I've been mulling over why Libertarians haven't been more critical of Israeli policy towards Palestinians (it turns out some have been for decades). I'll get to my own views later, first, let's cover the general Libertarian argument against any military occupation which is applicable to Israel/Palestine.
- Individual Rights compromised: This is a no brainer. Palestinian rights (freedom of movement, economic activity etc.) are severely undermined in the occupied territories and compromised within Israel. The founding of Israel has been a tragedy for the individual, inalienable rights of Palestinians. This is a core Libertarian principle that Israel has compromised.
- Property Rights compromised: Palestinian property rights are continuously undermined by settlement activity in collusion with the state. This is often overt, and in other cases it is underhand. The occupation and restrictions on trade, movement end up impoverishing Palestinians. This leads to distress sales of land and property. Well-funded settlement organizations supported by the state are ready to step into the gap. If libertarians believe they can raise objections to taxes and mandates based on property rights, the issues in Israel are far more clear cut. In many cases, what we observe is outright theft of land and resources using the state apparatus. Later we'll discuss a Libertarian view of the original Zionist acquisitions of land during Ottoman rule and under mandate Palestine.
- An Over-bearing State: Israeli operations in the West Bank are a militarized police state. Children are interrogated, IDF forces enter houses at any time of day or night without any sort of judicial supervision, often under slim pretext. In many ways, the military occupation of the West Bank is a Libertarian's worst nightmare. The modern-day ghettoization and siege of Gaza perhaps more so.
- Right to Self-Defense compromised: Palestinian rights to self-defense are not recognized in the Occupied Territories. This has also been codified into law: Palestinians have no right to self-defense from attacks by settlers.
- State monopoly on force compromised by settlers without repercussions: This is a deep issue within Libertarian political discourse, since it is the core distinction between a libertarian "night-watchman" state and anarchy. In a night-watchman state, citizens freely cede the "monopoly on legitimate use of force" to the state. Clearly this is not the case in the occupied territories where IDF forces routinely look the other way while settlers engage in violence against Palestinians and their property. Especially when dealing with armed settlers who have military training, this creates a proxy force whose compliant elements can be nudged to take actions too unsavory for state forces.
To a Libertarian it appears as if the Palestinian population is living under a form of anarchy when it comes to settlers and a tyranny in relation to the military-state administered by the IDF. There's really no reason a Libertarian can support this state of affairs.
Libertarians would argue that their prime objection to a non-minimalist state is that all states end up being controlled by the powerful at the expense of the weak. Therefore a small, weak state is capable of doing the least damage and presents the smallest enticement to those who wish to capture it to use for their own ends (billionaire oligarchs or beneficiaries of Citizens United for eg.). When understood in this context, an apartheid state is a Libertarian's worst nightmare.
This is the real-world though, and every political philosophy is compromised in practice. So how have Libertarians in the past and present warped fine ideals to support not so fine societies.
- Protecting Privilege: Though libertarian principles demands equal rights, in practice many political movements that claim to be libertarian are primarily concerned with providing these protections to a specific class of people. Others are classed as "non-citizens" or even "non-people". You could make a very persuasive argument that this was true throughout much of the US during the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.
- Racism or Southern Strategy redux: This is just a fancy way of saying that in some circles Jews (along with Catholics and Southern Europeans) have been accepted as "White Europeans" and therefore deserving of support. Which of course makes Arabs the darker other. This requires ignoring the majority of Israeli Jews who are actually Mizrahi. And of course ignoring the origins of the term "Semitic". But then again, when did racism ever make any sense.
- Politically expedient alliance with the religious right: The religious right and libertarians are strange bed-fellows in many, many ways. But since the Reagan revolution (perhaps even earlier) a tacit pact with the religious right has propelled libertarians to political power. They have in effect been able to exercise this power within the economic sphere, and ceded the social sphere to the religious right and social conservatives. This is not dissimilar to the compact monarchies and aristocracies have made throughout history with churches. With Libertarians though, there are always cracks beneath the surface in such an alliance. So for instance, many were surprised to learn that the David Koch supports gay rights (including same-sex marriage). For those in Libertarian circles it is not a surprise. Rather, many libertarians wondered why this support has been silent for so long, effectively prioritizing economic issues instead of those of individual liberty (see my personal footnote below the fold).
Some of these fissures are a reflection of a far bigger divide in Libertarian circles. That between followers of Ayn Rand, and those who consider her a lesser light in the Libertarian firmament. This antagonism is present in the Libertarian view of I/P as well.
Rand v. Rothbard
I'm going to engage in some Libertarian inside-baseball which may not be of interest to many here. Hold your noses and keep reading, it is somewhat necessary.
Within certain Libertarian circles, Ayn Rand is considered a useful propagandist and accessible "first point of contact" for people who being introduced to libertarian ideas, but no more than that. For the record, I have never been able to finish a book by Rand since she's such a terrible writer (think Fifty Shades of Grey for people who get aroused by adult morality tales that involve a lot of pious speeches). Plus, she's an unreconstructed racist, not least when it comes to Native Americans and Palestinians. Her followers are trying hard to sanitize her theories for a gentler age, but it's tough going given the source material. Which may be why so many sympathizers of the Confederate cause yearn for her. To give you a little taste of Rand (all emphasis, throughout the diary, is mine):
They (Native Americans) didn't have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their 'right' to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent. -- Q & A session following her Address To The Graduating Class Of The United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, March 6, 1974
There is so much ignorance and bile packed into this statement that I won't bother to refute it. It also gives you a good sense of Ayn Rand's view on Israel/Palestine, which is encapsulated in this statement by her:
The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures. They are typically nomads. Their culture is primitive, and they resent Israel because it's the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent. When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are. Israel is a mixed economy inclined toward socialism. But when it comes to the power of the mind—the development of industry in that wasted desert continent—versus savages who don't want to use their minds, then if one cares about the future of civilization, don't wait for the government to do something. Give whatever you can. This is the first time I've contributed to a public cause: helping Israel in an emergency. -- Ford Hall Forum Lecture, 1974
This is in keeping with Rand's broader theory about "primitive" cultures.
Murray Rothbard went back and forth during the Fifties on his view of Rand and participation in her "salon". He eventually proclaimed she was running a cult (certainly not an original observation). He took on Rand for her support of Israel in an article titled Rand on the Middle East:
Asked what the American people and the government should do about the Middle East war. Rand answered unhesitatingly: “Give every help possible to Israel.” Not American soldiers, she conceded; but military weapons. We need not stress here the assault on liberty involved when the U.S. government taxes Americans in order to send arms abroad; surely, this is as statist and immoral, though not to the same degree, as sending American soldiers to the Middle East. As for the American people, Miss Rand sounds for all the world like the United Jewish Appeal: “Give everything you can” (Give till it hurts?). Reaffirming her supposed and longtime opposition to altruism. Rand added that “this is the first time I have contributed” to public causes, but now apparently we have a vital exception.
Why? What is the overriding cause for which we must set aside libertarian principle, isolationist principle, and opposition to altruism; why is Israel’s “emergency” to be a claim on our hearts and pockets? Given Miss Rand’s militant atheism, it surely could not be the necessity for the reestablishment of the Temple, or the fulfillment of the old prayer, “next year in Jerusalem”; given her professed individualism, it surely could not be (one hopes) the Zionist call to blood, race, and soil. So what is it? Russia is of course dragged in, but even Miss Rand concedes that the Russian Threat is not the real issue here.
The real issue? Because “civilized men” are “fighting against savages”, and when that happens, says Rand, “then you have to be on the side of that civilized man no matter what he is.” The fact that Israel is socialistic, she adds, pales into insignificance before this great imperative.
There are two grave problems here: of the facts of reality, and of moral principle. Factually, what does Miss Rand mean by “savages”? Once work through the emotional connotations of the term, and the concept becomes a vague one. She explains that the Arabs are “primitive” and “nomads.” Here she betrays total ignorance of Palestine and its history. The only “nomads” in the region are not the Palestinian Arabs, who were driven out of their lands and homes by the Zionists, but the Jordanian Bedouins, who as hirelings of King Hussein are in effect anti-Palestinian and pro-Israel. Palestinian Arabs were not nomads but agriculturalists; long before Israel, they“made the desert bloom.” The “nomad” theory was convenient Zionist propaganda, and nothing more. Perhaps the Palestinian Arabs are “savages” because they live miserable lives in hovels on the desert; but they do so because—one and a half million of them—they were driven out of their homes and properties by the Zionists, and they remain in dire poverty as refugees. Miss Rand’s strictures are chillingly reminiscent of the English who drove the Irish out of their farms and lands by force, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and then looked down their noses at the “wild, savage” Irishmen who unaccountably spent their lives wandering around the forests.
In contrast to Rand, Murray Rothbard is considered a serious economist and political thinker by the Libertarian academic establishment. The broader neo-classical economic establishment disagrees and considers him at best a "popular economist", at worst a polemicist. Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek would be acknowledged both within Libertarian circles and by the general Econ academic establishment, as innovative economists even though they may reject their approach. Menger co-invented the concept of marginal utility, Hayek's insights on price theory and business cycles are seminal, and Mises was ahead of his time by trying to marry economics and psychology.
Mises never seems to have said anything substantial on Israel, though he reportedly didn't think much of Zionism's prospects. Neither did Hayek, who wrote a number of political books. Incidentally, the "Austrian school of economics" isn't called that for effect. Both Mises and Hayek were Austrian citizens (of the cosmopolitan mold) who did not return after the Anschluss. Mises was Jewish, but I don't believe he practiced. Rothbard was also born into a Jewish family and at different times described himself as an agnostic or a reform Jew.
Karl Popper is a contemporary of Mises/Hayek and a philosopher of science/politics referenced frequently by Libertarians. Popper's biographer relays a story of a ten year-old Karl Popper asking a friend who supported Herzl's Zionist project "Are there no Arabs in Palestine?" In general, this group seems to have been far more concerned with developing political and economic institutions that would prevent the sort of upheaval they saw undermine their beloved society during the inter-war years and then finally destroy it after the Anschluss. They were essentially for assimilation and considered their professional identities more important than their faith or ethnicity (even after WW-2). This cosmopolitan Viennese view is captured in this quote about Popper (I suspect Mises and Hayek would tacitly agree):
Popper’s ambivalence about being Jewish, despite being victimized by anti-Semitism and being forced into exile, was not accompanied by analogous ambivalence about Zionism. Jewish nationalism was both ‘‘stupid’’ and ‘‘wrong’’ racial pride like so many other nationalisms. Zionism was just the ‘‘petrified’’ tribalism of the European Jewish ghetto displaced to Palestine. Israel’s treatment of Palestinians made him ‘‘ashamed in [his] origin.’’
Rothbard is in some ways, the architect of the Libertarian establishment in the US. He had a knack for attracting students and setting up organizations (including the Mises Institute, Center for Libertarian Studies, and a couple of journals). And he's the one who tussled with Rand over Israel.
Rothbard is always good for a quote, and in this case there are several in his 1967 editorial War Guilt in the Middle East, written soon after the Six-Day war. He discusses early Zionism:
The chronic Middle East crisis goes back--as do many crises--to World War I. The British, in return for mobilizing the Arab peoples against their oppressors of imperial Turkey, promised the Arabs their independence when the war was over. But, at the same time, the British government, with characteristic double-dealing, was promising Arab Palestine as a "National Home" for organized Zionism.
These promises were not on the same moral plane; for in the former case, the Arabs were being promised their own land freed from Turkish domination; and in the latter, world Zionism was being promised a land most emphatically not its own. When World War I was over, the British unhesitatingly chose to keep the wrong promise, the one to world Zionism. Its choice was not difficult; if it had kept its promise to the Arabs, Great Britain would have had to pull gracefully out of the Middle East and turn that land over to its inhabitants; but, to fulfill its promise to Zionism, Britain had to remain as a conquering, imperial power ruling over Arab Palestine. That it chose the imperial course is hardly surprising.
[...]
Because of the Arabs resident in Palestine, Zionism had to become in practice an ideology of conquest. After World War 1, Great Britain seized control of Palestine and used its sovereign power to promote, encourage and abet the expropriation of Arab lands for Zionist use and for Zionist immigration. Often old Turkish land titles would be dredged up and purchased cheaply, thus expropriating the Arab peasantry on behalf of European Zionist immigration. Into the heart of the peasant and nomadic Arab world of the Middle East there thus came as colonists, and on the backs and on the bayonets of British imperialism, a largely European colonizing people.
Then moves on to the UN partition plan:
The partition plan granted the Jews, who had a negligible fraction of Palestine land, almost half the land area of the country. Zionism had succeeded in carving out a European Jewish State, over Arab territory in the Middle East. But this is by no means all. The UN agreement had provided (a) that Jerusalem be internationalized under UN rule, and (b) that there be an economic union between the new Jewish and Arab Palestine states. These were the basic conditions under which the UN approved partition. Both were promptly and brusquely disregarded by Israel -- thus launching an escalating series of aggressions against the Arabs of the Middle East.
[...]
By the advent of Israel's independence on May 15. the Palestinian Arabs, demoralized, were fleeing in panic from their homes and from the threat of massacre. The neighboring Arab states then sent in their troops. Historians are wont to describe the ensuing war as an invasion of Israel by the Arab states, heroically rebuffed by Israel, but since all of the fighting took place on Arab territory, this interpretation is clearly incorrect.
[...]
By the time of the permanent armistice agreement of February 24, 1949. then, 600,000 Jews had created a State which had originally housed 850,000 Arabs (out of a total Palestinian Arab population of 1.2 million). Of these Arabs, three-quarters of a million had been driven out from their lands and homes, and the remaining remnant was subject to a harsh military rule which, two decades later, is still in force. The homes, lands, and bank accounts of the fleeing Arab refugees were promptly confiscated by Israel and handed over to Jewish immigrants. Israel has long claimed that the three-quarters of a million Arabs were not driven out by force but rather by their own unjustified panic induced by Arab leaders--but the key point is that everyone recognizes Israel's adamant refusal to let these refugees return and reclaim the property taken from them. From that day to this, for two decades, these hapless Arab refugees, their ranks now swollen by natural increase to 1.3 million, have continued to live in utter destitution in refugee camps around the Israeli borders, barely kept alive by meagre UN funds and CARE packages, living only for the day when they will return to their rightful homes.
Keep in mind, this is written in 1967. He's writing well before any of the New Historians have gotten going on documenting the Nakba. But Rothbard knows from contemporary accounts what has gone on during 1947/48. He then moves on to the Six-Day War:
While giving lip-service to peaceful negotiation, the Israeli government finally knuckled under to "hawk" pressure within the country; and the appointment of the notoriously war-mongering General Moshe Dayan as Minister of Defense was obviously the signal for the Israeli blitz attack that came a few days later. The incredibly swift Israeli victories; the press glorification of Israeli tactics and strategy; the patent unreadiness of the Arab forces despite the hoopla; all this indicates to all but the most naive the fact that Israel launched the war of 1967--a fact that Israel scarcely bothers to deny.
[...]
When this war began, the Israeli leaders proclaimed that they were not interested in "one inch' of territory; their fighting was purely defensive. But now that Israel sits upon its conquests, after repeated violations of UN cease-fires, it sings a very different tune. Its forces still occupy all of the Sinai peninsula; all of Palestinian Jordan has been seized, sending another nearly 200,000 hapless Arab refugees to join their hundreds of thousands of forlorn comrades; it has seized a goodly chunk of Syria; and Israel arrogantly proclaims that it will never, never return the Old City of Jerusalem or internationalize it; Israeli seizure of all of Jerusalem is simply 'not negotiable.'
and finally he has the coup de grâce:
The one thing that Americans must not be lured into believing is that Israel is a "little" "underdog" against its mighty Arab neighbors. Israel is a European nation with a European technological standard battling a primitive and undeveloped foe; furthermore Israel has behind it, feeding it, and financing it, the massed-might of countless Americans and West Europeans, as well as the Leviathan governments of the United States and its numerous allies and client states. Israel is no more a "gallant underdog" because of numerical inferiority than British Imperialism was a "gallant underdog" when it conquered far more populous lands in India, Africa, and Asia.
And so, Israel now sits, occupying its swollen territory, pulverizing houses and villages containing snipers, outlawing strikes of Arabs, killing Arab youths in the name of checking terrorism. [...] Armed with light weapons, the Arab people could carry out another "Vietnam", another "Algeria" --another people's guerrilla war against a heavily armed occupying army. Of course, this is a long-run threat only, because to carry it out the Arabs would have to overthrow all of their stagnant reactionary monarchies and form a united pan-Arab nation--for the splits into nation-States in the Arab world are the consequence of the artificial machinations and depredations of British and French imperialism. But for the long-run, the threat is very real.
I would challenge you to find a more vigorous defense of Palestinian rights than the one presented by Rothbard here. He sounds like Chomsky, which is not as surprising when you realize that Chomsky calls himself a Libertarian-Socialist which he says is "properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment". Embedded in Rothbard's article is a view of property rights that we'll explore below. I'll also note that Rothbard covers proposals for a bi-national state with mild approval.
As a warning, Rothbard engages in some pretty extensive comparisons between Israel's actions and Nazi expulsions in this editorial. My sense is he's earnest in the revulsion he feels for the Israeli state's aggression towards Palestinians.
Rothbard is by no means the only Libertarian to follow this line of thinking on Israel/Palestine. The Mises Institute's Journal of Libertarian Studies published an article by Stephen Halbrook in 1981: Alienation of a Home-land: How Palestine Became Israel which is very sympathetic to Palestinian claims. Halbrook is a more marginal figure (especially when compared to Rothbard), but he is quite influential in his chosen specialty of gun-rights issues (he's written several books on gun rights through history). He taught at George Mason and Howard University in the 70s. Here are some selective quotes from his 1981 article:
Despite informal talks and contacts between U. S. and Palestine Liberation Organization officials, the U. S. refuses de jure recognition of the P.L.O. as the Palestinian spokesman because the P.L.O. does not recognize Israel's right to exist as an exclusively Jewish state and calls instead for a secular democracy in Palestine wherein Moslems, Jews, and Christians have equal rights.
[...]
If the state of Israel has a right to exist, it can only be because its citizens acquired the land in a just manner. In ideological struggle over the Middle East, standard non sequiturs are raised which obscure the ultimate issue of whether Jews, Palestinian Arabs, all of both, or some of both have the right to possession of Israel or occupied Palestine. (Of course, the terminology by which the land is described is itself determined by whether the Zionist entity is seen as legitimate or as contrary to international law and justice.)
These non sequiturs take various forms. Menachem Begin's adage during his Irgun terrorist days that "we fight, therefore we are," which is applied to justify subsequent Israeli conquests, assumes the ad baculum fallacy that might makes right; but certainly the same existential reasoning would demonstrate the legitimacy of the P.L.O.'s guerrilla infrastructure, including Yassir Arafat's Fatah, George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and other fedayeen organizations, especially insofar as their attacks on Israel are successful. When not basing Israel's right to exist on its ability to wage victorious wars against Arabs, Begin vindicates Israeli expansion by Jehovah's gift in perpetuity of Eretz Israel to the Jewish settlers, and thereby designates seized Arab land as "liberated" rather than "occupied." Yet international law, which views all people equally, eschews claims to territory based on theological presumptions, and it is grotesque to rationalize conquest and genocide by appeals to a higher Being which allegedly designates a privileged group as a chosen or master race. As for the Jews' right to "return" to Israel because they populated the area two thousand years ago, this reasoning would vindicate much more strongly the right of Palestinian Arabs to return to their homeland of only thirty years ago.
Nor can lsrael's right to the land be demonstrated by reference to the Balfour Declaration (1917). for Palestine belonged to its inhabitants, not to the British Foreign Minister. Freedom from British colonial rule was certainly more of a right of the Palestinians in 1917 than of the British citizens of America in 1776. Assuming the right of peoples to self-determination, Arab Palestine was not for the British to give to the Zionists. Finally, justice does not presuppose that if A oppresses B, then B may oppress C; thus, the genocidal policies against Jews by German Nazis would not justify Jewish Zionist punishment of Palestinian Arabs. Victims of the Holocaust have claims for compensation and territory against former supporters of Nazism, not against guiltless Palestinian peasants. The same principle repudiates the population-exchange theory which asserts that, because Arab states expelled Jews from their Arab homelands after the Zionists expelled Arab Palestinians from their homeland, everyone has "gotten even." Collective guilt of all Arabs cannot be based on acts by some Arab states; Zionists cannot justify their initial expulsion of Palestinians because Arab states (not Palestinian Arabs) later carried out repressive policies against Jews.
In short, neither military force, God, a distant past, Lord Balfour, Hitler, nor Arab state acts may, by equal standards of international law, be called upon to demonstrate the rightfulness and legality of taking the land of Palestine from Moslem and Christian Arabs and giving it to Zionists from Europe and elsewhere. If the Zionist settlers (which excludes indigenous Palestinian Jews, whose claim to their land is beyond question) have a rightful claim to the territory, it can only be because they acquired it from the Palestinian Arabs in a just manner. If it can be shown empirically that at the time Israel was founded the overwhelming majority of Palestine's inhabitants were Arabs and that most of the country's land was held by Arabs, then the Zionists' claim to legitimacy must be based on their acquisition of the land through equitable and voluntary methods based on the consent of the indigenous inhabitants. But if Palestine was in essence stolen from its people, not only does Israel's existence become negotiable, but a secular democracy becomes imperative.
and since this is a Libertarian view, what would it be without an analysis of property rights? Halbrook has an extensive survey of Ottoman era land-records that begins with:
While the [Palestinian] peasants perceived their right to their land to be based on long-standing possession and cultivation, the Ottoman code regarded the ultimate landowner to be the Sultan, whose agents would terminate tenure for nonpayment of taxes or rent. Fellaheen were severely exploited by tax farmers, who, backed by troops, doubled as moneylenders at rates of 60% interest, and not surprisingly the State was regarded as an organized band of robbers.
Take this with a generous helping of salt though. "An organized band of robbers" is arguably what some Libertarians would brand any and every state as. But Halbrook makes a decent case here:
Unsatisfied with previous acquisitions, Begin declared before the Knesset on October 12, 1955: "I deeply believe in launching a preventive war against the Arab States without further hesitation. By doing so, we will achieve two targets: firstly, the annihilation of the Arab power; and secondly, the expansion of our territory." A year later some fifty Arabs were massacred in Kafr Qasim, located in Samaria, and not long thereafter the Suez adventure provided an unsuccessful opportunity for Begin's plans. It remained for the 1967 war for Israel to occupy the West Bank and the Gaza Strip-to which Begin as early as 1948 claimed the Jews had a right-as well as the Golan Heights and the Sinai. The successive governments of Levi Eshkol, Golda ("there are no Palestinians") Meir, and Yitshak Rabin promoted settlements in these occupied territories. As a result of the June War, 1,700,000 Palestinians, largely non-citizens, were under Israeli occupation, and another million Palestinians remained outside Palestine, mostly on the East Bank.
By early 1973 it was estimated that out of 475 substantial Arab villages before 1948, only 90 remained. Settlements throughout the occupied territories have escalated at an ever increasing rate since the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the election of Begin during 1976. Confiscation and expropriation of Palestinian Arab land, creation of illegal settlements which are afterwards "legalized," and the consequent spontaneous demonstrations as well as guerrilla actions by Palestinians countered by repression by the Israeli armed forces mark the present epoch.
Keep in mind, this is written in 1981, as Halbrook notes in a footnote added after publication:
This article was written before the Holocaust in Lebanon of Summer 1982. At the time of this writing, after weeks of indiscriminate massacres of many thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians by Israeli military forces, it is impossible to predict whether the Zionist occupation as far north as Beirut will result in a "North Bank"as militarized and permanently occupied as the West Bank. The invasion also has implications for the analysis included herein of the oppression of Oriental Jews by Arab states-the Jewish quarter in West Beirut has been subject to the same Israeli shelling and destruction as the dominant Moslem quarters of that part of Beirut.
He's following Reagan's lead in using the term Holocaust. But I wonder now where Reagan got the idea.
Here's a thought experiment for advocates of Israel who hang their hats on the Republicans. Republican support for Palestinian rights in prior administrations is not entirely driven by considerations about Middle-Eastern oil. The Libertarian point of view as laid out by Rothbard (and tacitly accepted by most of the Libertarian establishment), doesn't provide much support for Israeli policy. In fact, it is quite firmly anti-Zionist. So what happens when Israel isn't a useful tool to exploit in domestic US politics and Republican libertarians re-discover this critique to the detriment of the Randians?
A personal note and some incidental observations below the fold...
This is sort of a coming-out diary for me on DKos. How you might ask do I know about the libertarian view at all? Well, ahem, I've self-identified as Libertarian pretty much my entire adult life. With the distinction that I privilege individual rights and equal rights above everything else (I don't think property rights are worth very much if you aren't free to be who you are). So for instance, I'm completely on-board with Peter McWilliams' Aint' Nobody's Business If You Do (which I recommend without reservation), and with most of JS Mill and FA Hayek in broad strokes. You could claim this is properly called classical liberalism. But let's not be coy, the only people calling themselves Classical Liberals are those somewhat embarrassed by their ideological brethren in the Libertarian camp. I respect Chomsky for using the term Libertarian-Socialist, at least he doesn't run away from Libertarian. In any case, whatever you call it, I'm more at home with a radically socially liberal, somewhat fiscally conservative state. My break with the libertarian strain in the GOP is that for me the first is sacrosanct, the second I'm flexible on, whereas they seem to have set the opposite priorities.
In that sense, I consider the Republican establishment an exemplar of what Libertarians are actually against. Hayek's critique of "socialism" is that it inevitably results in the submission of citizen to state. So I would say I'm closer to Hayek and haven't compromised his ends.
As a footnote, Hayek's Nobel memorial prize in Economics was jointly awarded to him along with Gunnar Myrdal. Which I find somewhat fitting, Myrdal's work in some ways pre-dated Keynes and what the committee was trying to do (it seems to me) was reward both lines of thinking on business cycles, but Keynes died in 1946. Myrdal did original research in price and business cycle theory, but he also worked on race relations in the US, particularly their impact on education. His work influenced the court in their Brown v. Board of Education decision.
I'd argue that characterizing Keynes' and Hayek's work as offering two different solutions (state intervention vs a minimalist state) somewhat misses the point since they were trying to solve two different problems. Keynes was focused on a solution to the Western European trauma of the Great Depression. For Hayek these concerns were superseded by the fascist trauma and hyper-inflation that his part of the world had suffered.
Finally, as an interesting aside, Rothbard also wrote an article titled Pat Buchanan and the Menace of Anti-Anti-Semitism in 1990 which contains some interesting notes on the first Iraq war. He's severely critical of the ADL:
Ever since August 2, Israel and what Pat Buchanan has brilliantly called its extensive "amen corner" in the United States, has been beating the drums for immediate and total destruction of Iraq, for the toppling of Saddam Hussein, for destruction of Iraqi military capacity, and even for a "MacArthur Regency" to occupy Iraq quasi-permanently. Pat Buchanan has distinguished himself, from the beginning, as the most prominent and persistent critic of the war on Iraq, and as the spokesman for a return to Old Right isolationism now that the Cold War against the Soviet Union and international communism has ended. Hence, it is no accident that the ADL picked the occasion of Buchanan's hard-hitting critiques of the war hawks to unleash its dossier, to issue and widely circulate a press release smearing Buchanan as anti-Semitic, which was then used as fodder for an extraordinarily extensive press campaign against Buchanan.
Buchanan's position on the first Iraq war was unfamiliar to me, and it led me to Buchanan's website. He's written a
vigorous defense of the Obama administration's attempts to reach a nuclear deal with Iran. I might be checking his site more frequently.
Rothbard then moves on to hurl fire and brimstone at Elie Wiesel:
But can Elie Wiesel's mystical insight really be relied upon? After all, this is the selfsame Wiesel who, in the early 1980s, pronounced his feelings to be favorable to none other than the monster Ceausescu. Why? Because of Ceausescu's pro-Israel foreign policy, naturally. Any man who confers his blessings upon one of the most savage butchers in the past half century, is scarcely qualified to hurl anathemas at anyone, much less at Pat Buchanan.
and this is after he's called Wiesel a "professional Holocaust survivor". What I wouldn't give to have Rothbard commenting on DKos.
We'll end with Popper:
If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. -- Karl Popper
