By Deontological Libertarian Ethics, Palestinians’ Rights Were Clearly Violated by the Nakba

 

            May 15, 2023 is remembered by Palestinians the world over as the 75^th anniversary of the Nakba. Meaning “The Catastrophe” in Arabic, this day is in remembrance of the events that constituted the ethnic expulsion and/or the causing to flee of around 700,000 Palestinians from what is today the State of Israel, the destruction of around 400 to 600 villages and erasure of evidence of their existence, and even acts of biological warfare by means of poisoning wells to prevent people from being able to return. As shown by the horrors of deliberately targeting a non-threatening village in Deir Yassin, the Zionist militias of the Irgun and Lehi were more than willing to engage in what can only be described as crimes against humanity. The main Zionist militia, which would later become the IDF, the Haganah, may not have been such as extreme, but their complicity in Palestinians being driven out to make room for Jewish settlers is not in doubt. Needless to say, not all Zionists wanted this to occur, and as shown with Albert Einstein, many did indeed condemn the violent circumstances that went into the founding of Israel. None of this is meant to spread disinformation or to deny the rights that Jewish people had to buy land within the British Mandate of Palestine or to even question the understandable rise in popularity of the previously marginal idea of Zionism among survivors of the Holocaust. All this being said, it should be pointed out that it has almost entirely been the left who has been willing to point out these historical events. Despite not respecting private property rights most of the time (and indeed actively celebrating their violations in events like the expropriation of the Kulaks in the Soviet Union, for example), the left does seem to make exception when the victims are indigenous folks, whether Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, or Palestinians. Where they get into anti-Semitic territory is when they suggest that the pre-1948 immigration of Jews to Palestine to start a new life was somehow imperialism and where their lack of concern with property rights is made apparent. By the same token, the right defends the rights of private property, but usually makes an exception when it comes to Israel stealing Palestinian land, as still occurs in East Jerusalem and the West Bank today. Whether this comes from a lack of true principles around property rights and subsequent ideological inconsistencies, geopolitical concerns, or simply extremist beliefs, like that all Jews need to return to the Holy Land for the Rapture to occur is seldom made entirely clear. The true ideologically consistent position espoused by deontological libertarianism offers a philosophy that both shows the Palestinians were wronged in the Nakba, but that a peaceful, voluntary form of Zionism could have been possible.

            Deontological libertarianism states that people are born with natural rights to self-ownership and because of this, all actions of coercion are prohibited from an ethical standpoint and are to be interpreted as a private property rights violation. This is best encapsulated by the non-aggression principle, which holds that no people are allowed to initiate force against a person and their property under any circumstances and that self-defense against such actions are morally justified. Adopting this message, it becomes very clear that the Nakba was a moral atrocity and that the Palestinians were absolutely in the right to resist having their homes and land stolen from Zionist settlers with the foundation of the State of Israel. They are fully within their rights to demand to return to lands taken from them and for the disaster of being relegated to UN-administered refugee camps to be ended. Attempts to deny this common-sense reaction to history, such as by Ayn Rand, have relied on petty racism, such as by claiming the Palestinians were ostensibly part of a primitive Arab culture and that the Zionists were justified by ostensibly setting up Western civilization in the Levant. The fact that Israel was largely a socialist planned economy, while Lebanon to their north was a relatively open economy composed of ethnic Arabs apparently did not cross her mind. This seems to largely be the mainstream right’s view as a whole. The Palestinians, it is said, are Islamic and therefore have no rights. Its horrific. At the same time, the left was initially just as unprincipled, with the Soviet Union being among the first countries to recognize the State of Israel and Progressive Party candidate in the 1948 U.S. election, Henry Wallace, openly calling for the United States to be best friends with the socialist nation, the plight of the Palestinians be damned. It seems they only support the Palestinians now because the Soviet Union reversed course once it was clear Israel wouldn’t be their puppet in the Middle East. The fact that there is never calls for ethnic Germans who were expelled from their lands in eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II, an idea pushed by Stalin, to get their land back, shows they are not truly concerned about property rights. It is only us deontological libertarians who understand that anybody or their descendants has a right to return to any land that was directly stolen from them, no matter who the perpetrator or victim was.