Ayn Rand v. Murray Rothbard

Libertarian view of Israel v. Palestine

Ayn Rand was Pro Zionism

Murray Rothbard was Anti Zionism

Both Jewish

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Ayn Rand :

The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures. They are typically nomads. Their culture is primitive, and they resent Israel because it’s the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent. When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are. Israel is a mixed economy inclined toward socialism. But when it comes to the power of the mind—the development of industry in that wasted desert continent—versus savages who don’t want to use their minds, then if one cares about the future of civilization, don’t wait for the government to do something. Give whatever you can. This is the first time I’ve contributed to a public cause: helping Israel in an emergency.

~ Ford Hall Forum Lecture, 1974

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Murray Rothbard :

“Asked what the American people and the government should do about the Middle East war. Rand answered unhesitatingly: “Give every help possible to Israel.” Not American soldiers, she conceded; but military weapons. We need not stress here the assault on liberty involved when the U.S. government taxes Americans in order to send arms abroad; surely, this is as statist and immoral, though not to the same degree, as sending American soldiers to the Middle East. As for the American people, Miss Rand sounds for all the world like the United Jewish Appeal: “Give everything you can” (Give till it hurts?). Reaffirming her supposed and longtime opposition to altruism. Rand added that “this is the first time I have contributed” to public causes, but now apparently we have a vital exception.

Why? What is the overriding cause for which we must set aside libertarian principle, isolationist principle, and opposition to altruism; why is Israel’s “emergency” to be a claim on our hearts and pockets? Given Miss Rand’s militant atheism, it surely could not be the necessity for the reestablishment of the Temple, or the fulfillment of the old prayer, “next year in Jerusalem”; given her professed individualism, it surely could not be (one hopes) the Zionist call to blood, race, and soil. So what is it? Russia is of course dragged in, but even Miss Rand concedes that the Russian Threat is not the real issue here.

The real issue? Because “civilized men” are “fighting against savages”, and when that happens, says Rand, “then you have to be on the side of that civilized man no matter what he is.” The fact that Israel is socialistic, she adds, pales into insignificance before this great imperative.

There are two grave problems here: of the facts of reality, and of moral principle. Factually, what does Miss Rand mean by “savages”? Once work through the emotional connotations of the term, and the concept becomes a vague one. She explains that the Arabs are “primitive” and “nomads.” Here she betrays total ignorance of Palestine and its history. The only “nomads” in the region are not the Palestinian Arabs, who were driven out of their lands and homes by the Zionists, but the Jordanian Bedouins, who as hirelings of King Hussein are in effect anti-Palestinian and pro-Israel.

Palestinian Arabs were not nomads but agriculturalists; long before Israel, they“made the desert bloom.” The “nomad” theory was convenient Zionist propaganda, and nothing more. Perhaps the Palestinian Arabs are “savages” because they live miserable lives in hovels on the desert; but they do so because—one and a half million of them—they were driven out of their homes and properties by the Zionists, and they remain in dire poverty as refugees. Miss Rand’s strictures are chillingly reminiscent of the English who drove the Irish out of their farms and lands by force, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and then looked down their noses at the “wild, savage” Irishmen who unaccountably spent their lives wandering around the forests.”

~ Rand on the Middle East by Murray Rothbard.

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