The Israeli/Palestinian conflict: A Brief Evolutionary Introduction and Free-Market Solution
A similar presentation of solution below an be seen in this video:
When a lion takes over a pride and kills the cubs so that the females will once again be ready to mate, we don’t say that the lion is “evil”, we rightly understand the complex evolutionary factors leading to such actions. It is likewise important to look at our socioeconomic problems like the current Israeli(Zionist)-Palestinian conflict and all that grows from it using an evolutionary lens that is free of “blame” and full of sympathy and understanding. From a simple evolutionary perspective there is nobody to blame for this mess. We should neither blame the slightly smarter apes who have grown up and absorbed a “Palestinian identity”, even the ones who go on stabbing sprees and mistakenly believe Jews are some sinister plotters-controllers-etc., nor the fellow slightly smarter apes that have absorbed a “Jewish identity”, even the racist-to-the-core-hyper-religious-tribalistic settlers. We should blame neither Hitler for his clueless antisemitism and racist pseudoscience, classic examples being of course:
“Don’t think you can fight racial tuberculosis without taking care to rid the nation of the carrier of that racial tuberculosis. This Jewish contamination will not subside, this poisoning of the nation will not end, until the carrier himself, the Jew, has been banished from our midst.”
Nor Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, founder and spiritual leader of the largest religious political party in Israel(Shas) which won 11 of 120 Knesset seats in the 2009 elections, and is also a former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel which can be seen as the sort of Pope of the Sephardic Jews, who said in a sermon on Oct 16th, 2010 that:
“Goyim[non-Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world — only to serve the People of Israel,”…“Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat. That is why gentiles were created,”
Nor the great Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin who said:
“From a Jewish perspective there is not one German who is not a Nazi, and there is not one German who is not a murderer”
These were fellow homo sapiens which were once little kids curious about the world. One has to look at the ideas and environment that cause such potentially dangerous-misguided-hopeful personalities-statements instead of reverting to simplistic “identity politics” and “good” vs” “evil”. Zionism and its underlying idea that the fellow homo sapiens who “identify as Jews” are so different from the other homo sapiens that they must leave the real thousands of towns and Synagogues spread throughout the world where for hundreds of years they were an integral part of Western Civilization to create the country of Israel based on religious mythology in an area already populated by others who had a different “identity” (Muslims, Christians, and fellow anti-Zionist Jews) and for numerous understandable reasons were adamantly opposed to the creation of a “Jewish State” in their surroundings, was and remains a monumental yet understandable error. Oftentimes bright and well-intentioned people, as was the case with Socialist mythology, understandably fool themselves into monumental errors. Zionism was an error made not by Jews, but by mankind in general. Had there been no antisemitism or Jew-Gentile misunderstandings in ‘Western Civilization’, Zionism and resulting ongoing disastrous ramifications simply would not have occurred. Sadly, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League Jonathan Greenblatt naively mentions that “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism” which can only lead to the further destruction of freedom of speech throughout the world and eventual Final World War. Let us very briefly try to see the history of this mess from a sort of evolutionary perspective. We must begin with a compact economic lesson.
By the late 1800s, as reason was replacing religious mysticism/squabbles, things were quickly improving for all Europeans and especially Jews. Man was supposed to be free to live his life as he chose instead of constrained by the rule of Kings-Church-Theocracy and have the right to keep and control his “private property”. From our freedom to use or transform our private property emerges the ‘freedom to trade’ it with anyone in the entire planet which inadvertently transforms mankind into a global supercomputer where companies are motivated to innovate and learn from each other(competitors) thus inadvertently cooperate to create and spread superior information and subsequent social order. It is our freedom as consumers to trade our life-and-order-sustaining wealth for the best cars with the latest innovations, and as producers to go into the auto-manufacturing business, which motivates existing auto manufacturers(competitors) to innovate-compete-copy-learn to produce the best cars. Just like in the Olympics we can discover the best athletes in the world due to global competition, so does having the ‘freedom to trade’ with everyone in the world allows the best ideas to compete and spread globally thus ensuring the best possible global order. Via advertising, competitors are motivated to spread the potential usefulness and superiority of their products-ideas as well as the defects-inferiority of their competitors thus accelerating the need to compete-copy-spread superior information and subsequent order. As cost-cutting ideas emerge and inevitably spread via competition leading relative prices to continuously fall, new profitable ideas easily arise and once again spread via competition in an endless cycle of knowledge generation-innovation. For example, computers were once very expensive, but once the price of making them came down enough, people easily realized that every home could have them, which gave birth to our computerized world and the Internet and all the great things that flow from it. The more wealth is produced, the more wealth must be offered in exchange for labor as companies compete against each other for the labor they need which helps explain why the economic pie grows for everyone. Morals are ways of acting; they too are knowledge which also emerges and spreads via economic competition to considerable degrees. It is hard-working, tolerant, courteous people who thanks to competition inevitably motivate everyone else to be likewise. As F.A. Hayek tells us:
“Competition is, after all, always a process in which a small number makes it necessary for larger numbers to do what they do not like, be it to work harder, to change habits, or to devote a degree of attention, continuous application, or regularity to their work which without competition would not be needed.”
As millions of Italians, Britons, Jews and others from all over the world came to America, it was ultimately the competition which grows from ‘private property’ and thus individual liberty which stripped these people of their otherwise nationalistic, ethnocentric, tribalistic “identities” and evolved what came to be seen as the classic American character of wanting to be seen as a reputable and honest businessman or professional who treats everyone with respect and wears a business suit as opposed to older ethnocentric attires. Thus freedom and emerging ‘competitive knowledge discovery’, as opposed to leading to chaos, is what 1) enables and motivates the discovery and spread of superior information and subsequent social order, 2) civilizes us, 3) protects us from being coerced into doing something we don’t want and thus allows us to live our lives as we wish, 4) and is vital for discovering the truth. Freedom is the ultimate algorithm!
The role of governments and thus coercion should be minimized because governmental or ‘public sector’ bureaucracies, being coercive monopolies which get their life or order-sustaining wealth through taxes and compulsion are immune to the competitive-information-spreading incentives and pressures which motivate private sector entities to keep up with the competition in terms of information and hustle. Central or government plans can’t work if people are free to not go along with or fund them, so they inevitably require compulsion. For example, it is a criminal act in Communist countries like North Korea and most of Cuba to start a business, in other words, to attempt a superior restructuring of society because it interferes with the plans of “the experts” who run the government. It is also a criminal act everywhere to not pay taxes that sustain government bureaucracies like “public education” so there is little incentive or wealth to sustain other more desirable or superior competitors or ideas. The former Soviet Union had plenty of highly educated scientists and ‘experts’ whose plans required the coercion of millions as still happens in Cuba, but they were thoroughly crushed by free Americans and their ‘competitive knowledge discovery’. The “classic” image shown helps explain the difference between competitive-private-free orders(South Korea) and monopolistic-government-coerced orders (North Korea). Keep your eye on how information arises and spreads via competition and continuously restructures the social order. Government regulations are coercive-competitionless-monopoly information which is not subject to continuous improvement-replacement via competition so they paralyze entire industries slowing down ‘competitive knowledge discovery’, driving up costs (more lawyers-regulators-bureaucrats), and potentially making criminals out of people who harm nobody but just prefer to do things differently. This explains why the increasingly regulated/paralyzed healthcare sector has grown from consuming 5% of the economy in 1960 to over 20% today culminating in the current CovidMania tyranny. By comparison the Software/IT sector has few regulations, there is no American Computer Programmer’s Association monopolizing/paralyzing the knowledge relating to writing software like the American Medical Association does for medical services so free competition motivates the creation and spread of innovations at breakneck speed. Finance-Banking motivates people to consume less, and thus save wealth, which is then consumed by efficiently-competitively-ordered private sector workers hired by entrepreneurs who borrowed the saved wealth which they now consume as they grow the economic pie by amounts greater than prevailing interest rates giving a tremendous ‘computational boost’ to society. Done with economics.
By not seeking converts and thus always remining a minority among the larger Christianity and Islam and easily losing their land from time to time among other factors, Jewish culture/identity was shaped-evolved-selected to be more commercial and thus ‘Capitalist’ and eventually hated by the economically ignorant masses/socialists like Hitler obviously. Hitler, being an economically clueless National Socialist (Nazi) believed that a coercive-competitionless bureaucracy of experts (government) would work better than free people-Capitalism. He was also understandably clueless regarding the great benefits of banking-finance and stock markets and saw the overrepresentation of Jews in those industries as some kind of sinister plot. Similarly, factors like Socialism-Communism’s atheism which would rid Jews of the religious persecution, its alluring scientific aura, and need for the better educated (which Jews were) to lead the central planning apparatus inadvertently caused Jews to be more attracted to Socialism-Communism and thus be leaders in both Socialism and Capitalism. They obviously did not “invent” or “plot” Socialism/Communism-Capitalism like Hitler and naïve thinkers to this day claim. It could be said that Jews were ‘naturally selected’ to be both Socialist AND Capitalist-finance leaders, thus giving the impression that they were its “creators/plotters”. Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, nicely summarizes the recent co-evolution of Jewish culture and Socialism and Capitalism:
“We are what the Ghetto made us. We have attained pre-eminence in finance, because mediaeval conditions drove us to it. The same process is now being repeated. We are again being forced into finance, now it is the stock exchange, by being kept out of other branches of economic activity. Being on the stock exchange, we are consequently exposed afresh to contempt. At the same time we continue to produce an abundance of mediocre intellects who find no outlet, and this endangers our social position as much as does our increasing wealth. Educated Jews without means are now rapidly becoming Socialists. Hence we are certain to suffer very severely in the struggle between classes, because we stand in the most exposed position in the camps of both Socialists and capitalists.”
The point of the above is that we must deconstruct hate, “evil”, hatreds into economic ignorance, fallacies and complex evolutionary factors. The rise of global free-trade and Capitalism was great, however, as the Church and its monarchical rulers were being replaced by nationalist-tribalistic representative governments which would eventually lead to WWI, the idea of Jewish Nationalism-Zionism understandably also emerged. Since Jews tend to be an extended blood-related family that has been an oftentimes persecuted minority due to religious/tribalistic squabbles of antiquity/etc., the sense of “identity” and ethnocentrism is understandably stronger and has been an important albeit unfortunate factor in both antisemitism and Zionism. Both antisemitism and Zionism are rooted in the same intellectual error, that the slightly smarter apes who “identify as Jews” are so different from the other slightly smarter apes that they must leave the real thousands of towns and Synagogues where for hundreds of years they were an integral part of Western Civilization to create a country based on religious mythology in an area already populated by others who had a different “identity”(Muslims,Christians, and fellow anti-Zionist Jews) and for numerous understandable reasons were adamantly opposed to living under such a theocratic/ethnocentric “Jewish State”. Theodore Herzl highlighted this ideological congruence of both Zionists and antisemites in his foundational book “The Jewish State”(1896) :
“The anti-semites will be our most steadfast friends.” “The anti-Semitic countries will be our allies” “Great exertions will hardly be necessary to spur on the movement. Anti-Semites provide the requisite impetus. They need only do what they did before, and then they will create a desire to emigrate where it did not previously exist, and strengthen it where it existed before.”
During the early days of Zionism, many Jews were divided into the Zionists and anti-Zionists (“assimilationists”). Chaim Weizmann, the leading Zionist figure after Herzl’s death in 1904, lamented how “assimilated Jews” were “dead against Zionism” and identified Zionism (correctly IMHO) as “a primitive tribalism”:
“For assimilated Jews…They looked upon it…as a primitive tribalism. They felt themselves…called upon to “rescue” Judaism from Zionism…these people are dead against Zionism…Zionism is not meant for those people who have cut themselves adrift from Jewry…”
Of course! That rapidly increasing number of very well educated cosmopolitan “assimilated Jews” spread all over Europe-USA just wanted to be fellow human beings free of ancient tribalisms-mysticisms-identities. Unfortunately, for very understandable reasons/factors(Hitler/etc.) for which nobody is to blame and are ultimately rooted in economic ignorance and the tribalistic nature of the slightly smarter apes, like a rocket that is just about to reach orbit but runs out of fuel and comes crashing down to earth, tribalism-Zionism would inadvertently pull Jews and all of Western Civilization back to an increasingly ethnocentric identity-worldview with disastrous consequences, such as the Zionists’ understandable need-desire to expel over 700,000 Palestinians and prevent them from returning home in order to create their “Jewish State”-Israel as the result of complex events leading to a sort of civil war in 1947–9. Israel’s main architect and first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion ten years earlier in 1938 mentioned:
“With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement]….I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” (Morris, 1999, p. 144)
On Feb 6th, 1948 as Palestinians were being expelled to make way for the Jewish State, Ben Gurion again:
“The war will give us the land. The concepts of “ours” and “not ours” are only concepts for peacetime, and during war they lose their meaning”
In another occasion:
“Transfer is what will make possible a comprehensive settlement program. Thankfully, the Arab people have vast empty areas. Jewish power, which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out transfer on a large scale.” (Morris, 2004, p. 48)
“The compulsory transfer of the Arabs… could give us something which we never had…This is national consolidation in an independent homeland.” (Morris, 2004, p. 47)
The Zionist error can easily be seen in statements by founder Theodore Herzl:
“Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment… Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” – June 12, 1895
The above helps us understand how there could never be a modern democratic country in the Middle East because such a democracy, rightfully reflecting the wishes and sense of justice of the Islamic world-public will always elect a critic of the Zionist error-fallacy (in its current form) and thus be seen as an “antisemite” since so many Jews have tied their own “identity” to a political-historical error. It certainly does NOT help that the non-Jewish-Gentile world is full of naïve thinkers who believe the usual jews-are-malicious-plotters tropes which then understandably causes Jews to justify the continuation-expansion of the current brand of Zionism and feel like co-existence would be impossible. Again, it is a mess for which no particular individual or group is to blame. This means that (as we have been seeing for 70+ years) the USA-Israel-Europe (the white non-Muslim world where white Ashkenazi-European Jews have tremendous support-influence-sympathy) will continue to have to either support pro-Israeli-status-quo dictators and-or continue military conflict/overthrows (Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.) in the area at a staggering cost in terms of US massive military yearly consumption(1.2 trillion per year), immense human suffering for the millions of people in the areas who have to either live under the dictatorships or war-torn countries. This conflict is like a knife stuck in mankind’s thigh which constantly radiates naïve religious/mystical “good vs. evil” thinking, segregating the slightly smarter apes for the final calamity in the form of the current Russia-Ukraine war.
This conflict can-should be seen as an opportunity to spread an understanding of free-markets and how freedom is the key to socioeconomic harmony. A simple starting point for a solution can be as follows: A single country/state with a largely NON-Democratic government where everyone has equal rights. The government should be minimal in the sense that it should be clearly defined in some bare-bones constitution that besides modern/obvious freedoms like freedom of press/speech/etc., the national government should only be involved in protecting such freedoms and private property, and should clearly be forbidden from ever going into education, elderly care, any kind of socialized/monopoly/medicine/anything, etc. This is NOT up to democratic change and is important so that Jews will not fear a larger Muslim population eventually taking their freedoms/wealth, which would definitely be the case if they were forced to pay for massive public sector welfare-state-bureaucracies attempting to provide equal access-funding for education, health services, elderly care, etc. that the economically-ignorant-though-well-intentioned-public always falls for. Jews-Muslims-Christians-everyone will have the freedom to pool their wealth to create their own privately funded educational systems-charities and be free to discriminate if they so wish based on religion, sex, whatever their customs or free individuals agree upon. Palestinians who were expelled during various wars and their descendants will have the right to go back to the lands they were expelled from and a similar effort should be made so that Jews who were expelled from Muslim lands can also reclaim their property and rights. If the lands have since been developed a simple starting solution to the potential conflicts and a way to provide some restitution to the Palestinians and help get this country on a rapid path to amazing prosperity is as follows: Jews keep lands and homes and buildings they currently have developed and are clearly being used for productive purposes. My guess is that this actual amount of land is probably around 40 percent of the land. Then we take the other 60 percent, and using some simple software or other means we distribute it to all Palestinians who were dispossessed thus privatizing most of the country. So far this simple framework accomplishes the following: Jews should be pretty happy, no fear of a demographic majority that can then interfere with your freedom and/or property, no need to pay for the education of non-Jews or other Jews for that matter. The more religious Jews who have a super strong connection to the land can live, travel, buy land everywhere. No draconian uprooting or potentially economically devastating disruptions. Palestinians regain their freedom and land. Since this minimal state will have minimal-no taxes or regulations it will quickly blossom in prosperity. The land will quickly increase in value, providing much deserved compensation for the Palestinians. The entire country will skyrocket in socioeconomic prosperity and serve as an example-beacon of progress. Loudly clamoring for a solution along these lines brings us free-marketeers tremendous advantages. We will be the only ones actually making noise and bringing attention to a rather simple-and-thus-easy-to-spread viral plan. It gives us an opportunity to teach and sort of piggyback basic economics as we explain to people how prosperity will skyrocket helping us in our more ambitious world-wide free-market educational efforts, which is obviously the key to everything.