Below is a ling to a long talk by Shlomo Sand. There is also Joe Kovel. Harold Channer is in the audience. Ir'a held at the the Brecht Forum.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk6gQcPMROM&feature=related
He gets into the political philosophical heart of the matter for him, Zionism, Israel, nationalism etc.
But there is a much larger context where most of the same intellectual elements apply. Take Iraq for example. I read from Riverbend that she thought the whole ethnic division between Sunnis and Shia was something ridiculous started by the Americans. Before the invasion, there were ethnic groups, of course, but not political parties constructed along ethnic lines----because of course Iraq was a single party dictatorship. When the US arrived, destroyed the army and forbid the Ba'ath they faced a problem of reconstructing a political system. In their great necon wisdom, they allowed various versions of religious groups reverting to ethnic identities to become political forces, therefore established the basis for a civil war for political domination.
If you think for a little you see the immediate connection to the western imperial founding of most of the Arab states, along the lines of the British Mandate and Israel. The key difference was that the West has no interest in establishing the older forms of colonialism. Instead the US has used the NGO system to convert the locals to the ways of neoliberalism. This establishes something like a patronage system between say US NGO's and the host country.
Here is a talk by Joel Kovel. He is talking about Israel, but much of what he says applies to the US in both its domestic and foreign policy. Both he and Sand mention `a state's right to exist', but only in passing. Kovel mentions that no state has a `right' to exist since it is a social contract. I would add, that this is part of the political philosophical core of what's wrong with Leo Strauss's political philosophy. From the historical and dominant western point of view (US, UK, France) a state is based on a social contract with it `citizens'. If the contract is disliked, it is torn up and a new one is made. This comes from several places but mainly the Americans and the French republicans. Strauss does not believe this. Instead, he would substitute a `natural right' to exist, as in a `state' and its `people', that is a `natural' bond between the state and its people. The roots of this idea are much older than the social contract theory and date back in modern times to Spinoza and Hobbes(?). They considered their concept of natural right progress from the concept of `divine right' given by God. What changed was some concept of `nature' substituted for God as the basis of a state: God -> Nature -> Contract.
Hopefully, the deeper parallels between what Sand and Kovel are talking about, for Israel, is found in US foreign policy and its disasterous wars of no reasons. Here's Kovel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBCHHawXfLI