Who Owns the Middle East?

Tucker Carlson’s February 18 interview of the US Ambassador to the State of Israel, Mike Huckabee, aroused a storm of controversy over Huckabee’s endorsement of a maximalist Israeli claim to a biblically-defined territory between the Euphrates River (which flows through Syria and Iraq) and the “Brook of Egypt” (roughly corresponding to the modern border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip according to most scholars, though identified with the Nile River in the interview):

Carlson: Does Israel have the right to that land? Because you’re appealing to Genesis. You’re saying that’s the original deed. It would be fine if they took it all, but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here today. What would be fine, what’s exactly what we’re talking about today? But here’s what I don’t think you’re-

Huckabee: I think it would be fine if the state of Israel took over all of the land. They don’t want to take it over. They’re not asking to take it over. But you’re saying that the reason that Israel is legitimate, has this inherent right to exist is in part because God gave it to his people.

Huckabee’s response to this question came up in the context of a lengthy discussion concerning Christian Zionism, where Carlson tried to pin down Huckabee’s views about how the Abrahamic Covenant applies not only to defining the territory that the modern State of Israel can legitimately claim by appealing to the scriptural authority of Genesis, but also to defining who should count as a legitimate modern beneficiary of the Covenant in light of the subsequent departure of many descendants of Abraham from Judaism (which, as Carlson noted, includes many Palestinian families according to DNA evidence) and of conversions of non-descendants into Judaism.

Many Jews and Christians do not share Huckabee’s contention that the State of Israel is the legitimate successor to Abrahamic promises. According to non-Zionist Christian theologies, Jesus is the only Biblically-legitimized ruler of Israel, and many of them also maintain that the benefits of the divine promises of the Abrahamic Covenant belong to those baptized in Christ. It is also important to note that most of the world, and even most Americans aged 24 and under, are neither Christian nor Jewish, and thus flatly reject the text of Genesis as a basis for legitimizing anything.

Curiously, neither Carlson nor Huckabee were particularly mindful of the US government’s own claim to legitimacy as stated by Thomas Jefferson in the famous opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Instead of appealing to scripture, Jefferson appeals here to a moral law that is embodied within nature itself. While the natural law conception of ethics predates Christianity, many Christians embrace it because scripture affirms the goodness of God’s creation and man’s place in it. Natural law can be readily embraced by most non-Christians as well, since the innate human need for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is not confined to adherents of particular cultures or religions. Belief systems that overtly require self-immolation or self-inflicted misery have few rigorous followers.

Under natural law, land claims are not derived from the arbitrary discretion of higher authorities. In his natural law analysis of property rights in The Ethics of Liberty, Murray Rothbard explains that land ownership originates through peaceful homesteading of previously unowned land by its first owner, not through politicized grants of land titles:

Again, the justification for the ownership of ground land is the same for that of any other property. For no man actually ever “creates” matter: what he does is to take nature-given matter and transform it by means of his ideas and labor energy. But this is precisely what the pioneer—the homesteader—does when he clears and uses previously unused virgin land and brings it into his private ownership. The homesteader—just as the sculptor, or miner—has transformed the nature-given soil by his labor and his personality. The homesteader is just as much a “producer” as the others, and therefore just as legitimately the owner of his property.

Since vague Abrahamic land grants are irrelevant for deciding who legitimate owners of Middle Eastern lands are, we need a clearer grasp of the implications of natural law principles when land titles are being disputed. In his work, Rothbard went on to outline basic legal principles for resolving property disputes:

To sum up, for any property currently claimed and used: (a) if we know clearly that there was no criminal origin to its current title, then obviously the current title is legitimate, just and valid; (b) if we don’t know whether the current title had any criminal origins, but can’t find out either way, then the hypothetically “unowned” property reverts instantaneously and justly to its current possessor; (c) if we do know that the title is originally criminal, but can’t find the victim or his heirs, then (c1) if the current title-holder was not the criminal aggressor against the property, then it reverts to him justly as the first owner of a hypothetically unowned property. But (c2) if the current titleholder is himself the criminal or one of the criminals who stole the property, then clearly he is properly to be deprived of it, and it then reverts to the first man who takes it out of its unowned state and appropriates it for his use. And finally (d) if the current title is the result of crime, and the victim or his heirs can be found, then the title properly reverts immediately to the latter, without compensation to the criminal or to the other holders of the unjust title.

It should be immediately clear from Rothbard’s analysis that there is not even a prima facie case for litigating any of the land between the Jordan and the Euphrates Rivers. The hotly-contested territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is perhaps more worthy of an argument, but from a natural law perspective the relevant facts are that almost half of the land between the River and the Sea—over 4,900 square miles—was claimed and used (mostly under Rothbard’s “b” or “c1” categories) by identifiable Palestinian Arabs, of which approximately 90 percent was subsequently stolen and retained by the State of Israel, thus moving this land into Rothbard’s “d” category. The Israeli State also granted itself title to the previously unclaimed wilderness of the Negev desert (once the home of Bedouin pastoral nomads) as well as title to the public lands previously claimed by the British Mandate, both falling into Rothbard’s “c2” category, comprising another huge swath of nearly 4,700 square miles.

A government agency—the Israel Land Authority—now acts as a feudal landlord illegitimately controlling 93 percent of all the land between the River and the Sea, parceling out long-term leases on a discriminatory basis while many descendants of their former Arab residents are confined to squalid, crowded refugee camps. Not only is the State of Israel complicit in the theft of nearly half the country from its rightful owners, it is denying even Israeli Jews (not to mention Bedouins) their liberty to establish full private ownership rights via homesteading in the Negev.

Another pertinent fact is that the vast majority of Arabs who were driven off their lands in 1948 or subjected to occupation in 1967 have no say whatsoever in what the Israeli state does. By any standard, the Jeffersonian principle of government by consent is not being observed. This doesn’t mean that Palestinian political entities and groups have been any more respectful of individual rights or of consensual governance, but it does mean that it is hypocritical for anyone who claims to uphold America’s founding principles or who sports an American flag on his lapel to ignore Jeffersonian principles of political legitimacy and ignore natural law standards of land ownership while invoking a highly-problematic Biblical pretext to rationalize one’s unconditional support for the State of Israel.