A familiar charge runs through most of the commentary on this conflict in the Middle East: that Israel’s presence in the “West Bank,” settlers and all, is a central obstacle to peace with the Palestinians. Even those who stop short of calling it the only obstacle treat it as one of the larger ones. The reasoning is tidy. Palestinians homesteaded land in the West Bank and Gaza, the argument runs, and yet Israel controls most of that land, along with most of the water beneath it. On this telling, the whole arrangement is a plain violation of Palestinian property rights and self-rule. It is theft, pure and simple.
We think this is mistaken, root and branch. Begin with two matters of vocabulary, because the words here do real work. The territory in question is Judea and Samaria, not the “West Bank,” a coinage of fairly recent vintage. And the people who live there are routinely labeled “settlers,” as though they were colonists who had seized land from prior occupants. The truth runs in precisely the opposite direction.
Why is there a war at all? What, exactly, do the Arabs hold against the Israelis? Compress the grievance into two words, and you get: land theft. The Arabs, the Palestinians, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, all sing the same tune: The Jews stole the land. The difficulty with the charge is chronology. The Jews were there first. Not a couple of centuries before, but more than 3,000 years ago, long before any Arab set foot in the place.
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The evidence for this is not thin. It is overwhelming. Take the simplest piece of it. The Al-Aqsa Mosque sits directly atop the Second Temple. Which came first? The Temple, plainly, with the mosque raised over it long afterward. Dig below even that, and you reach the First Temple. The Jews were there first. And Lockean homesteading theory, which no consistent libertarian can quietly set aside, is unambiguous on the point: The first homesteader is the rightful owner, not the second or any other latecomer. Is Jewish title therefore confined to a few sacred acres? Hardly.
Every country has its national pastime. Canada has hockey. The United States has football. Most of the rest of the world has soccer. Israel has archaeology. Israelis are forever digging in this field and along that hillside, turning up pottery, cloth, and coins. The first few feet down, you do indeed find traces of Arab life. Keep going, and it is Jewish the rest of the way down.
So, when critics say the Arabs homesteaded the land, they tell half the story. The Arabs homesteaded land that the Jews had homesteaded first, which is only a longer way of saying they do not own it. On this much, oddly, everyone agrees. Ask the Arabs, and they will call it land theft. Ask the Israelis, and they will use the same phrase. The libertarian simply insists on completing the question. Theft from whom, and by whom? Who was there first? The Jews were. The Jews are thus the rightful owners.
What about a statute of limitations? This would shore up the Hamas case, since Hamas governed Gaza for a time, with the Arabs holding Judea and Samaria alongside. The principle behind such statutes is sensible enough on its face: Titles cannot be litigated forever, so at some point the clock must be allowed to stop. Hezbollah might clear that bar. The Israelis cannot be tried under it, for the simple reason that their claim reaches so much further back.
But the statute of limitations is, at bottom, an unjust rule. Its entire justification is evidentiary. The deeper into history you reach, the harder it becomes to prove anything at all. Fair enough as a rough guide. Where the proof does survive, however, beyond any reasonable doubt (the Al-Aqsa Mosque again), any time limit whatsoever collapses into pure arbitrariness. It bars a claim for being old rather than for being weak. That is fatigue dressed up as law, and justice has nothing to do with it.
A second land-theft charge is dated to 1948. Close to a million Palestinians held property across what became Israel, Gaza, Judea, and Samaria, and they left. Why? Some, no doubt, simply got clear of an oncoming war. But a great many left at the express urging of the five Arab armies then massing to destroy the new state. The instruction was blunt. Get out of the way, so the Jews can be dealt with cleanly, and you will be back inside a fortnight to divide the spoils. They got out. That fortnight never arrived.
This complicates the portrait of pure innocence. A good number of those who left were active participants, lending a hand to the armies that came to finish off the Jews. Set their fate beside that of the Arabs who stayed. Today, roughly a fifth of Israel’s population is Arab. They fill the professions, argue cases as lawyers, lecture as professors, sit on the Supreme Court, and wear police and army uniforms. Are they treated in every respect like Jewish Israelis? No. Are they treated far better than they would be almost anywhere else in the Arab world? The direction of migration answers that one.
The ones who left now demand a right of return. How many were displaced? The usual estimate runs between 700,000 and 900,000. Here is the part that the standard account tends to drop. In those very same years, 1947 and 1948, between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were expelled from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and the rest of the Arab world. With one difference that decides the matter. The Arabs who left Israel had, in large numbers, thrown in with an invading enemy. The Jews driven out of the Arab states were guilty of nothing beyond being Jews. Their only alternative to leaving was being killed.
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In a sane resolution, the symmetry would have settled itself. The Palestinians who left Israel would have taken over the property of the Jews expelled from the Arab states, and the Jews expelled from those states would have taken over the property the Palestinians abandoned. Two populations of roughly 800,000 apiece, displaced in opposite directions. Call it a swap, and call the result rough justice. That is very nearly what happened, on one side of the ledger. Israel absorbed its refugees, the Jews from Egypt and everywhere else, and turned them into citizens. The Arab states did the reverse. They herded the Palestinians into camps and kept them there, a standing exhibit of so-called Israeli cruelty.
So, yes, land theft sits at the heart of the matter. The grievance is real, and the word for it is the right one. What the conventional story gets backward is the direction of the crime. Cast the Jews as the thieves, and you have the roles exactly reversed. They are the party that was robbed, first of their land in antiquity, and again of their neighbors’ good faith in 1948. The aggrieved party in this story is Israel.
Walter E. Block is the Harold E. Wirth eminent scholar endowed chairman and professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans. Oded Kohn Faran holds degrees in law from Sha’arei Mishpat College in Israel. He is the general director of Faran & Co. International Translations and lives in Tbilisi, Georgia.