Sunday, December 18, 2016

Understanding the Israel-Palestine Conflict: The Great Debate

I believe the Israel-Palestine conflict is very complex and would require a lot of study to understand all the factors involved. That said the youtube below is a great debate, hosted by Tom Woods, between Rafi Farber and Jeremy R. Hammond on the question.

They are both very bright and are very knowledgeable on the subject. I do not believe the debate resolves the Israel-Palestine question but you will learn a lot about the conflict from both men through the course of this debate.

 

 -RW

8 comments:

  1. I watched this when it came out, and I know Rafi reads this blog. While I think he's an interesting guy, his position doesn't represent any significant segment of Israeli politics. He's basically a Messianic religious person who doesn't give a hoot about Israeli sovereignty as long as he can worship the rabble at the temple mount. Luckily for Israel, this is a very fringe take in what Israel needs to do to prosper. His solution to the friction between Jews and Arabs is to incentivize them to move to the west. It is positions like his that underscore the notion that Jews are hypocrites towards gentiles promoted by the alt-right - "ethnic homogeneity for me but not for thee".

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    1. Regardless of what I personally want to do on the Temple Mount, the practical position of paying non Jews to leave the area voluntarily is supported by a majority of Jewish voters. My opinions on the Temple Mount are fringe in their outspokenness but not in their actual numbers. All religious Jews who call themselves religious pray for the restoration of the Temple all the time. Whether they are hypocrites in practice and don't really want it is a different question. Feiglin's Zehut party stands for voluntary emigration of Arabs, which is the most practical solution to the conflict in the end. The Arabs want to leave and the Jews want to pay them. The only thing getting in the way of this simple solution is the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, both equally bad institutions.

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    2. Hi Rafi,morally speaking, such a program could be justified if the funds required for the payoff were obtained privately and donated for the cause voluntarily AND the accepting population voluntarily wants to vouch for and shoulder the cost of receiving the immigrants. While your movement can to some degree guarantee one, the second condition, as we see in Germany and France these days is harder to meet. Importing Arab populations into Eruope and the US is an involuntary gov program with huge externalities on the public domain (unfortunately, a lot of out societies are in the public domain). So you can try to export the Arabs, and Western governments may even accept them, but the Western peoples will resent you and Jews in general for that.

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  2. I was surprised Dr. Woods had this debate but it was pretty interesting. The two debaters have positions that actually aren't even that far apart, probably since they are both libertarians and in general, when it comes to the issue of who owns property, they both approach the subject in the same libertarian homesteading type manner and even surprisingly agreed on large segments of the observed facts.

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  3. Yossi, the Alt-Right has no problem with Israel. It has a problem with Jews (almost invariably assimilated and left-leaning) living in the diaspora who indeed proclaim such. They (the Alt-Right) want for the West what Israel seeks for itself. Rafi himself is a little out there in his political thinking (trying to merge libertarian and Jewish thinking), but Israel is indeed quite right-leaning and the demographics are only making it more so over time.

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    1. Correct,but their support for Israel is conditioned on Israel solving its problems on its own, which precludes, for example, exporting all the undesirables to the west.

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  4. Neither the facts nor libertarian principles have changed since Murray Rothbard wrote "War Guilt in the Middle East”.

    Another excellent article on the subject written by a libertarian awhile back is "Alienation of a Home-land: How Palestine Became Israel" by Stephen P. Halbrook:
    The Journal of Libertarian Studies Vol. V, No. 4 (Fall 1981)
    https://mises.org/library/alienation-home-land-how-palestine-became-israel

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