Revisiting "The Classical Liberal Case for Israel"

The Classical Liberal Case for Israel by Walter E. Block and Alan G. Futerman has received considerable attention from Murdoch-owned media companies, especially The Wall Street Journal, ever since it appeared in 2021. This work is written from a passionately pro-Israel perspective, and already in the introduction the reader is overwhelmed by both the praise showered on Israel and the obloquy hurled at its Arab neighbors: "Israel is the most liberal state in the Middle East, surrounded by murderous dictatorships, autocratic regimes, and closed societies that dramatically oppress their citizens and shut down their voices." Moreover, "the Jewish state is the only real free society in the area, respecting private property and all that follows from it. It is innovative and strong because it is free." [Emphasis original]

Having visited Israel’s neighbor Jordan about 25 years ago, on a trip sponsored by the United States Department of State, I do not recall people I met there holding back from demonstratively blasting each other and the government. I also recall Jordanian women working in professional situations, as well as seeing women in traditional Muslim dress. As far as I could tell, private property was a feature of Jordanian life, though that country looked far less prosperous than Israel and undoubtedly featured far fewer educated inhabitants. Block and Futerman might have cited for their side the research of the Israeli scholar, Ofir Haivry, who argues that Arab feudal monarchies, like Jordan, leave too much power to decide property matters to their tribal rulers. But this raises the question of how often such arbitrary intervention occurs. It is not at all clear that such monarchical caprice asserts itself with any frequency.

In any case, Block and Futerman do not show that what they value most as libertarians, which is the right to property, does not exist among Israel’s neighbors, even if it exists more securely among Israelis. Since the authors keep telling us that the right to property is the most basic of rights from which other rights follow, how would they explain Western countries like Germany and Canada in which there are still recognizable property rights but freedom of opinion has been snuffed out for those critical of the Left?

In the case of this book, it might have been better if the authors, who are obviously well-educated economists, had limited their scope to their own field.

I am not entirely comfortable with the authors’ appropriation of “classical liberal” to explain their worldview, which seems to be a libertarian understanding of John Locke’s contractarian concept of civil society. This anarcho-libertarian understanding of how political societies are formed by consenting individuals incorporates the belief that “each individual owns himself.” According to this theory, we extend ourselves into what we seek to acquire by mixing our labor with it. I wonder how many Israelis take seriously such ideas, which even I as a defender of the bourgeois liberal tradition have difficulty buying. Am I supposed to believe that Israelis are wedded to the libertarian anthropology that prefaces this tribute to their country?

The best parts of the work under consideration prove how utterly misspent monetary gifts to the Palestinians have been. Their governing class is corrupt and misappropriates “foreign aid.” Moreover, there is no relationship between these gifts and what the Palestinian authorities have done to improve the living conditions of their constituency. Money earmarked for new housing, for example, hardly ever goes to this project, as the authors show with abundant documentation.

Palestinian leaders seem almost as worthless as American big-city Democratic administrations, which stay in power by showering interest groups with public money and by scapegoating white male “racists.” The resemblance between these two parasitic groups is quite striking. In neither case do monetary gifts buy civil peace. An escalation of violence, as Block and Futerman show, has typically followed the arrival of more “foreign aid” to Palestinian leaders, a fate that usually befalls our city when there is a danger of increased bribe money being reduced.

Where the Block-Futerman narrative becomes less credible is in discussing the historical background of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation. The authors meticulously document the low economic growth in Palestine before the arrival of a large Jewish population, starting with the First Aliyah in 1882, when European Jews established agricultural colonies such as Rishon LeZion. There was an older Jewish settlement, Old Yishuv, going back centuries, but the number and influence of these mostly Near Eastern Jews on the surrounding society were minimal. This, of course, conflicts with the Block-Futerman thesis that there was a presumably significant “uninterrupted” Jewish presence in Israel extending back into antiquity.

Although there were Jews in Israel even after Roman expulsions, their numbers were notably small. Indeed, by the third century, the Jewish population worldwide, as estimated by scholars, was no more than about a million and a half. The only area in territorial Israel in which Jewish communities flourished after the second century AD was in Galilee, a region that stayed out of the last, devastatingly unsuccessful Jewish revolt against the Romans between 132 and 135 AD.

Most Jews then lived outside of Israel, in Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, and increasingly Mesopotamia, where eventually the majority—perhaps three-quarters—of the Jewish population was found. Even among the Jews who remained in their homeland, Christian and Muslim conquerors drove many of them into converting to the dominant faith. None of these details controverts a Jewish claim to the land of Israel. It merely recognizes the validity of other ones.

Despite Block’s insistence that his mentor Murray Rothbard was wrong to locate the present Arab-Israeli conflict in the aftermath of World War I, Rothbard was, in fact, correct. It was the simultaneous promise of the British victors to protect the territorial interests of both Jews and Arabs, each of whom saw Palestine as their own, which led to further strife in the interwar period. By then, Jewish and Arab nationalisms had both become formidable forces, and the advocates of these movements were expecting the victors in World War I to take their side and not the other one. As more European Jews poured into the region between the wars, particularly after the spread of Nazi rule, the British, who were managing a “Palestinian mandate,” were left to deal with the conflicting interests.

Block and Futerman assure us that “not every party is equally guilty” as they enumerate the attacks and murders committed by the Arab population against Jewish settlers in the 1920s and 1930s. [Emphasis original] Undoubtedly, such incidents occurred, like the Hebron pogrom in 1929, which left scores of Jewish victims dead. Although in the interwar period the Palestinians instigated most of the strife, neither side was guiltless. There were several bloody clashes around the port city of Jaffa, in which it is hard to assign sole blame to either side. Moreover, the Jewish National Fund, which arranged for the settlement of Jews in what is now Israel, was able legally to prohibit the sale of land belonging to Jews to non-Jews. There were five such agreements in the interwar years that restricted land sales to gentiles, which excluded more specifically Arab buyers.

After World War II, as the Jewish inhabitants fought for an independent Jewish state, multiple killings of Arab civilians and the remaining British authorities took place. Those responsible were the ultranationalist terrorists in the Irgun and Stern Gang, which uninhibitedly murdered those they targeted, often to the consternation of the more mainstream Israeli army, the Haganah. Block and Futerman do not dwell on such details or the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, though they cite Benny Morris, the most reliable historian on this subject, to assure us that Israeli settlers were generally nicer people than the European imperialists to whom they have been compared. Morris finds no conflict between supporting Israel’s right to exist and defend itself and devoting his scholarship to detailing the expulsion of the Palestinians by the Israeli army.

Block and Futerman are entirely correct that Israel is a more attractive and more Western country than its Muslim neighbors. It is also a freer and more open society than many of the pseudo-democracies that now exist in Western Europe and in most of the Anglosphere. But I see no reason that Israel cannot survive without the American conservative establishment fabricating hagiography for its Jewish population and implausibly wiping away the country’s misdeeds. Exactly how would it benefit the United States if American influencers counterfactually told us that American Indians were never driven out of their tribal homes, and, even if that happened, the victims had it coming since they were odious people? I have also noted more than once (without consequence) that Ben Shapiro suffered no professional setback after previously urging the Israelis to expel their Palestinian population.

In the case of this book, it might have been better if the authors, who are obviously well-educated economists, had limited their scope to their own field. The most convincing part of their study deals with the contrast between Israel’s dynamic growth and the Palestinian equivalents of Detroit and Baltimore. Manichean interpretations of recent Middle Eastern history do very little to enhance the narrative.

Paul Gottfried is the editor-in-chief of Chronicles, the author of 14 books, and a regular contributor at American Greatness and The American Conservative. He served as the Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College for over two decades.