Wait so the british didn’t promise anything to Arabs under Ottoman control in return for fighting? (P.S. read the subsections)
You can read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Revolt
It was the Ottoman Arab dictator Sherif Hussein bin Ali who was promised an Arab empire that would include most of the middle east. To the best of my knowledge the promise was personal, not collective. It was simply a promise to one dictator to have more power than he previously did. This promise was not an official promise from the British prime minister at some Arab congress or parliament. It was just a bribe to a very specific dictator.
In any case, this promise was mostly kept with Jordan , Iraq and Syria going to the sons of Hussein, and the Saudi Arabia to Hussein himself. It was the promise to Jews that was not kept at all. Even immigration of Jews to Israel was forbidden by the British at some stage.
Rothbard completely distorts these facts and he presents an extremely biased narrative. But what surprises me most is his collective approach to this conflict. Instead of focusing on property rights violations of specific people, he talks about land ownership, promises to nations, and other collectivistic nonsense that leads nowhere.
Rothbard got Finnish Winter War wrong in his For a New Liberty. He claimed that Soviet Union wanted only Karelian Isthmus from Finland, and only because it was populated by “ethnic russians”. Well, it was populated fully by Finns and Soviet Union had a deal with Germany that Soviets can take the whole Finland. I’m hoping it was a mistake, but Rothbard tried to use this as an example of how Soviet Union and Stalin just wanted peace…
It is only reasonable to accept some level of generalisation if we want to get anywhere. Fact is the British promised Arabs independent statehood on their ancestral land. If you are going to dispute this because the deal was with this or that Arab political leader they cultivated ties with, then you may as well object when it is said that Americans are occupying Afghanistan, because actually it is the Armed Forces of the United States of America doing it, or that Dmitry Medvedev is the president of Russia, when actually he is the president of the Russian Federation. If you have a better argument why the need to go after technicalities?
It is obviously irrelevant in the moral sense which promises the British kept or not. It was not their land to give away so the British promising it to someone does not make them any more entitled to it than they were before. But Rothbard never says this anyway so keep your cool and stop slandering him as a collectivist. He is obviously interested in the British role only for its practical consequences not as some moral sanction.
Rothbard brings up the British in order to show the cause of Zionism benefited from British colonial presence, which was anyway favorably disposed to it, and that the founding of the State of Israel might never had been possible had the Arabs not been under a double yoke of British colonialism and the vestiges of Ottoman semi-feudal land relations and therefore relatively better able to thwart Zionist colonisation. This shows that Zionism did not win its earliest victories on its own strength, but piggybacked on the strength of the British and that from the Arabs’ perspective there is a continuity of European colonialism in Palestine.
Anyway here is the essay in HTML that copy&pastes for quoting purposes better than the .pdf you use: http://original.antiwar.com/rothbard/2010/03/02/war-guilt-in-the-middle-east/
I’m sure Rothbard was aware of this. Obviously the British did not identify with the Zionists cause themselves so the Zionists never had their full cooperation. But that Great Britain to some extent balanced between the Arabs and the Jews, is not to say it was balanced as such. On balance its policies favored the Jews more than the Arabs, at times more so, at other times less so. (In the later years at least some of the occupying soldiers came to detest militant Jews and sympathized with the Arabs, but that was a private stance, and of little consequence.) Throwing a tid-bit of information out there doesn’t work to change a characterization of the British policies built on examining them as a whole, not as a collection of a few random decrees (that may or may not have been made in good faith and with the intention of being enforced in full).
Maybe you need to freshen up on your libertarian theory. Land ownership is extremely pertinent to libertarians and always a key concern for us. The right to self-determination is a property right stemming from ownership over oneself and ones’ land, its denial represents a property right violation against hundreds of thousands of very specific people. The ‘promise’ thing I’ve dealt with.
More specificially Palestine was land which Arabs, Jews and Zionist Jews not just “lived on”, but owned (the parts that had any economic value). And as Rothbard points out Arabs owned far more land than Jews. So is your argument really again a technicality? What else can you object to?
Are you going to say Rothbard should have writen of Palestine not as of ‘Arab land’, but as of “land 92% of which was Arab”, or “land 92% of which owned by individuals who identified as Arab”? As said, some generalisations are necessary for the ease of expression, though technically incorrect at face value anyone who is sincere and knows even a tiny bit about Rothbard’s other views will know what he meant and where he is coming from.
Now you are free to dispute Rothbard’s facts showing that if he had been aware of the real facts he would have to reach a different set of conclusions, but strawmaning conclusions he draws from the facts he has as unlibertarian, that’s a little much. Can you argue his conclusions, or can you only besmirch them as collectivist?
Is that a joke? Obviously you haven’t read the letters because they were official correspondance…
Hell the wiki entry doesn’t even come close to characterizing things the way you do. At least the wiki acknowledges Arabs got boned on semantics…
https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/libertarians-on-kissinger/11733/33
I was curious too. To me it seems Dave’s posts there were uncharactaristically emotional (as opposed to the usual pithy and rational), deriding Rothbard with terms like:
“raving like a madman, or a paid propagandist”
“totally from fantasy world”
“he is lying”
“He lies about the numbers”
“Rothbard also gleefully accepts fairy tales”
“Rothbard doesn’t bother”
“people are very interested in lying, and Rothbard is very interested in publishing their version”
All basically for not reading the Wikipedia article (for an essay he wrote in 1987) so he would know the politically-accepted number of deaths.
Let’s continue:
Furthermore, the Zionists, far from hoping to preserve ghetto Yiddish culture, wished to bury it and to substitute a new culture and a new language based on an artificial secular expansion of ancient religious Hebrew.
Why was it important for Rothbard to mention this? What does it have to do with anything? It seems like Rothbard has a problem with modern and independent Jews rather than with Zionism and Zionists. Perhaps that’s the line that explains his bias best of all.
And again, look at the language:
Pressured from opposite sides by Zionists anxious for a Jewish state and by Arabs seeking an independent Palestine
The bad words: “anxious” and “Jewish state” (as if Arabs would have expelled from there) are used to describe Zionists, yet the good words “independent” and “Palestine” (as if all people would be welcomed there) are used to describe the Arabs.
Perhaps the biggest lie of all:
The UN agreement had provided (a) that Jerusalem be internationalized under UN rule, and (b) that there be an economic union between the new Jewish and Arab Palestine states. These were the basic conditions under which the UN approved partition. Both were promptly and brusquely disregarded by Israel – thus launching an escalating series of aggressions against the Arabs of the Middle East.
While the British were still in Palestine, the Zionist paramilitary forces began to crush the Palestinian Arab armed forces in a series of civil war clashes. But, more fatefully, on April 9, 1948, the fanatical Zionist-Revisionist terrorists grouped in the organization Irgun Zvai Leumi massacred a hundred women and children in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. By the advent of Israel’s independence on May 15 the Palestinian Arabs, demoralized, were fleeing in panic from their homes and from the threat of massacre. The neighboring Arab states then sent in their troops.
Even if we ignore the fact that there is almost no evidence for the “Deir Yassin massacre” and there is actually evidence to the contrary, we are still left with a pure distortion of history. Arabs were fighting peaceful Jews for decades. The Palestinian riots in the 20s, the 1929 Palestinian riots, the Jaffa riots, the 1936-1939 Arab revolt, and finally the greatest pogroms in 1947. Throughout these 3 decades Jews were almost entirely on the defensive side. How can Rothbard ignore all this and claim that it were the Jews who “launched an escalating series of aggressions”? Rothard or not, that’s completely nuts.
Nice mischaracterization of his case that you failed to quote. Not that I know you’re wrong, but I know that almost everyone I’ve encountered (including the OP) don’t quote Rothbard when they attack him precisely because they know they’re lying.
I will assume you’re lying too, until and unless you provide specific quotes, in context.
Eugene, Rothbard defines “Zionism” as that faction within Territorialism that specifically sought to have the already occupied land of Palestine. That should not be conflated with “modern and independent Jews” (who are Individuals); it is a State (with some sprinklings of Jewish identity) imposing itself on people.
Provide some proof that the Deir Yassin massacre did not exist.
Also, that there was Arab on Jew violence in previous decades in NO WAY negates the validity of the statement “launched an escalating series of aggressions”.
Some thing’s happened, then more things happened. That the happenings were of Arab on Jew violence and Jew on Arab violence does not justify or rationalize anything. This isn’t a tally board. You sound like you’re claiming that the Deir Yassin Massacre did not exist BECAUSE there had been Arab on Jew aggression previously, which is absurd.
You are using a big font, but you don’t offer much in the way of content. I don’t think dropping names of riots doesn’t really do anything to sway anyone since I’m sure most of us don’t have a clue what they were or much about the context. If you’re going to be persuasive I suggest you attempt a connected elaboration with background of events and what not, not just drop tiny bits of information in there. Mind you I don’t really know what a riot 15 years earlier has to do with war guilt in the Middle East in the period Rothbard talks about.
Rothbard was a great thinker, but would trap himself into chep sensationalist revisionism from time to time. Praising Che Guerava (a real life O’Brien from 1984) and the Soviet Union, bashing Adam Smith quite harshly.
And defending the Soviet Union actions during the Winter War as cited by Chyd3nius…that’s quite bad.
Well, to drag the discussion back to reality, remember that each and every crime is an individual historical event that occurs in a specific time and place. One of the many problems with Zionism and the State of Israel is that not only do they employ criminal means (like any State) to pursue their agenda (yes, Arab states are criminal in exactly the same way) is that they are granted some kind of “legitimacy” or “religious cover” for their behavior. For example, in the United States, the Dispensationalists (a considerable chunk of US Protestants are Dispensationalist) see 1948 in Bilical-religious terms; they believe that God Himself is moving world events in such a way as to revive the ancient Israelites (“God’s people”) and so on.
Of course, there is no connection between the ancient Judeans and modern Israelis, it’s all propaganda and nonsense. The so-called lost tribes of Israel may be a complete fabrication. Most of the Jews in Palestine were dispersed 2,000 years ago and dissolved into the surrounding populations. Those enclaves that managed to maintain a long-term Jewish identity (in the ghettos of Europe, for example) were inter-bred and have no verifiable ancestral claim to Judea. And even if they did, unless they happened to ahve a 2,000 year old deed saying “such-and-such square acres located at such-and-such location in the land of Palestine belong to Moshe Berkowitz”, there still is no lawful way for the land to be restored to its rightful owners because they’ve all been dead for millenia.
Nevertheless, magical thinking is never impeded by reality and the Dispensationalists form a hardcore network of pro-Israel sentiment within the US based on this magical line of thinking about God reviving the ancient Israelites in preparation for the return of Christ.
Prior to the rise of Zionism, Jews did live in Palestine and they generally peacefully co-existed with their Islamic and Christian neighbors. Zionism is a movement with a sinister agenda; those who are actively involved in Zionism are probably almost all dupes. I don’t believe that the true purpose of Zionism is to establish an Israeli state any more than the true purpose of the New World Order is to establish a World Government. The purpose is to keep us busy fighting with each other so those who dwell On High can remain in power. While we’re arguing about whether “Jews” or “Arabs” are worse, those who are responsible for these conflicts in the first place are maintaining and extending their hold on power over us and the rest of the world.
Think for yourself because those who offer to do your thinking for you really just want to use you as a parrot to spread their propaganda.
Clayton -
Though it’s not really important if this massacre took place. In fact it does not even matter if Arabs were driven out. As Rothbard points out fact is once they were out, Israelis would not let them back in. After that it doesn’t really matter even if they only left to go for a picnic in Jordan, it’s stil the same thing — usurpation of property.
At the end of the day Rothbard was perfectly capable of being mistaken on something (Cydinus referrences one article where he makes a few). But being wrong on one small aspect of the story doesn’t necessarily mean he was wrong in his overarching argument and certainly does not show he was “nuts” or was bent on distorting history as opposed to having made an honest mistake.
Can you cite something where he praises Soviet Union?
TY Groucho for the compliments.
I stand by what I wrote there, which refers not just to Dir Yassin, which he got totally wrong [did he ever bother to think maybe the Arab sources on the subject are not the most reliable?], but to many other things he wrote in that article. I did not pursue the subject, since I sensed nobody was listening with objective ears.
It is indeed an emotional topic for me, but do not make the mistake of thinking that I am therefore irrational. Passion and rationality are not mutually exclusive.
Jargon,
I give credit where it is due, and you deserve credit for taking a first step and admitting there are “exaggerations”.