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. === References in next tweet. Full essay can be found on saifedean.substack.com/p/pro…