Rothbard and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
By Oscar Grau
Mises.org
November 6, 2024
In Murray Rothbard’s thinking, the state is a criminal organization of aggression and depredation against the just rights of private property of its subjects. The state acquires its revenue by physical coercion (taxation) and achieves a compulsory monopoly of force and ultimate decision-making power over a given territory. Hence, there is no just state in Rothbard’s libertarianism.
The State of Israel
In 1948, within the boundaries of what was then known as Palestine, David Ben-Gurion announced the independence of the State of Israel. There, by 1949, as Rothbard recounted, “600,000 Jews had created a state which had originally housed 850,000 Arabs.” Three-quarters of a million of Arabs “had been driven out from their lands and homes, and the remaining remnant was subject to a harsh military rule.” And the homes, lands, and bank accounts of the fleeing refugees “were promptly confiscated by Israel and handed over to Jewish immigrants.”
Israel claimed that the three-quarters of a million “were not driven out by force but rather by their own unjustified panic induced by Arab leaders,” but as Rothbard pointed out, “everyone recognizes Israel’s adamant refusal to let these refugees return and reclaim the property taken from them.”
Rothbard saw two absolutely irreconcilable claims in the region:
On the one hand, there are the Palestinian Arabs, who have tilled the soil or otherwise used the land of Palestine for centuries; and on the other, there are a group of external fanatics, who come from all over the world, and who claim the entire land area as “given” to them as a collective religion or tribe at some remote and possibly legendary time in the past.
76 years later, the Israeli state remains undefined in its borders, expanding its territorial monopoly and maintaining state ownership of almost all the country’s land. The political movement behind all this conquest that still continues is called Zionism.
Interstate Wars and the Israeli-Palestinian Case
According to Rothbard, the myth that enables states to wax fat off war is the canard that it is fought by them in defense of their subjects. The facts are the reverse:
For if war is the health of the State, it is also its greatest danger. A State can only “die” by defeat in war or by revolution. In war, therefore, the State frantically mobilizes the people to fight for it against another State, under the pretext that it is fighting for them.
In this case, the Israeli state cannot even defend its subjects against another state, because there is no Palestinian state—which also does not exist to trick the Palestinians into dying in its defense.
Furthermore, the fact that the Israeli state claims ownership of all of that land not only makes that ownership unjust, but also makes many beneficiaries of that ownership complicit in a crime against just private property rights: Because the Israeli state aggresses Palestinians to possess more and more land and homes, and then leases new state property to Israeli citizens, who usually know the origin of it and sometimes are even helped by the Israeli state to settle.
War and Guilt
While libertarians should not exonerate any side in a war, nor any individual involved in crimes committed on behalf of either side, the truth is that even the blame for a war and its consequences cannot be shared equally—that is, one side always strikes first or causes more damage. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no exception. In this sense, with regard to taking sides, Rothbard exhorted:
Libertarians must come to realize that parroting ultimate principles is not enough for coping with the real world. Just because all sides share in the ultimate state-guilt does not mean that all sides are equally guilty… in virtually every war, one side is far more guilty than the other, and on one side must be pinned the basic responsibility for aggression, for a drive for conquest, etc. But in order to find out which side to any war is the more guilty, we have to inform ourselves in depth about the history of that conflict, and that takes… the ultimate willingness to become relevant by taking sides through pinning a greater degree of guilt on one side or the other.
Therefore, if the commitment to libertarianism goes beyond parroting principles, libertarians should be relevant and take sides as soon as they have the knowledge to do it—or, at least, they should admit the possibility of attributing a greater guilt to one side.
Here, the basic responsibility for aggression lies with the Israeli side—as Rothbard wrote, “Israel has been the aggressor in the Middle East.” And the Israeli state is guilty of most of the destruction and countless injustices committed in the region since 1948. Additionally, the fact that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—apart from the involvement of neighboring Arab states in wars against the Israeli state—has not been one between states makes all the pinning clearer.
Guilt and Narrative
The Israeli state has managed to lessen the clarity of its guilt thanks to some particular, albeit simple, factors. The primary factor, as explained by Michael Rectenwald, has to do with its status as a state, and as a religious one to boot—“with an ideology that is particularly bewitching to many.” Of course, this status is not an endorsement of its innocence, but as most people are not against the institution of a state and many are attracted to religious rationalizations, the combination helps to reduce the attention given to Israeli guilt. And as for religious rationalizations, for example, Rothbard indicated the dream of a state in the lands allegedly given by God several millennia in the past, and the areas designated for this state as those allegedly governed by Jews at some point in the Bible.
Justice and Zionism
Libertarianism is inseparable from the idea of justice that implies not only opposing the Israeli state, but also recognizing the justice of Palestinian efforts to resist the Israeli conquerors. In 1982, with respect to the libertarian perspective on the conflict, Rothbard expressed:
… the State of Israel is uniquely pernicious, because its entire existence rests and continues to rest on a massive expropriation of property and expulsion from the land… In the case of expropriations centuries ago, who gets what is often fuzzy… But in the case of Palestine, the victims and their children—the true owners of the land—are right there, beyond the borders, in refugee camps, in hovels, dreaming about a return to their own… Justice will only be served, and true peace in the devastated area will only come, when a miracle happens and Israel allows the Palestinians to stream back in and repossess their rightful property. Until then, so long as the Palestinians continue to live and no matter how far back they are pushed, they will always be there, and they will continue to press for their dream of justice… But allowing justice, allowing the return of the expropriated, would mean that Israel would have to give up its exclusivist Zionist ideal. For recognizing Palestinians as human beings with full human rights is the negation of Zionism…
Zionism and solutions
The bordering presence of a state counteracts the expansionist drive of any state, for there cannot be two monopolies holding the same territorial monopoly of taxation and ultimate decision-making power. And indeed, why would the Israeli state allow the creation of a Palestinian state that would limit its expansionism if it can continue to expel or annihilate an essentially defenseless people? In fact, the funding to divide Palestinians, the gradual shrinkage and invasion of the Gaza Strip, and the decades-long policy of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, all in the hands and the interests of the Israeli state, illustrate the Israeli rejection of the so-called two-state solution.
Rothbard considered these settlements as explicitly ideological and said that “these settlers were, and felt themselves to be, the vanguard of the eventual Zionization of the West Bank.”
On the other hand, Rothbard lamented that the PLO had always rested on multicultural ideals. For him, there could be either a war to the death, or an uneasy practical compromise that could neither be multicultural nor the dream of a peaceful and harmonious coexistence of all parties and groups:
From the irreconcilable conflict has come inevitable mutual hatred, and no propaganda by liberal or neo-con pundits or by United Nations proclamations, can change this reality by one iota.
In Rothbard’s view, a just Israeli state, insofar as any state could be just, would necessarily be one without Zionism. Four decades later, his final paragraph in 1982 resonates to this day, because Zionism is still at the helm of the Israeli state, and the slaughter and horror, as Rothbard warned would happen with a Zionist state, have definitely gone on.
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