Inside libertarian circles, critics attack anyone defending Israel as “collectivists” peddling broken ancestral claims. Their intellectual challenge boils down to one smug question: “Where is the private property? Where is the chain of title?”
Fine. Ignore the archaeology, genetics, and linguistics proving indigenous Jewish ties. Let us meet these critics strictly on their own turf: individual property rights, contracts, and Lockean homesteading.
These armchair theorists rely on a Soviet-era myth that early Zionists dispossessed an idyllic country of private Arab family farms. That country never existed. Under the 1858 Ottoman Land Code, private freehold (Mulk), in which an individual owned both soil and title, comprised less than 5% of the land and was confined almost exclusively to urban centers such as Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem.
The vast majority of arable land was Miri, a state-tenure category in which ultimate title resided with the Sultan while individuals held conditional usufruct. When the Ottomans mandated cadastral registration in 1858, local peasant cultivators (fellahin) avoided registering plots in their own names to dodge taxes and military conscription.
Consequently, absentee urban notables (Effendis) in Beirut, Damascus, and Jerusalem registered vast estates under their own names, legally reducing the peasantry to indebted sharecroppers. This occurred decades before modern political Zionism emerged.
Next, up to half of Arab agricultural land was trapped in the Musha’a system, an archaic arrangement in which village plots were forcibly rotated among clans every one or two years. This tragedy of the commons penalized long-term capital investment and made individual homesteading structurally impossible. Even worse, roughly two-thirds of the territory was non-arable waste, anchored by the arid Negev desert, which made up nearly half the mandate.
How did early Jewish returnees acquire land? Not through state decree or military conquest, but through rigorous market contracts.
Zionist purchasing bodies paid astronomical premiums, routinely spending three to five times the market price of prime, fertile farmland in Iowa, California, or France for neglected dirt and mosquito-infested bogs. When purchasing cultivated Miri land from absentee owners, Jewish buyers consistently went beyond statutory requirements. To avoid friction and respect customary usufruct, they paid cash compensation directly to resident tenant farmers on top of the exorbitant purchase price paid to titleholders. This is a reality recorded in the British Hope Simpson Report of 1930. When dealing with communal Musha’a, they executed consensual buyouts of individual shares or initiated civil partitions.
Where land was ownerless waste, pioneers engaged in classic Lockean homesteading. They moved into the malarial swamps of the Hula, Sharon, and Jezreel valleys, terrains abandoned for centuries due to disease. They endured lethal mortality rates from malaria and typhus, drained the bogs, laid irrigation, and transformed toxic waste into productive farms. Under John Locke’s Second Treatise, mixing labor with abandoned, unowned resources creates a legitimate original title.
Critics immediately object: that only accounts for pre-1948 purchases. What about the rest of Israel?
Libertarians must apply property liability consistently. In May 1948, the British Mandate dissolved into an institutional vacuum. The Jewish community declared statehood on contiguous lands acquired through purchase, homesteading, and international allocation. They did not initiate hostilities. Five sovereign Arab states and local irregulars launched an unprovoked war of extermination.
This was an irregular civil conflict fought village to village. When private homes, farms, and ridges were converted into sniper nests, artillery bases, and logistical blockades to starve civilian Jerusalem, those properties ceased to be protected civilian assets. Under libertarian law, turning private property into a combat staging ground for aggressive assault forfeits that property’s immunity from defensive seizure.
It’s interesting to see critics intentionally erase the second half of the property ledger: the violent, state-directed expulsion of over 850,000 Jewish refugees from Arab nations across the Middle East and North Africa. Millions of square meters of private Jewish businesses, homes, and centuries-old ancestral land were seized without compensation. In the violent partition of the post-Ottoman world, population and property displacement were bilateral. Demanding retroactive, micro-scale restitution solely from Israel while ignoring massive, permanent expropriation across the Arab world constitutes a fraudulent double standard.
When the Ottoman Empire fell, European powers handed over 98% of the Middle East to Arab dynastic states. The Jewish people established a society on a fraction of 1%, built on voluntary purchases, tenant buyouts, sweat-equity reclamation, and self-defense against criminal aggression. Calling this “stolen property” does not defend natural rights. It merely exposes an economic illiterate carrying water for feudal absentee landlords and aggressive militarism while denying legitimate Lockean homesteading.
We can, as advocates of the freedom philosophy, of course, have nothing against mere absenteeism. No proprietor is required to remain in residence in lands over which he has a rightful ownership. But these absentee landlords were of quite a different breed. The title to their territories was not exactly in line with Lockean principles. Whoever heard of these feudal princelings actually “mixing their labor with the land” as required for legitimate ownership? The very idea is preposterous.
The Jews, in effect, purchased property to which they had better title than those from whom they bought it. The Jews occupied these lands some 3,000 years ago. The Arabs have been in occupation of them, at most for one-tenth of that time; perhaps 300 years. The Al Aqsa Mosque lies above the Jewish Second Temple, not below it. And yet, the latter were “selling” to the former? It boggles the imagination. It upends basic elementary justice.
Critics of Israel are forever blathering on about the so-called “right of return” of Palestinians who departed from their premises in 1948. Why did they do so? They engaged in these acts in direct cooperation with the five Arab invading armies. The latter ordered them to leave, so as to promote the intended extermination of the Jews. Had they remained, these invaders would have had to waste time and energy to protect the departing Palestinians. Their orders to them were, leave now; after we mop up all the Jews, in about two weeks, you can return. It did not exactly work out that way.
Those who followed these orders were, in effect, traitors. The same does not at all apply to the Jews, also in 1948, who made a parallel emigration. They cooperated with no enemies of their host countries. They were merely fleeing for their lives.
Walter E. Block is the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans. Hushang Manuchehri is an independent writer.