) July 5, 2026
El-Sayed’s refusal to affirm the premise that Israel has a “right to exist” is the type of response that wasn’t just scandalized in the moment, it requires follow-up interrogation of one’s political allies the very next day, and presumably more follow-ups after that as the primary in Michigan reaches its home stretch.
Bash, and CNN more broadly, have, of course, interviewed dozens of politicians, both American and Israeli, who explicitly refuse to recognize Palestine either in principle or as an existing state. This includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, based on this survey, despite explicitly opposing the creation of a Palestinian state, has never once been asked if he believes Palestine “has a right to exist.” Explicit Islamophobes, anti-Arab racists, and anti-Palestinian bigots in Congress like Reps. Randy Fine, Nancy Mace and Brandon Gill––who not only reject the idea that Palestinians even exist, but openly traffic in overt religious and racist hatred––are never asked by CNN if they think Palestine has a “right to exist,” and they and their colleagues are certainly not grilled about it over several days. It’s simply a nonissue. Dehumanizing and belittling Palestinians and their right to live freely in their land is taken for granted in US media as a normal and uncontroversial opinion.
The corollary right to a “right to exist” is the “right to defense” or “to defend oneself.” This right, abstracted out into a seemingly banal truism, is evoked almost exclusively for Israelis. As I wrote in the Intercept, In my new book How To Sell A Genocide, I detail how this ‘right’ is almost entirely reserved for Israel, as it was afforded this right over 100 times more frequently than Palestinians in print media and cable news. (image via The Intercept)
A similar asymmetry is evidenced in the one-sided coverage of antisemitism vs Islamophobia in US media, in particular when it comes to incidents on college campuses. As I also document in my book, despite campus surveys on the topic finding roughly equal amounts of antisemitism and Islamophobia on major college campuses, the former was covered 63 times more than the latter, for 22 stand-alone mentions of Islamophobia, versus a staggering 1,385 stand-alone mentions of antisemitism in major US media outlets during a six month survey period.
Data point after data point shows a consistent and undeniable truth: Arab and Muslim lives, and Palestinian lives in particular, simply don’t matter. Their humanity is negotiable, their racial discrimination is a nonevent, and open support for their dispossession and statelessness is not only not a scandal, it is simply never acknowledged. El-Sayed is right that no one will ever ask him if Palestine has a right to exist, because to do so US media would have to see Palestinians as fully human first and they categorically, empirically, do not.
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