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Saifedean Ammous

@saifedean

Nov 10

Property Rights: The Root Cause of the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the inevitable result of the destruction of a centuries-old system of private property rights and its replacement by race-based state ownership. Since 1947, property rights in Palestine have been replaced by a government agency that owns the majority of land, constantly steals more, never sells, and only leases land to one racial group. Religious and racial conflict are not destined in Palestine; they are historically rare occurrences, but this system of property rights would create violent conflict anywhere.

In 1945, the British mandate government surveyed land ownership in Palestine and found that Jews owned 5.67% of the total land, while Muslims, Christians & other denominations owned 48.31% of the land. The remaining 46.02% was public land, mainly in the sparsely inhabited desert in the south, most of which was de facto owned by the Bedouins who herded there. Among the privately-owned lands, only 10.5% was owned by Jews, while 89.5% was owned by non-Jews. There was not a single district in Palestine in which Jews owned a majority of the land, as this illustration makes clear.[1]

In 1917, when the Balfour Declaration was issued, the Jewish population ranged from 4% to 13%. In 1945, the population of Palestine was 1,764,520, of which 69% were Muslim and Christian, and 31% were Jewish.[2] The majority of the Jewish population was recent immigrants from Europe, many illegal. Even after decades of legal and illegal immigration, land purchases financed by European benefactors, and terrorism against Palestinian civilians and British forces, the Zionist movement had less than a third of the population of Palestine, and owned less than 6% of its land when it established its ethnostate. To establish an ethnostate on a land in which the right ethnicity was less than a third of the population, and owned less than a twelfth of the land, Zionist terrorists engaged in a premeditated and systematic campaign of terrorism, murder, and violent expulsion, meticulously planned from the 1930s, ruthlessly executed against a largely unarmed population, and practically continuing until this day, explaining the conflict’s longevity. This has been extensively documented by Palestinian historians, such as Walid Khalidi and Rashid Khalidi, as well as by Israeli historians like Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris.[3]

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The expulsion of Palestinians was not some unfortunate consequence of war; it was well-planned by Zionist leaders, and it started in 1947, well before the 1948 war. Between 250,000 and 380,000 Palestinians had been expelled before[4] May 15, 1948, when Arab armies intervened to attempt to stop the slaughter and expulsion. Contrary to Zionist propaganda, the Palestinians did not leave as a result of the invasion of Arab armies. Zionist terrorist attacks and pogroms had started in 1947, before the war, and deliberately targeted civilians with the express purpose of terrorizing them to leave. Zionist terrorist organizations murdered entire villages of Palestinians, and would besiege nearby villages and tell their residents to leave or face the same fate. They also did the same thing to many neighborhoods in cities. The Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, is a famous example.[5] Another typical example is the massacres of Tantoura, which gained fame recently, thanks to an Israeli documentary film interviewing the perpetrators, who can be seen laughing and joking about murdering and raping civilians in what was a beautiful, rich village on the Mediterranean.[6]

youtube.com/watch?v=XjTxDY…

The need for mass expulsions was obvious to Zionist leaders from the 1920s and 1930s, as they fully understood they could never usurp a country from its rightful owners voluntarily, and said so repeatedly and clearly. David Ben-Gurion said in 1937: “With compulsory transfer we would have a vast area for settlement .... I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it."[7] And in 1938: “Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves ... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.”[8] Yosef Weitz, from the Jewish National Fund, was known as the Architect of Transfer, and he was also very categorical: “It should be clear to us that there is no room in Palestine for these two peoples … The only solution is Palestine, at least Western Palestine, without Arabs. There is no room here for compromises!... Not one village, not one tribe should be left."[9] Many more such quotes can be found from Zionist leaders, and an entire book was written to compile them.[10]

The 1947-48 Nakba was not a war, but a massacre by heavily armed and well-funded Zionist terrorist militias against largely unarmed civilians. The British army, working with the Zionists since the 1917 Balfour Declaration, had already disarmed Palestinians by 1939 and quashed the world's largest anti-colonial revolt in the interwar period, the 1936-39 Intifada. Contrary to Zionist propaganda, Israel's victory in 1948 was not a miraculous triumph of David over Goliath. Arab armies only intervened after Zionists had already captured most of the land and expelled more than 250,000 Palestinians. Arab armies were novice armies with little equipment or battle experience, and they were outnumbered and out-equipped, fighting far from their supply lines in unfamiliar terrain. They were no match for the Zionists, who fought close to their colonies and supply lines, had spent decades building military capabilities protected by the British, financed by wealthy European benefactors, armed by the socialist regimes of Eastern Europe, and fielding soldiers and generals who had fought in World War II. Israel’s war was against the Palestinian population it sought to murder and expel; the Arab armies fought to prevent that genocide, and at no point did they have as a realistic goal the destruction of the Zionist state.

More than 500 villages, towns, and city districts were destroyed in 1947-1949, and the result was the expulsion of around 800,000 Palestinians from their homes in what was to become Israel. They became refugees in other areas of Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and other countries. The majority of these Palestinian villages were systematically destroyed. None of the refugees has been allowed to return to their homes since then, and their property was confiscated under the Absentee Property Law, which entitles the government to steal the property of non-Jews. Even the Palestinians who moved to other areas in Israel and became Israeli citizens were never allowed to return to their destroyed villages, as they were labeled with the supremely Orwellian label of “Present Absentees” and their property confiscated anyway. The Christian village of Iqrit is an example.[11]

The villages the Zionists destroyed and depopulated were not chosen randomly. They were necessary to secure territorial continuity between Jewish settlements and allow the nascent Zionist regime to capture as much land as possible. By 1949, the Israeli government owned close to 70% of the land of Palestine, roughly 93% of the land under Israel’s control, and this was given to the Israeli Land Administration, never to be sold, and is, in practice, only leased to Jews.[12]

Zionists also launched countless terrorist attacks in cities, including the famous King David hotel bombing, which killed 91, including Brits, Jews, and Palestinians. The architect of the attack, Menachem Begin, would later become Israel's Prime Minister. When asked in 1974 how it felt to be the father of terrorism in the Middle East, Begin boastfully responded, “In the Middle East? In all the world!”[13] In 2006, on the 60th anniversary of the attack, Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu, commemorated it with a plaque. Zionist terrorism did not just target Palestinians and British; it also extended to Jews in Egypt and Iraq, launching false flags to blame on the local populations to get the Jews of Egypt and Iraq to leave for Israel. The perpetrators of the bombings against Egyptian Jews were honored by the Israeli government in 2005.[14]

Zionism in Reality

Functionally, the state of Israel is an ethnicity-based government monopoly socialist land agency with a military that steals Palestinian land for it, financed by foreigners. Rather than have a free market in land like a civilized society, the Israel Land Authority and its military have been constantly murdering and expelling Palestinians from their homes and providing subsidized leased lands to Jews from all over the world. This market distortion is key to understanding the conflict's history. Palestinians who have legitimate property titles going back centuries, from the same property system which Zionist migrants accepted as they purchased 5.67% of land before 1948, find themselves violently expelled, having their homes demolished and their land confiscated through an endless assault by the Israel Land Authority and its ruthless military. Most importantly, they are prohibited from ever repurchasing their own land. By contrast, anyone from any country in the world, with no connection whatsoever to Palestine, can claim to be Jewish, travel to Palestine, and be able to lease the same land from which Palestinians were violently expelled. Israel's Law of Return allows "return" and leasing of stolen land for Americans, Uzbeks, Italians, and Ethiopians with no connection to property in Palestine, but denies land to the millions of Palestinians with land titles from the same system from which the Israel Land Authority purchased its land before 1948. No other country in the world has a land ownership system as illegitimate as this. Israel’s propaganda likes to tell Westerners that Israel’s establishment is no different from the establishment of the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or other settler societies, but that is completely nonsensical propaganda. Native Americans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders are all able to purchase property in their countries today under the system of property rights, whereas Palestinians are constantly being robbed of land and denied the right to buy it. Moreover, there was no existing system of private property rights in these countries when European settlers arrived, as there was in Palestine. Europeans could settle on unowned land, and they purchased a lot of land from native tribes, whereas in Palestine, they had to violently expel and rob millions of people of their property, which was legitimate under a private property system that Zionist settlers themselves accepted as the tiny fraction of Palestine they legitimately owned.

Zionist settlers accepted the existing system of property rights in Palestine when they purchased land before 1948, but then violently attacked the goyim of Palestine and considered their property claims invalid based on the interpretation that socialist, atheist Eastern European Jews of the early twentieth century ascribed to ancient religious scripture. This is a recipe for eternal conflict, as anyone can claim that an interpretation of ancient scripture entitles them to someone else’s property. Murray Rothbard exploded the flimsy pretexts of Zionism in his seminal essay, War Guilt in the Middle East.[15] Stephen Halbrook provided a thorough critique of the legitimacy of Israeli land theft in his essay Alienation of a Homeland: How Palestine Became Israel.[16] And more recently, Hans-Hermann Hoppe provided a detailed refutation of Israel apologists' ridiculous arguments in favor of violently stealing Palestinian property and mass murdering Palestinian civilians if any Palestinian property owners dissent to being robbed.[17]

Expanding Dispossession

The best way to understand Israeli policy is that it has always functioned to acquire maximum land while having minimum Arabs. Since 1947, the Israeli state has continued to steal more land, expel more goyim, and invite more Jews to settle on this stolen land. This is why this isn’t some ancient historical grudge that Palestinians can just get over; the Israeli state continues to murder, expel, and steal more Palestinian land every single day, and its socialist land authority denies them the right to buy back or lease the land. Conflicts all over the world are resolved when property rights are protected for all individuals, but Zionism demands peaceful resolution on the basis of denying property rights to the goyim it views as subhuman, in an arrangement that can only be accurately characterized as slavery.

Israel launched another war in 1967, in which it conquered Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, where it continued stealing Palestinians' land and expelling them from their homes. Israeli settlements began expanding into the West Bank soon after the war, and they continue to steal more Palestinian land, lock Palestinians up into ever-smaller prisons, which 20 years ago were sealed with walls and fences into around 200 tiny islands in which Palestinians are corralled and prevented from moving freely.

Insane legalistic, military, and vindictive pretenses have been used to rob enormous swathes of Palestinian land in the West Bank over the years. Palestinians are expelled and declared absentees, and their property confiscated, or traveling Palestinians are declared absentees and their property confiscated. Sometimes, military needs are cited as a reason to expropriate land from its existing owners, which is then used to build settlements for Jews only. Gangs of Israeli settlers will attack Palestinians and squat on their land, and if the Palestinians fight back, the full might of the Israeli military will befall them.[18]

The most iconic emblem of Israel's insatiable theft of Palestinian land and homes came in 2021, when Yaacov, a fat American from Long Island, walked into the house of a Palestinian family in Jerusalem and demanded they leave so he could move in. The family had spent years in Israel's court system fighting against the government stealing their home and giving it to a foreign migrant. When the homeowner told him that this is her house and he shouldn't steal it, he replied with a phrase that should be added to the Israeli national anthem: "If I don't steal it, someone else is gonna steal it."[19] Many other similar videos exist of similar land and property theft on which Israel is built[20].[21]

youtube.com/watch?v=KNqozQ…

On top of constantly having their land taken from them, the Palestinians of the West Bank have lived under Israeli rule for 58 years, but are denied citizenship and all civil and legal rights, purely for being goyim. Instead, they live under Israeli military rule and are subject to a truly criminal and repressive military court and prison system. Jews who live on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank, often mere meters from Palestinians, nonetheless have full civil and legal rights under Israeli law. It is impossible to communicate the travesty of living under military rule for six decades to anyone who hasn’t been there, and that’s why Israel does its absolute best to try to prevent foreigners from going and seeing the absolute horror that it inflicts upon its unfortunate goyim subjects.

Israeli military checkpoints make life for Palestinians hell. Traveling between two towns 10 minutes apart can take hours, or even days, depending entirely on the whims of the soldiers manning the checkpoints. Entire towns and cities are cut off from the world at the whim of soldiers, and exit and entry are completely blocked off. Israel erects barbed wire fences on Palestinian property, separating a village from its agricultural lands, and making it impossible for the residents of the village to access their own land. This then eventually leads to the establishment of Jewish settlements on that stolen property. Under Israeli rule, property rights come from race, not from legitimate ownership.

Any soldier can choose to arrest any Palestinians for no reason whatsoever, and their mere word can ruin the Palestinian’s life, put him in jail for years, and subject him to unbearable, debilitating, and deforming physical and psychological torture. Close to a million Palestinians have been through Israel’s gruesome gulags, many of them subjected to the most awful torture imaginable, putting Soviet gulags to shame[22]. More than 100,000 of those prisoners have been in jail under administrative detention, without trial, where they can languish for decades. And those who receive trials face a completely rigged kangaroo court system with a conviction rate exceeding 99%. More than 10,000 children have been in these gulags, and many thousands of them have recounted the horrific torture they have been subjected to[23]. For decades, Israel has employed sexual assault against prisoners in a routine manner,[24] and deliberately inflicted debilitating torture on Palestinians. Israel’s torture gulag system has been a systematic attempt to destroy the lives of as many Palestinians as possible under the flimsiest pretext.

By contrast, Jewish settlers in the West Bank commit thousands of crimes of murder, assault, theft, and vandalism every year against Palestinians, but only a tiny fraction are ever investigated. Of these, only 3% lead to convictions[25], and these convictions then usually lead to symbolic light punishment.[26] Just in the last few weeks, three different settlers murdered three Palestinians in three incidents, all of which were caught on camera, but the murderers faced no punishment.[27] Instead, they continue to receive enormous government subsidies to steal more land and build more settlements on top of it.

To truly grasp the criminal depravity of Zionism in the West Bank, note that when Israeli settlers burned a Palestinian family alive in 2015, killing Ali Dawabsheh, an 18-month-old toddler and his parents, and badly burning his brother, the event inspired a regular song and dance in settler weddings, where the settlers would sing “Ali is on the grill” while stabbing his picture in celebration. Israel’s current Minister of National Security was filmed partaking in one of these dances.[28]

x.com/zei_squirrel/s…

If you want to imagine the frame of mind of the Israeli settlers given the freedom to rob, murder, and assault with total impunity, note that

Before the current Gaza war, and since 1947, Zionist gangs and the military they grew into have demolished more than 173,000 Palestinian houses under all kinds of ridiculous legalistic, military, and vindictive pretenses, as the Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolition has carefully documented.[29]

The result of Israel’s criminality is that today the West Bank is made up of large swathes of Israeli areas, with Palestinian cities and villages surrounded on all sides by Israeli walls, separated from their water and agricultural land, with movement severely restricted between these open-air prisons. Area A, where most Palestinians live, is under nominal Palestinian Authority control and forms only 18% of the West Bank, which is in turn 18% of historic Palestine. Area B is under joint Israeli and Palestinian control, and makes up 22% of the West Bank. Area C, under complete Israeli control and containing the ever-growing settlements and most water sources, is 60% of the West Bank.[30] These settlements are not just built on stolen Palestinian lands; they are state-owned and reserved exclusively for Jewish residents. Palestinians cannot even buy their land back if they wanted to, or even rent a home on it.

Land theft, terrorism, and expulsion are not some aberration, exception, or fringe activity in Israel; they are the raison d'être of the nation, and its motivating ideology, and the government has pursued them aggressively over eight decades, while attempting to maintain a facade of civilization to appease its funders among world Jewry and foreign governments. The genocide in Gaza is the most barbaric manifestation of the continuous crimes of Zionism, but it differs only be degree from the preceding eight decades.

Zionist terrorism against Palestinians started well before 1948, and continues to this day. It has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and has included premeditated and unprovoked indiscriminate murder, torture, and rape. It is inherent in Zionism and indiscriminate toward Palestinians. It targets Palestinians regardless of what they do: whether a Palestinian resists or not is irrelevant; they are doomed to remain an underclass without property rights. There is nothing that a Palestinian can do to be protected from Zionist theft and murder.

If you were outraged by October 7, ask yourself why you are not outraged by the thousands of October 7s which Israel has inflicted on Palestinians in more than 8 decades, for no fault other than being goyim living on the land their ancestors have lived on for millennia.

Ancient Blood Feud?

When confronted with the crimes of the Zionist regime, its defenders will usually resort to the false claim that this conflict is an ancient blood feud; that Jews, Christians, and Muslims have always fought in Palestine, and that this is just the nature of things in barbaric, uncivilized regions like the Middle East. This is not only false, but a great way to illustrate how exceptionally destructive and violent the Zionist movement has been compared to the rest of the history of Palestine. The last time a war in Palestine led to mass displacement, dispossession, and expulsion was during the Crusades, when local Muslims, Jews, and even Christians were slaughtered by the Crusaders. Before that, we have to go back almost 2,000 years to AD 70-130 when the Roman Empire put down the Jewish revolt, and some of the Jewish residents were expelled, but many remained and converted to Christianity, at least outwardly. Jews were only able to return to Jerusalem and practice their faith with the Islamic invasion in 637 AD. It was the Muslim Arab conquest that rehabilitated the Temple after the Romans had turned it into a trash dump for five centuries.

This is extensively documented, and you can read about it in detail in Israeli historian Moshe Gill's A History of Palestine, 634-1099, Relevant passages (pages 68-69) excerpted:

“Karaite commentators of the tenth century mention in a number of instances the drastic change effected by the Muslims in their capture of Jerusalem. Thus Daniel al-Qumisi writes at the end of the ninth century in his commentary on the Book of Daniel, xi:32: ‘For before he came [the king of Ishmael, who defeated the king of the south, that is the Byzantine emperor] they could not come to Jerusalem; and they would come from the four corners of the earth to Tiberias and Gaza to see the temple; but now with his coming he brought them to jerusalem and gave them a place and many of Israel settled there; and afterwards Israel come from the four corners of the earth to Jerusalem to preach and to pray. .. ’ In this same strain, Sahl b. Masllah writes in the introduction to his Book of Commandments:

“‘... and after they left the place, it was more than five-hundred years in ruins, inhabited by hyenas, and not one of Israel could come. There were jews from the east who came to the city of Maaziah [Tiberias] to pray there. From the west they would come to the city of Gaza. From the land of the south they would come to the city of Zoar. And in the days of the little horn, God opened the gates of his compassion to His people and brought them to His Holy City and they settled there and they built places to read and to interpret and to pray at all times and to keep watchers therein at night…’

“Similarly, his contemporary Salmon ben Yeruhim, in his Arabic commentary to Ps. xxx: wrote ‘... as we know, the temple remained in the hands of the Romans for more than 500 years and they did not succeed in entering jerusalem; and anyone who did and was recognised [as a jew] was put to death. But when the Romans left it, by the mercy of the God of Israel, and the kingdom of Ishmael was victorious, Israel was permitted to come and to live... ’”

While the Arabs expelled the Roman rulers, they allowed the indigenous Jews and Christians to remain in Palestine. While the invasion brought Islam to Palestine, few Arabs actually came with it, and the majority of the Palestinian population has remained from the indigenous Palestinians, many of whom converted to Islam, and many of whom remained Christian and Jewish to this day.[31]

Since the Islamic conquest of Palestine in 637 AD, Jews, Muslims, and Christians have been free to live in Palestine and own property, until Zionism came to deprive goyim of their property rights. While the political control of the land shifted among various rulers from 637 to 1947, the property rights of the local population were largely respected throughout, and the three monotheistic religions coexisted peacefully. Wars in Palestine have almost always been conflicts between armies, with the winner getting to rule and collect taxes; but the civilian population was spared the horrors, and their property rights remained intact.

As a result of this civilized system of property rights, people of all religions could coexist peacefully. As an example, here is how R. Avraham Gershon of Kitov, Poland, the brother-in-law of the founder of Hasidism, described his experience in Hebron when he immigrated to Palestine in 1747.[32]

“In this holy city, there is a Jewish courtyard which they [are permitted to] close during the Sabbath and festivals, no one can come in or out all night, and they have virtually no fear of gentiles. Its doors were kept unlocked at night…

“And when there is a celebration, such as circumcision or some other occasion, the Muslim elders come, and all rejoice. And it is not only this, but the local gentiles, even the greatest ones, love the Jews very much, and whenever there is a celebration, such as circumcision, their leaders come to celebrate with the Jews and dance with the Jews, almost exactly —not to compare—just like Jews.

“When I came here, the city’s highest officer greeted me, and I gave him a nice zibbuk (pipe?) I had from Istanbul. And they [the Arab officers] love me and say that I brought them great fortune and luck.

“At the evening of the recent festival of Simhat Torah, when I was designated as Hatan Torah, all the [Jewish] sages came to celebrate with me, and the [Muslim] dignitaries came too, and they were dancing and singing just like the Jews, and praising God in their language, Arabic.”

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Property or Conflict

It is not inevitable that Jews, Muslims, and Christians have to live in conflict, as they had coexisted peacefully in Palestine for 1300 years. As is the case everywhere, peaceful civilization is only possible when property rights are respected. And as is the case everywhere, violent conflict is inevitable when property rights are violated.

The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises brilliantly explained the importance of property rights, and his words explain the root cause of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: “If histrorical experience could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.”[33] He also said: “social cooperation and the division of labor can be achieved only in a system of private ownership of the means of production, i.e., within a market society, or capitalism. All the other principles of liberalism democracy, personal freedom of the individual, freedom of speech and of the press, religious tolerance, peace among the nations are consequences of this basic postulate. They can be realized only within a society based on private property.”[34], and most pertinently: “What elevates man above all other animals is the cognition that peaceful cooperation under the principle of the division of labor is a better method to preserve life and to remove felt uneasiness than indulging in pitiless biological competition for a share in the scarce means of subsistence provided by nature.”[35]

As I explain in detail in my book Principles of Economics, building on Mises’ work, private property is the only workable solution for dealing with scarcity, so it is only with clear property rights that the division of labor and market cooperation emerge, and only through that can humans rise above animals and live in peaceful civilization. There can be no human civilization unless it is established on a solid bedrock of respect for property rights, and the only alternative to property rights is conflict, and a descent into the rank of subhuman animals engaged in pitiless competition for the subsistence provided by nature, as Mises put it. Palestine is the perfect illustration of the truth and wisdom in Mises’ words. Tellingly, the great Mises, who was Jewish himself, never expressed a shred of sympathy or support for the Zionist project in all the many thousands of pages he published on a wide variety of topics.

For millennia, Palestine was peaceful as property rights were protected and respected. Palestine then fell into interminable bloody conflict when the property rights of the majority of its population, and the majority of its land owners, were declared invalid in 1917 by the fiat of a British government that issued the Balfour Declaration giving Palestine to the Rothschild family in return for bringing the USA into the First World War, which Britain should have never entered.[36] Israel remains the only state in history created by a foreign leader’s letter assigning it to a foreign population, and the implications of that letter are very clear. In spite of its text paying lip service to protecting the rights of the Palestinians, a candid letter from Lord Balfour to Lord Curzon presents his genuine views, and explains the ensuing calamities: “the four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”[37]

The current conflict is not a continuation of ancient hostilities. Zionism is the initiation of hostility that has turned a peaceful and civilized land into a horrific gulag by destroying the property rights of the majority of the rightful property owners, whom it views as subhuman, employing the most brutal means to expel them and to try to replace them with foreigners with no valid property rights.

The widespread respect and enforcement of property rights is the basic building block for any human civilization, and the only thing that can allow us as humans to escape eternal violent and destructive conflict. Zionism is a return to barbarism, and its continuation undermines the foundations of civilization in the Middle East and the entire planet.

Zionist Parasitism

If property rights are essential for civilization and economic production, one must wonder how it is that Israel, as a state, can continue to survive and enslave Palestinians when it destroys property rights? Clearly, a civilized order in which property rights are protected should be far more economically productive than Zionism and its inevitable conflicts. Shouldn’t the lack of property rights result in destruction, as Mises explains? How has Zionism sustained itself through the past eight decades of crime? The answer is that Zionism is fundamentally parasitic on civilized countries that respect property rights. Israel can only be sustained through enormous subsidies from the world’s advanced civilized economies, which explains the marked contrast between Israel’s actions and its rhetoric appealing to them. This parasitism is as quintessentially Israeli as land theft and mass murder, and has been a feature of the Zionist movement since before Israel was established.

This parasitic relationship began with British colonialism, whose Balfour Declaration laid the groundwork for the theft of Palestine from its rightful owners. Throughout the period of the Palestine Mandate, the British did everything to undermine the property rights and national rights of Palestinians, including disarming the Palestinians in 1936-39, while allowing the Zionists to continue to build their terrorist organizations, even as they launched terrorist attacks against British soldiers and civilians, and assassinated Lord Moyne.[38]

Further, and as astonishing as it may sound to modern readers, it was the Nazi regime that gave the Zionist movement the lifeline it needed to survive the 1930s in the face of growing Palestinian hostility and global Jewish apathy to the Zionist project. As thoroughly documented in the work of Lenni Brenner[39], the Zionists signed the Haavara agreement with it, which would encourage German Jews to leave Germany for Palestine and let them take their capital by converting it to German goods, which would be invested in the Zionist settlements in Palestine. Even though many international Jewish organizations had organized a boycott of the Nazis, the Zionists didn’t comply with the boycott and relieved the pressure on the Nazis in order to prompt German Jews to move to Palestine. The Nazis further provided training to Zionists in agricultural skills to encourage them to leave for Palestine, and also allowed for extensive Zionist propaganda in German newspapers. In fact, it was none other than Adolf Eichmann who was a central figure in the Nazi-Zionist alliance, even studying Hebrew and traveling to Palestine. Without the rise of the Nazi regime and its support at a key moment, it is doubtful that the Zionist project would have survived.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the majority of weapons that the Zionist terrorist groups were able to smuggle to Palestine came from the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist regimes. The Zionist project was initially dominated by socialists and inextricably linked to the socialist model of settlements, and so it obtained plenty of support from socialist regimes that wanted to spread socialist revolution globally.[40]

The Zionist project then became dependent on the United States for its financial and military survival. Since turning the US into its vassal state in the 1960s, Israel has received several hundred billion dollars[41] from the American government, and gotten the American government involved in massively expensive, interminable wars in the Middle East under an endless series of false pretexts, whose only real purpose is to eliminate all opposition to Zionist land theft. The tab for these wars runs in the trillions of dollars and millions of lives.[42] European countries have also provided countless billions to the Israeli government, have spent billions to fight Israel’s enemies, and they offer extensive military support, including in the Gaza genocide.

As Israel’s land theft regime continues to require trillions of foreign dollars of aggression to maintain, it must also transgress against the laws, norms, and institutions on which modern Western societies are built, which are explicitly designed to protect property rights and prevent the kind of senseless murder, theft, and torture on which Israel has been built, as well as the theft that sponsors them. The US, UK, and Europe have laws[43] against the sale of weapons and provision of financial aid to governments that might use them against civilians, or engage in torture. But these laws are completely ignored and undermined in the case of Israel, undermining the legitimacy of the rule of law and setting a dangerous precedent for future conflicts. The rights to free speech and assembly have been severely curtailed, along with open debate over governments’ involvement in wars, in order to facilitate the continued complicity of these governments in Israel’s wars. The British government refuses to disclose the extent of its military involvement in the Gaza genocide even to its own parliamentarians, who know less about their military’s activities than the Israeli government, the de facto commander of the British military. The US and German governments have brutally attacked peaceful demonstrators in scenes that would constitute grounds for regime change if carried out in countries hostile to Israel. To facilitate all this theft, Israel has turned the parliaments of these puppet states into prostitute galleries, where politicians compete in their servile depravity to a foreign state and clap like seals to the genocidal leader utterly reliant on their money and weapons for his crimes. Israel continues to exercise enormous influence on the politics of these countries because it is utterly reliant on them, because it is an aggressive project of land theft, and not a normal country built on the legitimacy of protecting property rights. The Jeffrey Epstein sexual blackmail scandal is likely but the tip of the iceberg of secret Israeli influence.

Israel regularly subverts and undermines the rule of law and the institutions of these countries because Zionists have the same perspective on the rights and property of goyim in Palestine and worldwide. Americans and Europeans who think accepting and supporting Israeli land theft is an acceptable political compromise are in for a rude awakening. Giving a government carte blanche to violate the rights of others with impunity will not be contained outside your borders. In the same way Zionists think it is legitimate for Israel to steal the land of Palestinian goyim, they think it is legitimate for Israel to steal money from American and European goyim. Anyone who thinks the lives of Americans matter more to the Israeli government than the lives of Palestinians needs only to look at Israel’s false flag attack on the USS Liberty, and the ensuing cover-up by Israel’s agents in control of the US government.[44]

Humanity has always faced a simple but difficult choice: accept that others own their selves and their property and get to enjoy the enormous benefits of peaceful human civilization, or aggress against others and their property and live in a constant state of war, destruction, and degradation. Peace in the Middle East, as everywhere, can only come when people are secure in their property. Western governments that continue to bankroll Israel’s aggression will not bring peace to the Middle East; they will just embolden Zionists to aggress more against Palestinians, and against the rest of the world in pursuit of ever more goyim land.

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References in next tweet.

Full essay can be found on saifedean.substack.com/p/property-rig…

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Saifedean Ammous

@saifedean

Jan 10

Javier Milei One Year Assessment

Everyone excited about an Argentina economic miracle is basing it on all sorts of government statistics except the most important statistics: money supply measures and public debt growth.

Under its new supposedly free-market Rothbardian president, Argentina's money supply in 2024 has increased at these astonishing rates:

M0: 209%
M1: 133%
M2: 93%
M3: 123%

To put these numbers in perspective, note that they dwarf the rates during the preceding years, during which Argentina thoroughly earned its reputation as one of the most dysfunctional fiat monetary basket cases in the world.

In the four years of 2020-2023, Argentina’s money supply measures grew at a compound annual growth rate of:

M0: 50%
M1: 77%
M2: 90%
M3: 86%

In Milei’s first six months in office, public debt grew from $370 billion to $442 billion, a staggering increase of 19.4%. Borrowing $72 billion in 6 months can make any economic statistics look good, but the problem of course is in the long-term consequences. It is possible to make short-term growth, poverty, unemployment, or inflation numbers look good by printing and borrowing money, thus transferring the cost of a short-term glow up to the future, where they are paid with exorbitant interest. Those of us who thought things could not possibly get worse might need to reconsider.

Remember that in his election campaign, Milei specifically campaigned on a platform of abolishing the central bank, even saying that that was non-negotiable. Yet as soon as he went into office, all such talk was ignored, and replaced with elaborate stories about how shutting down the central bank would be very politically unpopular. In this, Milei has fully adopted the same statist rhetoric that is always used to justify inflation by governments: the short-term pain of stopping inflation would be so bad, that it's better to continue down the path of inflation and ignore the long-term consequences. The reality is that the Argentine central bank is bankrupt, and the sooner this reality is acknowledged, the quicker it can be overcome. Trying to save the central bank can only be done by piling up debt obligations that will make the future problems even worse. In this, Milei is no different from all his predecessors who sought short-term relief at the expense of the future.

Milei has also refused to default on the public debt, which would have been the Rothbardian solution to finally free his countrymen from eternal debt slavery to pay for the consumption binges of their previous presidents. A default on foreign debt, and a shuttering of the central bank would have caused a few months of painful adjustment, after which the Argentine economy would recover on a solid footing, without even the possibility of a government being able to create inflation or saddle the population with debt. Foreign currency and bitcoin would likely dominate such an economy, and the state would necessarily be limited by the fact that it cannot print money.

By not shutting down the central bank and letting it ramp up its money printing, Milei is sowing the seeds for currency crises in Argentina’s future. By not defaulting and hiring the same bankers who brought calamity to the country in the previous administrations, it seems Milei is eager to get another IMF bailout, which will saddle Argentinians with generational debt slavery and more fiscal crises in the future. Unsurprisingly, he is raising taxes significantly, illustrating that his understanding of Austrian economics is no deeper than the regurgitation of cliches on TV. To increase taxes in order to facilitate more government borrowing is a crime against the people of Argentina to benefit the international banking cartels and the IMF criminals. It is a tyrannical recipe advanced by the Keynesians at the IMF, and has no relation whatsoever to what any real economist worth his salt would advocate.

A lot has been made about Milei reducing the budget deficit, but this is not that important. Argentina’s problem was not that it had a big budget deficit, as its budget deficit has usually been pretty low, under 4% of GDP, the same range as European countries with no major inflation and fiscal problems. The problems have always been in money supply increase and in public debt, both of which have accelerated under Milei in an unprecedented way.

The cherry on top is that Milei has shipped off the little remaining gold Argentina has to London, in search of some yield. Pawning off a politically neutral monetary asset free of counterparty risk in search of a few quick bucks does not inspire confidence. In his book The Ascent of Money, historian Niall Ferguson details how Argentina’s economic problems began when president General Juan Domingo Peron visited the central bank in 1946 and was astonished at how much gold was sitting there. Argentina had more than 1,000 tons of gold at that time, and Peron and his successors would not resist the temptation to finance their spending by running down the gold reserves that should have been backing the people’s money. The past 8 decades of calamity were the predictable consequence. After billions of percentage points in inflation and countless defaults, Argentina’s gold reserves today are no more than 61 tons. By shipping off the last monetary reserve of the future in exchange for a quick buck to allow him to keep paying off debt so he can get another IMF loan, Milei has completed Peron’s inflationary legacy to its logical end. Argentina now has no money of its own, only an ever-growing pile of liabilities from foreign banks replete with political and economic risks. Rothbard must be turning in his grave every time this Peronist invokes him to justify his actions.

This data is astonishing and flies in the face of the hype. But unless someone can show me why this data is wrong, then, for all of his libertarian and free market rhetoric, Milei is a vintage Latin American populist inflationist, buying short-term popularity with long-term inflation and debt, essentially no different from every Argentine leader since Peron. All that his free market rhetoric seems to have achieved is to trick poor Argentines into trusting their broken central bank again instead of trying to find a working alternative like Bitcoin. His anti-socialist rhetoric is nice to listen to, and his hysterical antics, relentless emotional crying, and triumphant theatrics may be amusing to some, but fate usually serves its cruelest dishes to those who celebrate before victory.

On a personal note, I found Milei’s recent attacks on Hans-Hermann Hoppe to be ridiculous. Hoppe was absolutely correct: Milei has not shut down the central bank or defaulted, which would have been the correct course of action for anyone who understands economics and is interested in the wellbeing of the Argentine people, rather than power. Milei simply insulted Hoppe and called him an idiot who doesn’t understand economics. And yet, rather than offer an actual economic argument for keeping the central bank, Milei offered a political argument, straight from the Keynesian textbook--the same argument used by every socialist and Keynesian political leader in history: inflation is needed now, in the short term, because the political costs of stopping it would be too devastating.

To pretend that this is some deep insight into economics is ridiculous; it’s simply a political strategy argument for Milei to remain in power. Putting aside the matter of whether Milei and his fellow socialists and Keynesians are correct, it is ridiculous for Milei to call Hoppe ignorant of economics for not understanding the most elementary and moronic political argument for central banking. The insinuation that Hoppe doesn’t understand economics because he’s an academic whereas Milei is a real world leader achieving results on the ground is also nonsensical. Hoppe--or any random 16 year old--could also achieve everything Milei has achieved in Argentina if allowed to saddle the country with $72 billion of debt in six months and double the money supply in a year.

It would have been far more instructive for Milei to explain why he himself spent his entire electoral campaign saying that closing the central bank was essential and non-negotiable. Was Milei also an idiot who didn't understand economics then? Or is he just another lying opportunist inflationist politician like the ones he made his name attacking?

x.com/InMilei/status…

Receipts:

Money supply statistics:
tradingeconomics.com/argentina/mone…

Money supply statistics from Argentina’s central bank:
bcra.gob.ar/Pdfs/Publicaci…

Public debt statistics:
ceicdata.com/en/indicator/a…

Argentina's Milei says shutting central bank 'non-negotiable'
reuters.com/world/americas…

Argentina public debt
tradingeconomics.com/argentina/gove…

Argentin’s gold is no longer in Argentina:
english.elpais.com/economy-and-bu…

Read 4 tweets

Saifedean Ammous

@saifedean

Oct 27, 2023

Israel is too PR savvy to just kill 2 million Gazans. Instead, they're systematically destroying all essential infrastructure to create a humanitarian crisis where disease & starvation will kill many of them & force neighboring countries to take the rest as refugees
#GazaGenocide

It will only take a few terror attacks or false flags from the West Bank to do the same thing to the 3m Palestinians there. This has been Zionism from day 1: PR-optimized ethnic cleansing to acquire as much land as possible with as few Arabs as possible.

There's been practically no serious effort by Israel to target Hamas or its leadership with the carpet bombing of Gaza. The goal is to flatten all buildings & turn Gaza, already one of the most densely populated parts of the world, into destitute tents.
edition.cnn.com/2023/10/25/mid…

Read 43 tweets

Saifedean Ammous

@saifedean

Oct 14, 2023

https://twitter.com/bokeralmog/status/1711788685169926651

When was the last time you found yourself supporting the complete destruction of the lives of 2.2 million people because you've been manipulated into believing in collective guilt like a criminal moron?

"Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings"

https://twitter.com/bokeralmog/status/1711788685169926651

https://twitter.com/scotthortonshow/status/1711706174351917401

You have to be a complete retard if you think the systematic destruction of Gaza is about targeting Hamas, which this Israeli government has worked hard to support over the years. This is just Israel's national sport: ethnic cleansing

https://twitter.com/scotthortonshow/status/1711706174351917401

~50% of Gaza's population is under 18.
~75% were unborn/too young to vote in the last election in 2006.
Do they all deserve to have their lives destroyed over that vote?
How would YOU like to be held personally responsible for everything your government does, forever?

Read 5 tweets

Saifedean Ammous

@saifedean

Sep 3, 2023

This serves as an excellent introduction to one of the most interesting and original recent works in political philosophy: Prince Hans-Adam of Liechtenstein's The State in the Third Millennium.

Prince Hans-Adam proposes self-determination & the right of secession as the basis for political organization, as opposed to the fiction of popular managerial oversight over government.

The former is how Apple works; the latter is how democracies fail
amazon.com/State-Third-Mi…

Apple users don't get to tell the CEO & engineers what to do; they simply decide to buy or not buy. Since Apple can't force them to buy their stuff, the only way they can sell it is by making it good enough for people to willingly buy it.

libgen.rs/book/index.php…

Read 8 tweets

Saifedean Ammous

@saifedean

Aug 8, 2023

Bitcoin fixes renewables by bankrupting all fiat governments that subsidize electricity from intermittent sources, forcing TV-watching virtue-signallers to come to terms with thermodynamic reality: a choice of hydrocarbons vs cold, darkness, poverty, primitiveness, & early death

Wind & solar are unpredictable & intermittent, so no sane engineer would ever connect them to an electric grid, whose entire point is to provide reliable power regardless of weather. Only fiat makes this insanity possible.

When sun doesn't shine or wind doesn't blow, the cost of electricity from solar & wind is infinite. Modern technology, from fridges to baby incubators, relies on steady power, which means solar & wind require backups for their entire capacity, which makes them entirely superflous

Read 9 tweets

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