Murray N. Rothbard’s views on Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, Nation States, Islamic Governance & Zionism.

The one thing that Americans must not be lured into believing is that Israel is a “little” “underdog” against its mighty Arab neighbors. Israel is a European nation with a European technological standard battling a primitive and undeveloped foe; furthermore, Israel has behind it, feeding it, and financing it the massed might of countless Americans and West Europeans, as well as the Leviathan governments of the United States and its numerous allies and client states. Israel is no more a “gallant underdog” because of numerical inferiority than British imperialism was a “gallant underdog” when it conquered far more populous lands in India, Africa, and Asia.

And so, Israel now sits, occupying its swollen territory, pulverizing houses and villages containing snipers, outlawing strikes of Arabs, killing Arab youths in the name of checking terrorism. But this very occupation, this very elephantiasis of Israel, provides the Arabs with a powerful long-range opportunity. In the first place, as the militant anti-imperialist regimes of Syria and Algeria now see, the Arabs can shift their strategic emphasis from hopeless conventional war with a far better armed foe to a protracted mass people’s guerrilla war.

Armed with light weapons, the Arab people could carry out another “Vietnam,” another “Algeria” another people’s guerrilla war against a heavily armed occupying army. Of course, this is a long-run threat only, because to carry it out the Arabs would have to overthrow all of their stagnant, reactionary monarchies and form a united pan-Arab nation for the splits into nation-states in the Arab world are the consequence of the artificial machinations and depredations of British and French imperialism. But for the long run, the threat is very real.

Israel, therefore, faces a long-run dilemma which she must someday meet. Either to continue on her present course and, after years of mutual hostility and conflict be overthrown by Arab people’s guerrilla war. Or to change direction drastically, to cut herself loose completely from Western imperial ties, and become simply Jewish citizens of the Middle East.

If she did that, then peace and harmony and justice would at last reign in that tortured region. There is ample precedent for this peaceful coexistence. For in the centuries before 19th and 20th century Western imperialism, Jew and Arab had always lived well and peacefully together in the Middle East. There is no inherent enmity or conflict between Arab and Jew. In the great centuries of Arab civilization in North Africa and Spain, Jews took a happy and prominent part—in contrast to their ongoing persecution by the fanatics of the Christian West. Shorn of Western influence and Western imperialism, that harmony can reign once more.

~ Murray N. Rothbard

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Full article: libertarianinstitute.org/articles/war-g…