It is estimated that the early modern human has inhabited this world for 300,000 years and started behavioral modernity 50,000 years ago, but only the last 5,000 years of human history are known through writing. During much of recorded history, the region of Palestine was the stage of territorial conflicts and was successively occupied by Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites, Philistines, Egyptians, Hebrews, Assyrians, Babylonians, Achaemenid Persians, Greeks/Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, Sassanid Persians, Arabs, European Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, French, British, and Zionists European. After millennia of land disputes, these latter occupiers have instigated another kind of dispute, this time within libertarianism, which has also reached biblical proportions. Apparently, there is almost unanimity among the great names of libertarianism, present and past, who agree that the Zionists are invaders and the Palestinian Arabs are dispossessed victims. But out of this “almost” unanimity are two strident voices that think otherwise. One is Walter Block, one of the leading libertarian intellectuals of our times, who has defended the Zionists in the mainstream media, in a book and in debates with other great libertarian intellectuals (here, here, here, here, here, and here). The other is the first self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist to be elected as head of State, Javier Milei, who may not be among the greatest libertarian intellectuals, but he is the one who is most in the spotlight of the mainstream media, and his Zionist statements have reached great exposure.
Given the notoriety of these two dissenting voices, it is worth reconsidering the question: if Jews are the true owners of Israel’s land, as Block and Milei claim, the conflict against Palestinian Arabs could be a just war of defense. Block and Milei also claim that the way the war is being conducted by the IDF is the best possible form of defense, where no excesses are committed, and all civilian casualties are inevitable collateral damage to this type of war. If these two isolated cases are right, then all the other libertarians – who in unison condemn Israel – are wrong. According to Zionists, the Jews were forcibly expelled from there and currently, centuries later, they are just taking back what is rightfully theirs. So, are the Jews, as a people, the legitimate owners of the historic Palestinian region?
The acquisition of land
The earliest alleged claim to property comes from when the Habiru Abraham migrates to the city of Hebron, located in the land of Canaan, which God had promised to his offspring. Established there, Abraham buys from the Hittite Ephron for 400 shekels (approximately 100 lbs) of silver that the Machpelah cave to bury his wife Sarah. According to the Bible, Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, is renamed Israel and has twelve sons, who would form the Twelve Tribes of Israel. These now called Israelites end up being enslaved in Egypt, but not all of them—some continued to inhabit Canaan,e.g., the city of Salem remained in the possession of Israelites. The Israelite slaves became very numerous, until the great legislator Moses led a revolt and freed them, leading them back to the Promised Land, which was inhabited by other peoples and had to be conquered by force. This is how the reconquest would have taken place:
Suddenly, the wall of Jericho the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city. They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys. (Joshua 6:20-21)
This genocide is far from fulfilling the libertarian ethic’s prerequisites for property acquisition. Although archaeology indicates that this and other accounts in the Bible never occurred, they nevertheless served as the nation’s founding myth nation and are used today to motivate and justify Zionist atrocities[1]. Several passages in the Bible indicate that the Israelites felt guilty for stealing the land from the Anaanites. Nevertheless, for four centuries the Israelite conquerors would live in a very approximate libertarian system, under the authority of Judges, who would rule based on divine laws, that is, a theocracy. In his A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson indicates:
The Israelite tradition, already strongly entrenched, of equality, communal discussion, acrimonious debate and argument, made them hostile to the idea of a centralized state, with heavy taxes to pay for a standing army of professionals. … The ‘judges’ were not national rulers, holding power in succession. Normally they ran only one tribe each, and some may have been contemporaries. (p. 45)
The Kingdom of Israel
During this period, the Israelites were involved in several conflicts with other peoples and internal conflicts between the tribes of Israel, who only came together in the face of the threat of a powerful enemy, the Philistines, who almost came to dominate Egypt. Even then, they would only agree to change from the decentralized system of Judges to a central monarchy through the old institution of prophecy. Johnson relates that the prophet Samuel “reminded the people that they had never had a king—one function of the prophets was to deliver popular history lectures—and that, being a theocracy, for Israel to choose rule by king was to reject rule by God, and thus sinful.” And Samuel’s prophecy was a precise and true libertarian warning:
This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots.13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day. (1 Samuel 8:11-18)
The first king was a failure. Saul and his son Jonathan are defeated and killed by the Philistines. David then becomes King of Judah, and after the murder of Ishbaal, Saul’s successor in the kingdom of Israel, the elders offer David the throne. After taking Jerusalem from the Jebusites, something the Israelites had not been able to do in 200 years, he united the North and South and made it the national and religious capital of Israel. The Golden Age of Israel begins, with the dominion of all the land that was promised to Abraham’s descendants. This era, which is used as a model by modern Zionists in their attempt to expand Israel, lasted only two generations.[2] David was succeeded by Solomon, who was succeeded by Rehoboam, who was unable to hold the kingdoms together, and the North separated from the South. “In an age of rising empires—the Babylonians followed by the Assyrians—both these small kingdoms, Judah in the south, Israel in the north, went to their doom separately.” Even if we consider that the Israelites living in the unified kingdom were all descendants of Abraham, would modern Jews have maintained this heredity by not marrying foreigners? This Zionist theory soon falls apart with Solomon, who “loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh’s daughter—Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites. … He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines.” (1 Kings 11:1-3)
Early diasporas
These divided kingdoms of mixed races could not withstand the expansion of the Assyrian empire. Sargon II destroyed the northern kingdom, removing all the elite and sending settlers out, in what would be considered the First Diaspora, when the 10 Israelite tribes also disappeared forever. However, as Sargon II recounts in the Annals of Khorsabad, he took with him only 27,290 of the people who lived there. In Samaria, Israelite peasants and artisans remained and mixed further with the new settlers. A Second Diaspora occurred 135 years later, after the fall of the Assyrian empire and the rise of Babylon as the new power. The kingdom of Judah was defeated, Jerusalem was destroyed, and Israelites were exiled again; but again, the poor people remained, and some cities, such as Gibeon, Mizpah, and Bethel were untouched. It was in exile, deprived of a state, that Jewish practices developed the most, also as a way of distinguishing them from the pagans who surrounded them. Jeremiah, the first Jew, said that “the destruction of the kingdom did not matter. Israel was still the chosen of the Lord. It could perform the mission given to it by God just as well in exile and dispersal as within the confines of its petty nation-state.” When the alliance of Persians and Medes led by Cyrus succeeded the Babylonian empire, the exiled Jews were able to return, but most chose to remain in Babylon. Those who chose to return went through the same difficulties as the Zionists of the twentieth century.
Despite Cyrus’ support and command, the first return in 538… was a failure, for the poor Jews who had been left behind, the am ha-arez, resisted it, and in conjunction with Samaritans, Edomites and Arabs, prevented the settlers building walls. … We are told of the first survey of the ruined walls in secret by night; the honours-list of those who took part and what they built; the desperate attempts of Arabs, Ammonites and others to prevent the work; its continuation under armed guard — ‘For the builders, everyone had his sword girded by his side, and so builded’
The Jews would live in peace under the Persians, who allowed free religious practice throughout their empire, until it was destroyed by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. The Macedonian conquests used to be followed by Hellenization, which frighteningly affected Jewish culture, generating a dispute between Reformist Jews and Rigorist Jews that culminated in revolts in 166-152 B.C. and the expulsion of the Greeks—which did not eliminate Hellenism, only polytheism. Greeks were overcome by Romans. Allying themselves with the rising Roman Empire, the Hasmoneans took power. They were like the future Zionists, and found themselves imbued with the task of reviving the Book of Joshua and reconquering all of Palestine for the chosen people. According to Johnson, the ruler John Hyrcanus
… pillaged and burned the Greek city of Scythopolis. John’s wars of fire and sword were marked by massacres of city populations whose only crime was that they were Greek-speaking. The province of Idumaea was conquered and the inhabitants of its two main cities, Adora and Marissa, were forcibly converted to Judaism or slaughtered if they refused.
In the end, the Hasmonean rulers became tyrants who murdered thousands of devout Jews who opposed them. It was by taking advantage of the internal divisions of this bloodthirsty despotic kingdom that Rome made Judea a client state in 63 B.C., and it was under Rome, with the reign of Herod the Great, that Israel experienced a new apogee. Again, an aggressive territorial rule without any kind of libertarian legitimacy. Israel would live its time of greatest splendor, with the construction of the second temple, palaces, fortresses, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, ports, infrastructure and the foundation of new cities. However, the Jews were divided into several sects such as Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots and Essenes. An Essene community, the Baptists, was developing into a universalist sect that would internalize Hellenism and predominate over all others: Christianity. But it was the Zealots who led the first revolt against Rome that resulted in the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple—that was never rebuilt—and ended with the taking of the fortress of Masada in 74. However, irreconcilable tensions between Judaism and Greek culture continued, and 60 years later another great revolt against Rome broke out. At this point, the Jews constituted 10% of the population of the Roman Empire and led by Prince Simon bar Kokhba, whom, Akiva ben Joseph, the most learned rabbi of the time recognized as Messiah. The Jews put up fierce resistance, inflicting heavy losses on the Romans, who had to deploy no less than 12 legions to finally defeat them in 135, and the victors renamed the region Syria Palestine. It would be another Jewish Messiah, foretold chiefly by the prophet Isaiah, Jesus Christ, who would prevail over Rome in 313. But these two defeats put an end to Jewish state history in antiquity, and it is on the basis of this event that the political Zionists would first claim the territory for the Jewish people, who would have been forcibly expelled by the Romans and would have the legitimate right to return seventeen centuries later. So, is there any libertarian justification for this claim? Would the Jewish people be the rightful owner of Palestine? And, even more importantly, is there a “Jewish people”?
Expulsion?
If groups of people are evicted from their property, they remain the rightful owner and have the right to return and retake the area. This right can be passed on to their descendants, and the illegitimacy of the illegal occupants is also passed on to their descendants or later occupants. As we have seen above, Israel’s property was never legitimately acquired, but rather through aggressive conquest over peoples such as the Canaanites and Idumeans. However, it can be argued that the Jews possess a better claim than any other, for the Canaanites and Idumeans have vanished, and the Jews have allegedly remained a people to this day. The first point to note is that this expulsion never took place. When Rome suppressed the Bar Kokhba Revolt, hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed and enslaved, but only a ruling and priestly elite was forced to leave the region. The Roman Empire was not used to expel the populations from the conquered regions. Palestine continued to be occupied mostly by Jews, who soon experienced a “golden age” under the leadership of Yehuda HaNasi (135-217), a Rabbi compiler of the Mishnah and prince who had a good relationship with the Roman emperors. So what explains the presence of Jews scattered around the world? Were they not exiled by the Romans? In fact, before the revolts against Rome, the Jews were already scattered, as Johnson reports:
The Roman geographer Strabo said that the Jews were a power throughout the inhabited world. There were a million of them in Egypt alone. In Alexandria, perhaps the world’s greatest city after Rome itself, they formed a majority in two out of five quarters. They were numerous in Cyrene and Berenice, in Pergamum, Miletus, Sardis, in Phrygian Apamea, Cyprus, Antioch, Damascus and Ephesus, and on both shores of the Black Sea. They had been in Rome for 200 years and now formed a substantial colony there; and from Rome they had spread all over urban Italy, and then into Gaul and Spain and across the sea into north-west Africa.
Jewish proselytism
In the year 59 B.C. Cicero was already complaining about the large number of Jews in Rome. They were also present in the country of the Parthians, to the east. This was due to two main reasons. The first is immigration. In the same way that today millions of people immigrate to other countries in search of better opportunities, many Jews moved from Israel to other parts of the ancient world, especially to the big cities—this Jewish urban trend prevailed throughout the ages. The second is conversion. The idea of ethical monotheism was very seductive to pagans, which gave strength to Jewish proselytism. The Septuagint, the translation of the Torah into Greek, gave even more impetus to conversions. In the first centuries of our era, a competitor in the monotheistic market emerged, Christianity, but since it was forbidden and persecuted in the Roman Empire, Judaism had the upper hand. Being a religion legally recognized by Roman law, North Africa and the entire Mediterranean experienced a mass conversion to Judaism. Conversions occurred among all social classes, including political entities, such as the kingdom of Adiabena, present-day northern Iraq. The term Jew ceased to mean “inhabitant of Judea” and began to designate all converts to Judaism and their descendants. These facts refute the Zionist claim of the forced exile of a people, both on the side that there was no expulsion and on the side that the Jews did not constitute a people, but a religion. In fact, bulk conversions brought DNA that was not part of the original gene pool in the land of Abraham. Origen of Alexandria, the Christian scholar theologian who lived at this time, noted that the name ioudaios was not the name of an ethnicity, but of a choice of a way of life.
When the growth of Christianity became uncontrollable, and it became the official religion of the Empire, Judaism was thrown to the margins. Another factor that helped reduce the number of Jews was their more excessive requirements – such as circumcision and dietary restrictions – and they went out to seek adherents in places where Christian monotheism had not reached. Many in the Arabian Peninsula adopted the Jewish religion, including a powerful kingdom, Himyar, present-day Yemen. Some of these Jews developed into another sect that would follow a separate successful course, Islam, which would dominate much of the world and throw Judaism into a very modest third place in adherents of monotheistic religions. During Byzantine rule, numerous Berber tribes adopted Judaism, which lasted until the violent Islamic conquest in 694 with the defeat of the Jewish queen Kahina. Judaism would still be the religion of a vast empire from around the year 800 until its destruction in 1016 by an alliance of Russians and Byzantines, Khazaria, whose extent was by far the vastest and most important than that of all the kingdoms existing in the country of Judea, and the available external sources on its history are far more varied than those relating to the reign of David or Solomon. But outside these periods, the Jews would live in kingdoms and states dominated by other religions.
Therefore, talking about “Jewish people” makes as much sense as talking about “Christian people” or “Mohammedan people.” And the practitioners of the Jewish religion would have as much right to the Eretz Israel promised to Abraham as the practitioners of the two major Abrahamic religions—the Christians and the Muslims—that is, none.
Zionists may claim that Judaism would have more right to Zion because it remained faithful to the religious practices of the patriarchs, while the other sects differentiated themselves to the point of disassociating from a continuous religious stream, but this is far from the truth. Rabbinic Judaism, with the synagogue as its normative institution, developed from the Pharisaic sect and is very different from the religion practiced in ancient Israel, which was centered on the temple and animal sacrifice. If there were a right established by similarity, the most legitimate claim to property would belong to the Karaites, a sect of Judaism that does not accept any post-Moses additions, such as the Talmud and the Mishnah. In addition, Islamists and Christians postulate that they are the mainstream and that it was others who deviated from it, thus losing the right to Abraham’s inheritance. For example, Peter, the first to confess faith in Christ, founded the early Church on the inheritance of Israel, and in Galatians 3:28-29, Paul expands the Abrahamic heritage to anyone who accepts Jesus:
There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
As a matter of fact, Christians and Muslims fought several wars to control the region, which they also considered sacred. The Cave of the Patriarchs serves as an example of this dispute. It was a place of pilgrimage and was fortified and ornamented by the Jewish king Herod, it was transformed into a basilica by the Byzantines, changed to a mosque by the Arabs. Then, it became a church again when taken by the Crusaders, Saladin made it a mosque again, which was enlarged by the Mamluks, and was restored by the Ottomans. And after the Six-Day War and the occupation of the West Bank, it came to be controlled by the State of Israel. After Abraham’s purchase, force has always been the rule in Palestine, and there has never been a legitimate claim to ownership over the territory that could be attributed to a fictitious Jewish people.
The case for Zionism
Although they have no right to Palestine, the Jews should be able to have a state of their own. Of course, by libertarian ethics no state has the right to exist, but they exist on 100% of the world’s land and a group of people who wanted to separate from existing states and form their own autonomous polity should have the right to secession. If this group of people is scattered around the world, they can move to a territory and concentrate there and demand their right to secession. And this was the alleged Zionist desire that arose at a time when the identities of modern nation-states were being formed, and gained strength with the treatment that the unlike received. After losing their states and losing the battle of conversions, the Jews closed in on themselves and began to live as a minority, generally oppressed by their gentile surroundings.
During the Middle Ages, in European Christianity, Jews were considered a social problem that contaminated religious truth. In an age of mysticism, Jews were periodically accused of blood libels that usually ended in massacres. Judaism was not free from mysticism, quite the opposite – it was the religion most contaminated by obscurantism, especially with the widespread dissemination of the esoteric teachings of Kabbalah, which, with its belief in various deities, even led Judaism to exclude itself from monotheism. Because it was involved in witchcraft and magical rituals, Professor Ariel Toaff, who specializes in medieval Judaism, believes that the recurring accusations of blood libels were not false – as mainstream historiography claims – and that the hostility of Christians against Jews was well-founded. Jews would prosper financially with the practice of usury, which was forbidden for Christians – and also for Jews, but Jews could lend money at interest to non-Jews (gois). Since they had no moral restraint against exploiting the Goy, the Jews would also prosper by being used by princes and nobles as tax collectors and bailiffs, oppressing the peasantry and the poor on their behalf. Often this enrichment coming from immoral roles aroused popular resentment that could result in the expropriation and expulsion of the Jews.
Despite the current impression to the contrary, in fact the Jews lived better under Islam than under Christianity. Under Islamic rule, non-Muslims had limited opportunities and had to pay taxes. Maimonides, the greatest Jewish intellectual in history, who was once considered a “second Moses,” wrote in Arabic and lived under Islamic caliphates, first under Al-Andalus and, after fanatical Berbers took power and imposed “conversion or exile,” under the Shiite and then Sunni caliphates that controlled Egypt during his lifetime, where he was Saladin’s physician. The Jews – in addition to Hebrew, which was used only for liturgical purposes – developed their own language, Yiddish, and lived separately from the rest of the population, usually in ghettos that enjoyed a certain autonomy from the dominant powers. Before immigrating to the United States, David Rothbard, Murray Rothbard’s father, lived in a ghetto in Poland and could not even speak Polish, only Yiddish. Within these semi-autonomous Jewish communities, the individual was at the mercy of the rabbinical authority that coercively controlled all aspects of life and applied an iron fist to the disobedient, even the death penalty. Professor Israel Shahak reports that the act of liberation came “when the modern state was born, [and] the Jewish community lost its power to punish or intimidate the individual Jew. The bonds of one of the most closed of ‘closed societies,’ one of the most totalitarian societies in all of human history, had been broken.”
After the French Revolution and the general decline of religious power, Jews—who, having been freed, also began to abandon religion—began to envision an end to their status as second-class citizens in the nations in which they lived and the beginning of equality before the law. This proved to be an illusion in the light of the great Russian pogroms of 1881–2 and the Dreyfus affair of 1894 in Enlightenment France. It was while reporting on the injustice suffered by the Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus, and influenced by the novel Daniel Deronda, that the Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl was inspired to start the modern Zionist movement. In 1885 he published the book Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State], proposing that the Jews of the world should gather together in one territory and establish a state of their own, where they would no longer be a minority subject to the excesses of the majority—a legitimate demand; he wrote: “If only they would leave us alone … But I do not believe they will.” Herzl suggested the formation of a Zionist congress to discuss practical actions for the creation of a Jewish state, an idea that was soon put into practice with the holding of the first Zionist congress in 1897, in Switzerland. The first difficulty was to specify who would be Jewish: would they be practitioners of Judaism? Would they be an ethnic group? Herzl himself was astonished at the suggestion that Jews were a race when the Jewish-British writer Israel Zangwill, known for his ugliness, considered that both had the same origin. But this ethnocentric idea was put forward by other Zionists, such as Max Nordau, who believed that “the Jews clearly constitute a people of homogeneous biological origin”. The religious aspect was also not satisfactory, given the large number of atheist or non-practicing Jews who swelled the ranks of Zionism. But for the movement to advance, it was necessary to create a common identity, and this task was carried out by proto-Zionist and Zionist historians.
The invention of the Jewish people
As recounted by Sholomo Sand in The Invention of the Jewish People, when in 1820 the German-Jewish historian Isaak Markus Jost published the first volume of a total of nine of his History of the Israelites from the Time of the Maccabees to Our Time, he considered that the Jews possessed perhaps a common origin, but the Jewish communities were not separate members of a specific people. Their culture and their way of life varied entirely from place to place, and only a particular belief in God brought them together and bound them. There was no Jewish political super entity that separated Jews from non-Jews. But it was a critic of Jost’s approach, Heinrich Graetz with his History of the Jews from the Oldest Times to the Present, the first volumes of which were published in 1850, who invented the concept of the Jewish ethnoreligious “people,” as possessing a continuous existence confirmed by the biblical accounts until contemporary life in exile. Graetz was not a Zionist, he did not advocate the creation of a Jewish homeland, but he included the narrative of exile in his work. The Zionist claim for the return to Israel of an exiled people was based on a myth created and spread within Christianity. The exile would have been a divine punishment against the Jews who, instead of accepting the redeeming grace of the Messiah sent by God, according to the prophecies, crucified him. In 1862, with the publication of the work Rome and Jerusalem by Moses Hess, the Zionist idea of Theodor Herzl was anticipated. Hess was the forerunner of both Zionism and Communism, as Douglas North noted in “The Marx Nobody Knows.” Inspired by the racist pseudosciences that proliferated in his time of the rising nationalism, Hess conceived of the Jews as a race, which preserved its purity since Ancient Egypt thanks to its faith, and was destined to immigrate back to the Holy Land—this conception would be the basis of the Reich Citizenship Law of November 14, 1935, where the Nazi bureaucracy drafted twenty-seven decree laws dealing with the racial issue.
Historians Simon Doubnov and Salo Baron established “a specific, well-defined protonationalist discourse. Jewish history was the story of a nomadic people born in great antiquity, which had mysteriously and marvelously continued to exist throughout history.” And historians Yitzhak Baer and Ben-Zion Dinur consolidated a Zionist historiography, of a homogeneous continuity of the “people of Israel,” always eager to return to their homeland. In the absence of historical and archaeological evidence that Rome expelled the Jews, Dinur altered the narrative of the exile: the Jews were expelled from Palestine after the Islamic conquest—a more recent date, the seventh century, which would improve the Jewish people’s claim to the land of Israel. However, this expulsion also never occurred, as explained below.
At the beginning of the Zionist movement, the location of the new Jewish state was not defined; Argentina and Uganda were some of the proposed locations, and in fact, the return to Zion was forbidden by rabbinic commandments and should only occur at the Last Judgment and through the Messiah. However, Palestine was the only place that took off, and Zionists began to move there and encourage mass immigration of Jews. The myth was then created that the Jews were a people, illegitimately expelled from their land, that therefore had the right to return. If Palestine were “a land without a people for a people without a land,” a Zionist (re)homesteading would be legitimate, but the problem is that it was not.
The Arab problem
When the first Zionists arrived at Palestine, they found a vastly occupied land. From 1891 Ahad Ha-‘Am pointed out that “was little untilled soil in Palestine, except for stony hills and sand dunes. He warned that the Jewish settlers must under no circumstances arouse the wrath of the natives by ugly actions; must meet them rather in the friendly spirit of respect.” The Arabs who were there were largely the original local peoples, who had not been expelled by either the Romans in the second century or by the Muslims in the seventh century. Under the Umayyad Caliphate, in order not to pay the jizia – the tax for religious minorities, many Jews converted to Islam—a close religion that originated as a branch of Judaism. The Marxist Zionist Dov Ber Borochov considered the Palestinians to be part of the Jewish race. Indeed, genetics seems to prove this ancestry, suggesting that the Palestinians are the most genetically close to the ancient Israelis. Borochov’s two main disciples, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi—future founders of the State of Israel—believed that they would “return to Judaism” when faced with this “superior culture” and thus be integrated into the new nation. However, the Palestinians—Muslims and Christians—have shown themselves to be much more attached to their traditions than the Zionist left imagined. Finally, with the Arab revolt of 1929, Ben-Gurion abandoned his expectation of integration and entered into a territorial dispute with the Palestinians.
At first, Jewish immigrants from Europe bought the land from the Arabs, who began to charge more and more for it. The mostly illegitimate acquisition of land (after Ottoman rule many titles were in the hands of foreigners who had never set foot in Palestine) was driven by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who in 1924 acquired 125,000 acres, where he established several communities and helped promote the socialist initiative of the kibbutz. But this theoretically legitimate path was proving to be very inefficient for the Zionist plan to form a Jewish state, a plan that came to be increasingly known by the Arabs, giving rise to inevitable conflicts. Created in 1920, the Haganah—a paramilitary group that under the command of Ben-Gurion would become a real army and give rise to the Israel Defense Forces—began to protect the Zionists and intimidate the Palestinians. Alongside two other militias, the Irgun and the Stern Gang, the Haganah would wage a campaign of terror, the Nakba, aimed at the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Promised Land. The most notorious act of this campaign was the attack on the village of Deir Yassin, where more than a hundred unarmed civilians, including children, women and the elderly, were massacred by the Zionist military. With news of the barbaric carnage spreading, the goal was achieved and 750,000 Palestinians fled in terror from their homes, towns and farms.
The Zionists were also the inventors of modern terrorist tactics, and many terrorist attacks were carried out against the British Empire that dominated Palestine. The greatest of all these acts was the bombing of the King David Hotel by the Irgun, with the consent of the Haganah, which caused 91 fatalities, 28 British, 41 Arabs, 17 Jews and 5 others, and seriously injured another 45 people. Zionist terrorism also achieved its goal, and the British handed over the mandate of Palestine to the UN, which would soon recommend the creation of the State of Israel. Apart from Ben-Gurion, several other Israeli prime ministers came from these terrorist organizations, such as Yitzhak Shamir, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, and Yigal Allon; all appropriate rulers of a country formed through terrorism and property theft.
The UN’s suggestion of partition also lacks any legitimacy. Even if it had not been a fraudulent vote presided over by the Brazilian pro-Zionist diplomat Oswaldo Aranha, no supranational bureaucratic body has the right to determine borders and form countries without the consent of the local populations – which in 1948 was made up of less than 30% Jews, who owned only 7% of the land, and who were given 54% of the territory. This UN recommendation was promptly accepted by the Jewish minority, which proclaimed the founding of the State of Israel, clearly an aggressive act that caused the Arabs to unite in a league and declare a defensive war. Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders never intended to respect these UN-manifested borders, which were expanded with the victories in this war and other subsequent wars, and continue to be expanded to this day.
The Palestinians expelled from their properties emigrated to different parts of the world, however, not all Arabs fled the Zionist violence; many remained within the boundaries of present-day Israel and many took refuge in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which are, in one way or another, territories under Israeli rule, which turned Israel into an apartheid state, where Israel’s Palestinians are second-class citizens.
The modern intelligentsia considers that the panacea would be to turn Israel into a democracy, but libertarians know that democracy is nothing but a tyranny of the majority. Israel is constituted as a Jewish state, and it could not be otherwise, because this is the essence of Zionism. The whole Zionist idea was about creating a state where the Jews were the majority, and not a minority that could be—and history has shown that it would inevitably be—oppressed by the majority. Democracy would be the ruin of the Jews, as Yasser Arafat actually foresaw when he said that their best weapon was the womb of the Arab woman. The birth rate among Palestinians is much higher than among secular Israelis, which in a few generations can make Jews a minority in Israel, prone to be oppressed—in a democracy, the womb is really a weapon. In analyzing the apartheid regimes of South Africa and Israel, Murray Rothbard indicated a different solution: instead of partial apartheid, total apartheid, or the two-state proposal. However, as the eminent professor of international politics John Mearsheimer summarized, both the two-state solution, democracy and apartheid have been discarded by the current Israeli regime, which is conducting brutal ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip and habitual killing and dispossession in the West Bank—in addition to the tens of thousands killed by bombs, thousands more Palestinians have already died from disease and starvation and more than 1 million may also die.
Libertarian Zionist?
In view of the story told, it is really appalling to come across any libertarian who supports this Zionist project of conquests and theft. Even more pitiful is to see a (ex)libertarian of the caliber of Walter Block, with a life full of great contributions to the defense of a free society, destroy his entire legacy by vehemently defending a gang of murderous thieves. Block always told the story that when he was part of Ayn Rand’s circle in New York, as soon as he met Murray Rothbard, in a few minutes of conversation he was converted to anarcho-capitalism. However, it has now been revealed that Block never actually became a Rothbardian, and remained a genocidal collectivist Randian. In spite of the clear criminal record that European Zionists—the real anti-Semitism—are aggressive invaders of Palestine, Block and Milei insist that Israel is only defending itself in a just war, without any excess, and that all the thousands of civilian deaths in this particular stage of the long conflict—at least for Block—are the sole fault of Hamas (an organization that was promoted by Israel), as if this had begun on October 7, 2023. As if the Israelis had never done any harm to the Palestinians and were just minding their own business when, out of nowhere, Hamas crossed the border and started killing them. As if it were possible that such a sinister attack[3] could have been carried out by people who had not suffered any previous aggression. The evil of the Hamas terrorists is a blowback of the evil, terrorism, injustices and oppression inflicted on the Palestinian people for decades by the Zionists. A demonstration of the source of evil can be seen on the date of the documentary Born in Gaza, filmed during the IDF’s offensive on the Gaza Strip in 2014, one of Israel’s many attacks on Palestinians. The documentary shows the tragedy caused in the lives of 10 children by Israeli bombs. The same happened to thousands of children who in 2023 would be the young people who committed atrocious acts against Israelis on 7/10.
Milei has the nerve to say that Israel is the defender of Western values in the Middle East, and therefore should be supported at all costs, but land theft and genocide were never Western values—neither democracy, which was rejected by the Greeks and even the American founding fathers, and is really a sign of de-civilization. Nevertheless, Sammy Samooha ranked Israel very low in the hierarchy of democratic regimes. Firstly, Western values are not Jewish, but Catholic. In The Birth of the West, Paul Collins points out that the West was born when the Pope crowned Otto I emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and the convictions of the Roman Catholic Church dominated the scene. As seen above, Jews would be an excluded minority in the Catholic West, and their values insignificant in the constitution of Western culture. The modernist motto “Judeo-Christian values” would have sounded absurd to the man living in the medieval era (the most libertarian era in history) or even in the nineteenth century. However, not even ancient Jewish values are upheld by Israel. If Israel were to embody the precepts of ancient Judaism, human life would be a supreme value. Human life was considered sacred because humans were created in the image and likeness of God. As Paul Johnson explains:
The sages ruled that a man had no right to save his life by causing the death of another. … When it came to human life, quantitative factors did not signify. An individual, if innocent, might not be sacrificed for the lives of a group. It was an important principle of the Mishnah that each man is a symbol of all humanity, and whoever destroys one man destroys, in a sense, the principle of life, just as, if he saves one man, he rescues humanity. Rabbi Akiva seems to have thought that to kill was to ‘renounce the Likeness’, that is leave the human race. Philo called murder the greatest of sacrileges, as well as by far the most serious criminal act.
How can we reconcile the importance given to life by ancient Judaism with the carnage caused in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military? It is impossible. However, the Judaism that developed from the first century onwards is Talmudic Judaism, which teaches that only the lives of Jews are sacred, while the lives of the Goy can be despised. That Jews can and even should be disloyal in dealing with Goy. That Jews can exploit and oppress Goy. Even stealing from Goy is permitted by the Talmud, as Shahak relates:
Stealing (without violence) is absolutely [90] forbidden – as the Shulhan ‘Arukh so nicely puts it: ‘even from a Gentile’. Robbery (with violence) is strictly forbidden if the victim is Jewish. However, robbery of a Gentile by a Jew is not forbidden outright but only under certain circumstances such as ‘when the Gentiles are not under our rule’, but is permitted ‘when they are under our rule’. Rabbinical authorities differ among themselves as to the precise details of the circumstances under which a Jew may rob a Gentile, but the whole debate is concerned only with the relative power of Jews and Gentiles rather than with “universal considerations of justice and humanity. This may explain why so very few rabbis have protested against the robbery of Palestinian property in Israel: it was backed by overwhelming Jewish power.
Thus, the less influence the Jewish religion (Classical/Orthodox Judaism) has on the State of Israel, the better. Erstwhile Israel has carried out its evil operations in a less genocidal way. When it kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, the Israelis did not bomb Argentina indiscriminately, but instead secretly entered and captured him without harming any other innocent people. Counter-terrorist operations were also very different from the IDF’s later bombing of residential areas, and the Israelis actually targeted the fighters and minimized harm to civilians. The cinematic rescue at Entebbe airport of 102 Jews kidnapped by Palestinians, where only two hostages were killed in the exchange of fire, is one of the best examples of Israel’s willingness to punish the guilty and preserve the lives of innocents. In Operation Entebbe, all 7 terrorists and 45 more Ugandan soldiers were killed, and only one Israeli soldier died, Yonatan Netanyahu, whose younger brother, Benjamin Netanyahu, would become famous and become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. Yonatan had participated in other precision operations of this type, such as Operation Spring of Youth in 1973, which invaded Lebanon and killed the terrorist leaders of the Munich Massacre. Today, his brother Benjamin, in the name of retaliation and the rescue of some 200 hostages of 7/10, has killed tens of thousands of civilians, injured and maimed tens of thousands more, displaced millions, and left entire cities in rubble. What a difference! And Block is proud to say that this genocidal war criminal wrote the foreword to his book in favor of Israel.
Block builds his case for Israel from a classical liberal perspective, arguing that it is necessary to leave his anarcho-capitalist position to avoid sectarianism, that is, not to limit himself to saying that abolishing the state is the only way. The objectivist whom Block came upon to co-author his book had a hard time trying to explain this contradictory position. It is paradoxical because libertarians are not against the state as such, but against aggression. The emphasis on the state comes from the fact that it is, by far, the greatest property aggressor that has ever existed, but libertarians also oppose aggression by private individuals and groups. Therefore, anarcho-capitalists do not need to set aside their advocacy of the abolition of the state in order to analyze the actions of states and propose alternatives other than their end. However, it is important that anarcho-capitalists always point out that the ideal solution is in fact the abolition of the state.
Anarcho-Zionism
For centuries, Jews lived as minorities in societies they despised and were rightly despised in return. The Zionist project emerged as a response to this. It lost much of its meaning with American Jewry, which found a safe haven in a country where it was given the same rights as other citizens and could prosper without the backlash from the rest of the population that occurred in previous centuries, when Jews were expelled from thousands of places. The legitimacy of the Zionist movement was irretrievably lost when they stopped buying the Palestinians’ property and began to take it by force. But the fatal mistake of the Zionist Jews was that they once again ignored Samuel’s prophetic warning and aspired to a state. It was the rejection of rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai’s warning, the deputy head of the Sanhedrin, who “had opposed the revolt and spoke for the long-established element in Judaism who believed that God and the faith were better served without the burden and corruption of the state.” It was to desire a re-establishment of the Davidic kingdom and not of the age of the Judges. Not only that, but it was ignoring that the history of the Jews highlights “an inherent conflict between religion and the state of Israel:”
When the Israelites, and later the Jews, achieved settled and prosperous self-government, they found it extraordinarily difficult to keep their religion pure and incorrupt. The decay set in rapidly after the conquest of Joshua; it again appeared under Solomon, and was repeated in both northern and southern kingdoms, especially under rich and powerful kings and when times were good; exactly the same pattern would return again under the Hasmoneans and under such potentates as Herod the Great. In self-government and prosperity, the Jews always seemed drawn to neighbouring religions, whether Canaanite, Philistine-Phoenician or Greek. Only in adversity did they cling resolutely to their principles and develop their extraordinary powers of religious imagination, their originality, their clarity and their zeal. Perhaps, then, they were better off without a state of their own, more likely to obey the law and fear God when others had the duties and temptations of ruling them. Jeremiah was the first to perceive the possibility that powerlessness and goodness were somehow linked, and that alien rule could be preferable to self-rule. He comes close to the notion that the state itself was inherently evil.
…
A broad group of pious Jews in the tradition of Josiah, Ezekiel and Ezra. Many of them did not object to Greek rule in principle, any more than they had objected to the Persians, since they tended to accept Jeremiah’s arguments that religion and piety flourished more when pagans had to conduct the corrupting business of government.
By choosing to create a state, the political Zionists did not get rid of oppression, they just changed oppressors; before they were oppressed by Gentiles states, now they remain between the oppressors and the oppressed in their very own style The nature of the state is aggression, and any state will be composed of exploited and exploiters. It was made clear during the covid dictatorship, when Israel was one of the countries that most tyrannized its subjects with lockdowns, mandatory masks and vaccines. Israel used its citizens as laboratory guinea pigs for Pfizer, killing thousands of people with the anti-covid “vaccines.” The Zionist attempt to free Jews from oppression failed, and libertarians can and should point to its fundamental flaw: institutionalized aggression. And who knows, maybe a new Zionist movement will emerge that will truly free Jews from tyranny and not tyrannize other groups, the Anarcho-Zionism. The ideal would be a Zionist movement that rescued the values of ancient Judaism, but even a Zionism of Talmudic Orthodox Judaism would be welcome: if Jews despise the Goys, it would be better if they live completely separated from the Goys. Renowned thinkers have pondered this issue, from Roman emperors to Napoleon and Goethe, and many agree in seeing the Jew as a universal danger. Martin Luther saw Zionism as a solution when he said in 1543: “In my opinion, if we want to be free from the Jewish evils, we must separate ourselves from them, we must send them away from our lands. And they? Let them go to their own country!”
But libertarians also have much to learn from Zionists. In a few decades they have managed to do what some libertarians have been trying to do for a long time: concentrate enough people with the same political views in one place, form a majority, and gain autonomy and independence. (obviously, leaving aside the part about oppression of the native inhabitants) For 23 years now, the Free State Project has been trying to form an electorally relevant libertarian mass in New Hampshire, but without success to date. Liberland has been trying to colonize and obtain autonomy for a small island in the Danube River between Croatia and Serbia, also without success. The recent Los Propietarios project attempts to form a community of anarcho-capitalists in Argentina, something similar to what was already attempted 15 years ago by Doug Casey. There are other projects like Free Cities and Seasteading, but none has come close to the Zionist victory (not as a libertarian feat, of course).
Before Theodor Herzl, Zionists also made attempts that went nowhere, such as that of Mordecai Noah, who in 1825 planned to acquire an island in the Niagara River to be an autonomous home for the Jews. Stalin also tried to give the Jews a home and created the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, which was also unsuccessful, because although it still exists, only 0.2% of the population is Jewish. Hitler was also a Zionist who wanted to remove all Jews from Europe (and not exterminate them – this was the real Final Solution) and, after the Third Reich invaded France, the plan was to send them all to Madagascar, but with the invasion of Russia the destination changed to the conquered territories to the east. Zionist Jews even tried to ally themselves with the Nazis and wanted the Jews to be deported to Palestine. With the German defeat in the war, this also failed. It was only with Herzl’s great organizational power that a Zionist movement would be triumphant. With a solemn style, he managed to garner the support of the rich and powerful of his time. After his death, his work was advanced by Zionists such as Chaim Weizman, who made Arthur Balfour, leader of the British Conservatives, Winston Churchill and Lloyd George become strong defenders of Zionism. But it was only with the definitive entry of the Rothschilds into the project that the Jews criminally conquered their Zion and dominated the globe.
[1] Like most modern Zionists, David Ben-Gurion, the founder and first prime minister of Israel, was an atheist, but a profound student of the Bible, aware of its mythical potential as the creator of the Nation of Israel. Sholomo Sand explains that:
The charismatic leader was not only a keen reader of the ancient Hebrew book; he also made cunning political use of it. Quite early he realized that the holy book could be made into a secular national text, serve as a central repository of ancient collective imagery, help forge the hundreds of thousands of new immigrants into a unified people, and tie the younger generation to the land. The biblical stories served him as a basis for everyday political rhetoric, and seemingly he genuinely identified with Moses and Joshua. Much as the leaders of the French Revolution felt they were assuming the roles of ancient Roman senators, so Ben-Gurion and other leaders of the Zionist revolution, senior military figures, and national intellectuals felt they were recapitulating the biblical conquest of Canaan and the construction of a state along the lines of David’s kingdom. Current action became significant in the context of paradigmatic events of the past. In both cases the revolutionaries dreamed of creating a completely new man, but the materials they used in his construction were taken from a mythical past.
More recently, following October 7, 2023, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was criticized for citing a biblical reference to the Amalekites in a speech about military campaigns in Gaza. This is just one more example of the dangers of the secular Israeli state being based on Talmudic Judaism, which values the lives of Jews far above those of non-Jews. In his 1997 book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion – The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Israel Shahak discusses the differential treatment that Jews and Gentiles receive under Israeli law and highlights:
In addition to laws such as those mentioned so far, which are directed at all Gentiles in the Land of Israel, an even greater evil influence arises from special laws against the ancient Canaanites and other nations who lived in Palestine before its conquest by Joshua, as well as against the Amalekites. All those nations must be utterly exterminated, and the Talmud and talmudic literature reiterate the genocidal biblical exhortations with even greater vehemence. “Influential rabbis, who have a considerable following among Israeli army officers, identify the Palestinians (or even all Arabs) with those ancient nations, so that commands like ‘thou shalt save alive nothing that acquire a topical meaning. In fact, it is not uncommon for reserve soldiers called up to do a tour of duty in the Gaza Strip to be given an ‘educational lecture’ in which they are told that the Palestinians of Gaza are ‘like the Amalekites’. Biblical verses exhorting to genocide of the Midianite were solemnly quoted by an important Israeli rabbi in justification of the Qibbiya massacre, and this pronouncement has gained wide circulation in the Israeli army. There are many similar examples of bloodthirsty rabbinical “pronouncements against the Palestinians, based on these laws.
[2] This is according to the biblical narrative because “according to Ze’ev Herzog, an Israeli archaeologist and professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, the united monarchy of David and Solomon, if it existed, was at best a small tribal kingdom and not a regional power.Israel Finkelstein, a preeminent Israeli archaeologist and professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University, has similarly argued that Jerusalem at the time of David was little more than a village. Finkelstein has proposed that the Biblical account of the kingdom of David and Solomon, written by Judean scribes at least 300 years after the supposed reign of David, was a mythologization of the kingdom of Jeroboam II, who is known to have ruled Israel from about 788 BC to 747 BC.” – Jeremy R. Hammond, A Brief History of Palestine.
[3] Despite the brutality of the attack, the Jewish propaganda machine thought it was too soft and invented and disseminated an exaggerated and false version of the terrorist acts to justify the ethnic cleansing being carried out in the Gaza Strip. The whole hoax has been exposed, as this Grayzone documentary shows. This type of deception is a Jewish pattern. The same was done quite successfully in relation to the Holocaust hoax. Jews suffered under the Nazi policy of uprooting, where they were forcibly deported from the territories dominated by the Third Reich and all their property was taken away, for them never to return. They were enslaved in forced labor camps and placed in transit camps eastward, in sometimes unsanitary conditions, where thousands died, mainly in typhus epidemics. Massacres against Jews [pogroms] occurred by local populations freed from the Bolshevik yoke and by Nazi divisions acting against Hitler’s orders. However, once again, the Jewish propaganda machine found this insufficient and created and disseminated an exaggerated—or completely fabricated—legend of the facts, which included fantasies such as gas chambers and the claim that a total of 6 million Jews were exterminated. This hoax was also completely debunked decades ago by revisionist historians.
