Mondays with Murray: Rothbard on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Last week, I discussed how the lack of a proper conception of property rights has been a major contributing factor to the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. LewRockwell.com recently re-pubslished an article from Murray Rothbard entitled "War Guilt in the Middle East", in which he describes the genesis of the hostilities. Rothbard gives a more thorough re-hashing of the modern history of the conflict:

The chronic Middle East crisis goes back – as do many crises – to World War I. The British, in return for mobilizing the Arab peoples against their oppressors of imperial Turkey, promised the Arabs their independence when the war was over. But, at the same time, the British government, with characteristic double-dealing, was promising Arab Palestine as a "National Home" for organized Zionism. These promises were not on the same moral plane: for in the former case, the Arabs were being promised their own land freed from Turkish domination; and in the latter, world Zionism was being promised a land most emphatically not its own. When World War I was over, the British unhesitatingly chose to keep the wrong promise, the one to world Zionism. Its choice was not difficult; if it had kept its promise to the Arabs, Great Britain would have had to pull gracefully out of the Middle East and turn that land over to its inhabitants; but, to fulfill its promise to Zionism, Britain had to remain as a conquering, imperial power ruling over Arab Palestine. That it chose the imperial course is hardly surprising.We must, then, go back still further in history: for what was world Zionism? Before the French Revolution, the Jews of Europe had been largely encased in ghettoes, and there emerged from ghetto life a distinct Jewish cultural and ethnic (as well as religious) identity, with Yiddish as the common language (Hebrew being only the ancient language of religious ritual). After the French Revolution, the Jews of Western Europe were emancipated from ghetto life, and they then faced a choice of where to go from there. One group, the heirs of the Enlightenment, chose and advocated the choice of casting off narrow, parochial ghetto culture on behalf of assimilation into the culture and the environment of the Western world. While assimilationism was clearly the rational course in America and Western Europe, this route could not easily be followed in Eastern Europe, where the ghetto walls still held. In Eastern Europe, therefore, the Jews turned toward various movements for preservation of the Jewish ethnic and cultural identity. Most prevalent was Bundism, the viewpoint of the Jewish Bund, which advocated Jewish national self-determination, up to and including a Jewish state in the predominantly Jewish areas of Eastern Europe. (Thus, according to Bundism, the city of Vilna, in Eastern Europe, with a majority population of Jews, would be part of a newly-formed Jewish state.) Another, less powerful, group of Jews, the Territorialist Movement, despairing of the future of Jews in Eastern Europe, advocated preserving the Yiddish Jewish identity by forming Jewish colonies and communities (not states) in various unpopulated, virgin areas of the world.Given the conditions of European Jewry in the late 19th and turn of the 20th centuries, all of these movements had a rational groundwork. The one Jewish movement that made no sense was Zionism, a movement which began blended with Jewish Territorialism. But while the Territorialists simply wanted to preserve Jewish-Yiddish identity in a newly developed land of their own, Zionism began to insist on a Jewish land in Palestine alone. The fact that Palestine was not a virgin land, but already occupied by an Arab peasantry, meant nothing to the ideologues of Zionism. Furthermore, the Zionists, far from hoping to preserve ghetto Yiddish culture, wished to bury it and to substitute a new culture and a new language based on an artificial secular expansion of ancient religious Hebrew.In 1903, the British offered territory in Uganda for Jewish colonization, and the rejection of this offer by the Zionists polarized the Zionist and Territorialist movements, which previously had been fused together. From then on, the Zionists would be committed to the blood-and-soil mystique of Palestine, and Palestine alone, while the Territorialists would seek virgin land elsewhere in the world.Because of the Arabs resident in Palestine, Zionism had to become in practice an ideology of conquest. After World War I, Great Britain seized control of Palestine and used its sovereign power to promote, encourage, and abet the expropriation of Arab lands for Zionist use and for Zionist immigration. Often old Turkish land titles would be dredged up and purchased cheaply, thus expropriating the Arab peasantry on behalf of European Zionist immigration. Into the heart of the peasant and nomadic Arab world of the Middle East there thus came as colonists, and on the backs and on the bayonets of British imperialism, a largely European colonizing people.While Zionism was now committed to Palestine as a Jewish National Home, it was not yet committed to the aggrandizement of an independent Jewish state in Palestine. Indeed, only a minority of Zionists favored a Jewish state, and many of these had broken off from official Zionism, under the influence of Vladimir Jabotinsky, to form the Zionist-Revisionist movement to agitate for a Jewish state to rule historic ancient Palestine on both sides of the Jordan River. It is not surprising that Jabotinsky expressed great admiration for the militarism and the social philosophy of Mussolini's fascism.At the other wing of Zionism were the cultural Zionists, who opposed the idea of a political Jewish state. In particular, the Ihud (Unity) movement, centered around Martin Buber and a group of distinguished Jewish intellectuals from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, advocated, when the British should leave, a binational Jewish-Arab state in Palestine, with neither religious group to dominate the other, but both to work in peace and harmony to build the land of Palestine.But the inner logic of Zionism was not to be brooked. In the tumultuous World Zionist convention at New York's Hotel Biltmore in 1942, Zionism, for the first time, adopted the goal of a Jewish state in Palestine, and nothing less. The extremists had won out. From then on, there was to be permanent crisis in the Middle East.

When one group imposes a religious state on others who do not share its vision, endless conflict is bound to ensure. As long as Israelis and Palestinians view the land in that region as a whole, as "their land", for religious reasons, there will be indeed be a "permanent crisis", as Rothbard describes .Read the full article over at LewRockwell.com.Miss an edition of Mondays with Murray? Check out the full archive!Receive access to ALL of our EXCLUSIVE bonus audio content – including “Conspiracy Corner”, “Degenerate Gamblers” and the “League of Liberty Podcast” by joining the Lions of Liberty Pride and supporting us on Patreon!