memes

Did I? Because I was thinking about how the Soviet Union had a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany until the latter attacked the former. It was only then that the USSR started giving a shit about killin natzis. Which, in total fairness, was kind of generally true of much of the West at that time. The only reason the Holocaust was stopped was that shithead got too big for his britches and pissed off 110% of the right people. It had nothing to do with the noble cause of ending genocide, ending genocide was just a happy side effect.

Ending the Holocaust was the right thing to do, but it was only ever a retroactive point for the war against the Nazis. A lot of their political contemporaries either agreed with them or didn't have the political will to go to war over it. And yeah, anyone paying attention knew what was going on. Maybe the full scope wasn't well understood until after the war, but plenty of states knew what was happening.

Not that I know of, tbh. I'm sure that the answer to that question can technically be yes; I'm certain that somewhere across all the horrors of human history, it must have happened, but I can't think of a case I'm aware of.

tl;Dr: No, not a right, but an obligation.

I think that states have not a right, but a requirement to kill terrorists in order to guarantee their continued existence. If they don't, then they no longer have the monopoly on violence, and the odds that a new state will form increase. It's the same as anything that seeks to kill another thing to further its own existence. Though, I reject your assertion that one must only absolutely agree or disagree that state violence towards terrorists is legitimate, regardless of whether it's in bad faith. By that logic, if you agree that the police in China may use deadly force to kill a spree murderer, you necessarily agree to the genocide of Palestine. As the Israeli state functionally considers all surrounding peoples, including Palestine, to be terrorists, they would be justified in committing genocide, because the Israeli state is doing it (in bad faith) to stop terrorism.

I also think that people have a much more legitimate right to resist the state than the state has to propagate its continued existence. It's really down to whose violence you believe is legitimate, and I tend to air on the side of people over states. Were the native American raids against US settlers legitimate violence? Was the US right to kill the native American terrorists? Was the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation legitimate violence? Were the Nazis right to kill the resistance fighters? The Russian empire and the revolutionaries? Israel and Hamas? It's states acting on their requirement to maintain and exercise the monopoly on violence. It's just states propagating their own existence, which they always must do or face extinction; so the question becomes, does every state have a right to secure its existence in the way it imagines itself? No, I don't believe so. It's going to do it anyway, because that's what states do, but I don't think that the state, as a composition of political elements, has an absolute right to execute its will against all others.

Edit: took out the "free of all harassment". We're talking about whether the state has the right to kill terrorists, so the natural assumption is that the state in question has already been harassed.