Does Israel have a "right to exist"?

The ever-inspiring Scott Ritter, who has become a sage and a guide the old fashioned way -- by thinking for himself -- offers on AlterNet this comment on the surreal tragedy inflicted on the people of Lebanon by the state of Israel:
AlterNet: War on Iraq: The Grave Consequences of Supporting War in Lebanon

It put me in mind of the frequent claim by the Israelis that the legitimacy of any party with whom they can negotiate turns on their willingness to recognize Israel's "right to exist".

I have never really understood this. Our own Declaration of Independence flatly contradicts the idea that a state or a government has any such right; when a government becomes destructive of specified ends, Jefferson wrote, "it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it." It is the people who hold the rights; it is in order to protect these rights that governments are instituted among people, "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed".

I think what is probably meant by the claim of Israeli officials that their government has some such right of existence derives from the principle that all the people in Palestine, like all the people of Earth, have a right of self-determination. This right is well established in law, and would accommodate the creation of a Jewish state like Israel where everyone there had a free choice as to whether they wanted it, which Israel has been unwilling to permit.