In his treatise A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, Hans-Hermann Hoppe lays the theoretical foundations for understanding and identifying the phenomenon of socialism, not as a mere invention of the Marxists of the nineteenth century, but as a much older idea of the institutionalized interference with or aggression against private property and private property claims. Then, Hoppe holds the institution of the State “as the very incorporation of socialist ideas on property,” and expresses the idea that the State is, indeed, “the very institution that puts socialism into action.” And as socialism “rests on aggressive violence directed against innocent victims,” aggression is the nature of any State.
The opposite of socialism is the recognition and defense of private property rights, or, as Hoppe writes, “a social system based on the explicit recognition of private property and of nonaggressive, contractual exchanges between private property owners.” Whether in land or anything else, private property rights are justly assigned to specific individuals on the basis of original appropriation or of voluntary property transfer. And all claims to property not based on these principles are unjust.
Hoppe discusses four forms of socialism: socialism Russian style, socialism social-democratic style, the socialism of conservatism, and the socialism of social engineering. As to the discussion of each style, the validity of the conclusions reached are established independent of experience. With no quasi-experimental case study which alone could provide what is considered “striking” evidence, all sorts of policies—Marxist-socialist, social-democratic, conservative, and also capitalist-liberal—are so mixed and combined, “that their respective effects cannot usually be neatly matched with definite causes, but must be disentangled and matched once more by purely theoretical means.”
Now, we can add another form of socialism: While any State, for its very existence, as Hoppe explains, depends on taxation and forced membership (citizenship), here, primarily founded on the institutionalized aggression against private property and private property claims in land, a State and its expansion, based on ethnic membership and partially unforced citizenship—yet also depending on taxing its own citizens—partially externalizes its costs in foreign taxation and foreign forced membership—this is socialism Israeli style: Many Jews who were victims of socialism in Europe, went on to practice and become part of their own socialist experiment in Palestine, with the creation and expansion of the State of Israel. However, in this case, many Israeli Jews have come to share in the benefits of this socialism, plain and simple because the main victims of it have been non-Jews.
The State of Israel
Not surprisingly, in a 1937 letter to his son, David Ben-Gurion, the primary founder of the State of Israel as well as its first prime minister, framed the Zionist plan for Palestine as follows:
No Zionist can forego the smallest portion of the Land of Israel. [A] Jewish State in part [of Palestine] is not an end, but a beginning… through this we increase our power, and every increase in power facilitates getting hold of the country in its entirety. Establishing a State… will serve as a very potent lever in our historical effort to redeem the whole country.
Be that as it may, the State of Israel was established in 1948 by mostly European Jews of Zionist persuasion, and only about 7 percent of present Israel could be said to have been justly acquired by Palestinian Jews before 1948, and thus be claimed as legitimate property. From then till now, the establishment and the continued expansion of Israel is overwhelmingly the result of expropriation, intimidation, terrorism, war, and conquest against the then-present, mostly Arab residents of Palestine and the Arab residents now remaining in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Yet, as Hoppe indicates, the claim of present-day Zionists to a homeland in Palestine can only be made if one abandons “the notion of individual personhood, of private property, private product and accomplishment, private crime and private guilt;” and instead, one adopts “some form of collectivism that allows for such notions as group or tribal property and property rights, collective responsibility and collective guilt.”
On one hand, in the West Bank, the building of Jewish settlements has transformed the region into non-contiguous open-air prisons controlled by Israeli forces. There has been more than half a century of occupation, dispossession, demolitions, walls, blockades, permits, checkpoints, raids, detentions, political imprisoning, military courts, targeted assassinations, and tortures. And with this, towns, villages, homes and businesses have been destroyed to repopulate the areas with Jewish squatters.
On the other hand, in the Gaza Strip, since the attacks of Hamas in October 2023, the State of Israel, assisted by US funds, weapons and ammunition, retaliated with everything it got, killing tens of thousands of innocents and turning to rubble almost the entire Gaza Strip. And the killing and destruction continues.
Additionally, to this day, the Israeli government continues to interfere with trade with and within the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and with nearly the entire land market in Palestine.
Land ownership
The formal basis for the socialist project of the Jewish State was present in organized Zionism long before Ben-Gurion’s letter. The limitation on the transfer of State property that the State of Israel has as a rule since 1960 reflects the principles of the Jewish National Fund approved at the fifth Zionist Congress held in 1901. The organization was founded with the function of purchasing land for Jewish settlements in Palestine, and formed the very basis of Israeli public land ownership. Likewise, in 1929, the Constitution of the Jewish Agency for Israel (formerly known as the Jewish Agency for Palestine), Art. 111, declared, “Land is to be acquired as Jewish property… [and] held as the inalienable property of the Jewish people. The Agency shall promote agricultural colonisation based on Jewish labour…”
In Israel, all land is in public trust. Similar to the Communist Manifesto that calls for “the abolition of property in land,” so that it is used only for “public purposes,” the Israeli Constitution stipulates that “land shall not be held in exclusive private ownership.” Generally, land is distinguished between urban land and rural land. The former is commonly leased for periods of 49 years, with an option to extend the lease. State property in Israel represents around 93 percent of the entire Israeli territory.
Israeli citizenship
In the times before 1948, the Zionist lease contained that the holding shall always be held by Jews, and that in connection with cultivation of the holding, only Jewish labor could be employed. And since 1948, the Jewish Agency for Israel claims to have brought 3 million immigrants to Israel.
With the 1950 Law of Return, any Jew or person with one or more Jewish grandparents, and their spouses, are entitled to move to Israel and acquire Israeli citizenship, provided that he does not pose a threat to public health, state security or the Jewish people, or have a criminal past that may endanger public welfare. Upon arrival, the government may assist the settling of the new citizens. Many times, Jews occupy land and homes and settle in expropriated properties for which there are still titles in Arab hands. And the expropriation is promoted and helped legally and militarily by the Israeli government in favor of Israel’s expansion and the benefit of Jews.
Foreign taxation
Pro-Israel lobbies have wielded enormous influence on the US government for decades—engendering support for Israel in US politics and US foreign policy. So much that Israel, despite its wealth, has been conferred with unique privileges over US taxpayers and is the leading recipient of US foreign aid. Although this relationship between the United States and Israel plays a role in bolstering the US hegemony in the Middle East, the asymmetric relationship with respect to US taxpayers makes the US government a tool of the State of Israel to externalize its costs in foreign taxation and foreign forced membership and plays a critical role for the State of Israel.
This is a mutually beneficial relationship between the ruling gangs of Israel and the United States that includes the interests of the military-industrial complex, because war and preparation for war is big business for some people. And while the Middle East is a reservoir of energy resources of global importance, the US taxpayers do not need their government funding Israel or waging wars in the region to get oil—which is abundant in many places, and all countries are able to buy it on the global markets without invading other countries or building military bases around the world. Hence, empowering and funding Israel, more than an act to weaken Arab extremism and Arab states to favor US interests, works perfectly for the expansionist and domination interests of the State of Israel.
Recognition of injustice
Not all injustices will always be resolved in favor of the victims. But we can know when something unjust happens. Sometimes these injustices can no longer be proven, so there is no choice but to accept the current circumstances. Typically, the older the injustices, the more difficult it is to achieve justice. And has the burden of proof, whoever claims to be the just owner of a property in possession of another. The latter is, in principle, the rightful owner—unless the contrary is true. These issues can be impossible to resolve justly. However, for the Israeli case, not only there is an overwhelming record of proven injustices, but the fact that the institution of a state claims to be the owner of that amount of land makes all that ownership necessarily unjust.
Whether or not justice is possible, the State of Israel is a unique case among states. And even with the present situation in the historic region of Palestine, the possibility of recognizing injustices and true history is a matter that does not depend on the viability of justice. In consequence, it is possible to defend and promote a correct analysis from the perspective of justice and private property rights, despite the impossibility of total justice.
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