The horrible war in Palestine raises an important question. Strife in the Middle East is often portrayed as Muslims vs. Jews. But what if religion had nothing to do with it? What if it is really just a question of property rights?
A home bombed by Israel in the 2014 Gaza War. Photo by Muhammad Sabah.
Before Israel was founded in 1948, many members of the Zionist movement — those advocating a return of Jews to Palestine — understood the importance of property rights. Groups such as the Jewish National Fund began buying land in what became Israel as early as 1901. Eventually, they owned 13 percent of the land within Israel’s current borders. Another 7 percent was own by private individuals, 4 percent by Arabs and 3 percent by Jews.
That left 80 percent of the land owned by whatever government happened to be in charge. Much of this land was occupied but the occupants didn’t have title to the land. After Israel was created, some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes or fled as a result of war, and it is likely that most of them were living on land to which they didn’t have title.
Israel also passed what is known as the Basic Law, which effectively acts as the nation’s constitution. Among other things, it specifies that the 80 percent of land that is owned by the government should remain government-owned and leased out to users such as communes. When new communes were created, any Arabs living on that land would be evicted.
In contrast to Israel, about half the land on the Gaza Strip is privately owned. But rights to that property are not well secured. Among other things, if the government decides to build a road, it can take up to 25 percent of anyone’s property without compensation. Beyond this, about 30 percent of land in Gaza (and 70 percent of land on the West Bank) is unregistered, meaning its occupants consider it private but don’t have title to the land. They can be and have been removed at any time without compensation.
It’s too bad Israel wasn’t founded on the principle that private property with secure property rights leads people to cooperate with one another. In contrast, common property too often leads to strife and bloodshed.
In essence, Israel is a feudal society, meaning either the government or a small aristocracy owns the vast majority of the land. This is not unusual: as I’ve noted here before, most of the land in the world is under feudalistic ownership, including nearly all of Africa, Asia, and South America. Even in the United States, I would argue that Hawaii and Nevada and perhaps Alaska are feudalistic.
In The Mystery of Capital, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto argues that replacing feudalism with a private property rights regime allows people and societies to build wealth. But I suspect it also reduces civil strife within and between those societies. Historically, most if not all civil wars have been about who owns the land and what rights do they have.
The attack by Hamas on Israel was horrifying. Like the U.S. treatment of Native Americans, Israel’s treatment of Arabs before that attack was also shameful, and I suspect most of that was due to problems with property rights.
It might be too late to use property rights to end the wars in Palestine. But the governments of the world should make a concerted effort to create systems of secure property rights that will eventually allow any resident to own their own land.
Palestine/Israel was settled and fought over by Caaninites, Assyrians by 6th cen BC. First Muslim invasion 7th cen AD.
Point is they’ve been killing each other since Bronze Age
If they wanna continue, They don’t need my taxmoney.
So called “Native Americans” were killing each other for over 20 Millennia EACH OTHER! til Whites did it better, but they’re oppressed.
20,000 years of tribal violence; their minds couldn’t process “The Wheel”, domestic animal traction, Riding animals or ritualistic cannibalism/sacrifice.
low-IQ groups are incapable of sustaining a democracy or beneficial form of government. Sub-Saharan Africa; IQ’s range in the mid 60’s to low 80’s. If we had been allowed to discuss IQ and do cognitive/intelligence research that fedderal government largely banned after the WWII; the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars would never had occurred…. Because no one would have been under the illusion a Democracy would emerge from a population with an IQ in the low 80’s. Many indigenous societies; average IQ’s occupy the range of the low 80’s that is why tribalism was their main form of governing.
Native American IQ’s average in the low 80’s……. 400 years of exposure to modernity they still fail to get ahead.
Average Palestinian IQ, is 83.
Dr. Stephen R. Schroeder, executive director of the Prince Salman Center for Disability Research, told the New York Times. Arabic world is a living genetics laboratory “Here you can study 10 families to study genetic disorders, where you would need 10,000 families to study genetic disorders in the United States.
In Muslim world, 40-50% will marry a cousin. This crosses a HUGE likelihood recessive gene disorders.
Fanaticism, violent behavior, poor reasoning skills.
Two-Thirds of the Arabic world is Inbred.
IQ is a poor measure of intelligence. The problem with Native Americans that I referred to is white Americans ruthlessly took their lands, often signing treaties that promised them land and then going back on the treaties and taking even more land. Many if not most of the Indian wars started because we broke the treaties. So much for secure property rights.
The problem with Native Americans that I referred to is white Americans ruthlessly took their land…….
Land is irrelevant, Teacher once said.. “technology creates natural resources”.What good is oil or uranium if the technology were never invented to use it? None at all. If not for Edison,Tungsten is but a paperweight. They constantly whine “White man colonialism” stole our wealth?, the resources they mistook for rocks….
Indians exchanged land holdings frequently, as their propensity for violent conflict precluded many from ever building permanent dwellings or cities, there were cities, but largely abandoned.
Meanwhile Jews and Chinese and Europeans… fled the Holocaust and Cultural Revolution and Fascism respectively, fled their homeland with NOTHING in their pockets and no English skills whatsoever; and in no more than 2-3 generations matched or exceeded US median Incomes.
The Indigenous Aboriginal people of Australia had 50,000 years of isolation before ever saw a White Man………they invented a stick.
Short answer, “necessity is the mother of invention” and the cousin to scientific inquiry. Most humans who evolved within the equator have a lower IQ than those who evolved above the equator.
Why Europe different? Study last 3000 years European/Western History
– Seasonal variation limits agricultural productivity so preservation and curbing unchecked population growth, until they developed means to improve crop productivity
(seed variety breeds thru mendelian genetics, fruit walls, Willow tree pits, arbor loos, greenhouses, GMO)
– Wedlock children use too many resources
– The Plague’s mostly killed off Low IQ whites
– The protestant reformation permitted high iQ clerics to have babies.
– The Gutenberg printing press de-throned Latin as Circa central language and allowed hundred vernacular languages gave rise to linguistics and translation for global trade. The publication of trade-related manuals and books teaching techniques accounting and bookkeeping increased the reliability of trade and led to the decline of merchant guilds and the rise of individual traders all whom became more mathematically inclined
– Religious wars mostly kill off low iQ zealots.
Your meddling of facts and fiction, combined with the miscomprehension of what IQ even entails and the strongly flawed reasoning processes that you’re demonstrating, as a supposed argument for white superiority, illustrates perfectly why your claim of white superiority is utterly and completely wrong. And in your second post your ignorance of historical and biological systems is even further exemplified.
I spend everyday at an academic institution (filled with your so called ‘superior’ high IQ whites) and the evidence is clear that there is no correlation between IQ and stupidity. Some of the smartest people around are also the most ignorant and dangerous fools on the planet.
Oh and your second last phrase ‘Fanaticism, violent behavior, poor reasoning skills.’ literally describes a large part of modern dynamics in the USA as exemplified by supreme leader Trump.
Lazy Reader:
In recent decades, as understanding of human genetics has advanced, claims of inherent differences in intelligence between races have been broadly rejected by scientists on both theoretical and empirical grounds.
Wikipedia
Thank you, Rovingbroker
Saudi health authorities, well aware of the enormous social and economic costs of marriage between family members, have quietly debated what to do for decades, since before Mrs. Hefthi was married 23 years ago. Now, for the first time, the government, after starting a nationwide educational campaign to inform related couples who intend to marry of the risk of genetic disease, is planning to require mandatory blood tests before marriage and premarital counseling.
Mrs. Hefthi, for one, wishes she had been given the opportunity to test for genetic risks.
”If I knew, I would have said no to that marriage,” Mrs. Hefthi, an elementary school teacher, said the other night, sitting in her living room with three of her sons.
”Why? It’s very painful. Why? If you know something is wrong, would you do it?”
Genetic counseling started in Saudi Arabia in 2005 where the first Saudi genetic counseling training program was established by the Department of Medical Genetics at King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center (KFSH&RC) and considered as a major referral centre in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. (KFSH&RC) initiated the first metabolic clinic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/01/world/saudi-arabia-awakes-to-the-perils-of-inbreeding.html
(published 20 years ago)
It seems like the defining feature of this is more the strength of property rights and the ability to enforce those rights rationally than individual versus collective ownership. Most people could care less if large swaths of the western US are public lands so long as the management is responsive to how most people want to use that land. However, when you have an authority dictating uses of either public or private lands that do not meet people’s needs that is when there is trouble. Fundamentally, this is what defines colonialism whether it is in Israel or with the Native Americans. You have one group that overwhelms the other with economic or physical force and their property rights are effectively nullified. The fix for this should be obvious you have to have a responsive democratic form of government to manage the public space and you have to respect the interests and rights of private property owners, and everyone else for that matter, especially as it relates to their ability to exist and use their property to support themselves.
Also, per Lazy Reader’s comments. All too often racist narratives are applied to subjugated groups as a rationalization for their marginalization. e.g. “They are stupid and deserve to be mistreated”. When you control for the socioeconomic status of an individual ethnic and racial background make no difference.
You’re probably right that the land has as much, maybe even more, to do with it as the religion. Although the Jewish idea of the ‘promised land’ (and therefor their claim to the land) is of course tied to religion. Although in modern days that’s not how it might have been implemented.
But is the problem really one of ‘private property’ or simply one of not recognizing, as outsider coming in, the property rights as they have been implemented.
If the property rights for a home are based one a ‘you’re using it and you have been using it for a long time, therefore it’s yours’ kind of argument this works quite well on small scale settlements. Because everyone knows who lives where.
The whole ‘use it and it’s yours’ Lockean argument has been applied by European, supposedly liberal and advanced, colonial conquerors/settlers as well though, simply not recognizing the property rights as have been present, and using their superior weapons to claim and dictate their own ownership ‘rights’.
These ‘rights’ are thus not a question of ‘rights’, but of power.
Of course the introduction of more complex and more powerful institutions, such as a state administrative and judicial system, can help in defending (private) property rights. But the whole point of an invasion, or of colonialism, is that there are outsiders coming in who do not recognize the (local) state and regulations and implement their own state-system. Thereby simply ignoring existing property rights, going back to a ‘right of the strongest’ until the new system has been put in place.
Funnily enough the ones defending strict private property rights are often similar people as the ones arguing against a strong and active state. But no strong and active state, no rights.
I realize now that I did not get entirely to the point you were trying to make, which is that of a larger (feudal) early 20th century Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine landowners not recognizing local property/usage rights and selling the land on which people have built their homes to Jewish settlers. Which might be true. Oh and the British basically dividing the land in a Jewish and Arab state, ofcourse. European (colonial) history is filled with decisions that fail to take into account actual people and local social dynamics…
But as you’ve said that was only a small percentage (at least the purchase, the latter divide was already more).
If I’m not mistaken, however, most of the land was taken after the 1948 war, as you also mentioned. But at this point any system of land title or ownership or right that might have been there was simply declared defunct by Israël by claiming the Palestinians ‘voluntarily’ abandoned their homes. And the informal and formal institutions that could have been in place to defend people’s rights were simply no longer there, because everyone had fled, and any physical evidence easily destroyed.