A Palestinian State?
June 6, 2002

by Joe Sobran

     I recently read that I'm "pro-Palestinian." Well, I 
do sympathize with the Palestinian people in their 
present plight, but feelings are only feelings. Sympathy 
for one side in a conflict can lead to injustice to the 
other side. Israel's sympathizers are often callous 
toward the Palestinians, and Palestinian sympathizers 
often slight the legitimate concerns of Jews.

     But what good would a Palestinian state really do? 
We've seen many cases of new states that turned out to be 
more oppressive than the royal, aristocratic, or colonial 
regimes they replaced. The French Revolution quickly 
became far bloodier than the ancien regime. The Soviet 
Union was infinitely crueler than the tsars had been; 
every Communist regime, from Asia to Cuba, has made its 
predecessor seem liberal. And look at the new states of 
Africa. Hundreds of millions of people must bitterly 
regret having been "liberated."

     The desire for a Palestinian state is really an 
understandable yearning for relief from tyrannical 
Israeli rule. But what would such a state be like? Would 
it really make Palestinians freer? Would it protect the 
rights of Christians and Jews? Or would it merely permit 
tyranny to take new forms?

     The record of modern states isn't encouraging. 
Revolutionaries, filled with high hopes, have repeatedly 
bought a pig in a poke, only to discover too late that 
they've acquired an aggressive boar with nasty tusks.

     A state is nothing more than a monopoly of power 
over a given territory. Taming this critter, as with 
constitutional restraints, has proved extremely 
difficult, maybe impossible over the long haul. Even the 
U.S. Constitution is pretty much a dead letter, since the 
state itself gets to decide what it means. The federated 
"United States" have long since become a single, 
monolithic, expansive United State.

     Being constituted by force, states specialize in one 
thing: war. They make war on each other, often bringing 
other states into their wars as allies. Or they make war 
on their own subjects.

     "Conservatives," a misnomer, usually prefer to apply 
force to rival states; "liberals," another misnomer, 
prefer to use the state's power against its domestic 
population. Either way, the state pretends to be 
protecting the population from monsters, at home or 
abroad.

     Even after the state-organized mass murders and 
"peaceful" tyrannies of the twentieth century, most 
people can hardly imagine an alternative to the state and 
still, in fact, look to the state for salvation. The 
Palestinians think a state of their own is the antidote 
to the Jewish state.

     But the real solution would be no state at all; an 
area where anyone would be free to settle, where everyone 
had the same rights and none had privileges; no top dogs 
and no underdogs. Not a Palestinian state, but a 
stateless Palestine.

     Jews are afraid of a Palestinian state because, not 
without reason, they imagine it as an enemy that would 
hate and threaten Israel. Such a state could also expel 
or persecute Jews. But a stateless Palestine could do 
none of these things, because there would be no state to 
make war, expel, persecute, or assign privileges to any 
particular category of people.

     Is this a utopian dream? Most people now assume that 
a stateless territory would be a mere vacuum, which would 
quickly be filled by power in some form or other. When 
you come right down to it, they would argue, the state 
can't be eliminated; there must always be a top dog. As 
Thomas Hobbes put it, anarchy would mean a perpetual "war 
of all against all," until there emerged a supreme power 
to "keep them all in awe."

     This is a difficult argument to answer, because, 
having so little experience of statelessness, we find it 
hard to conceive. Yet America already has what our 
ancestors would call "anarchy" in religion, but what we 
would call peace, because we generally agree that nobody 
may force anyone else to join his church. And this 
arrangement, once nearly inconceivable, has worked very 
well.

     If we generally agreed that nobody has the right to 
coerce others in any respect -- that state authority has 
no moral basis and is, in fact, radically immoral -- 
political "anarchy" might work just as well as religious 
freedom has worked. But few are ready to contemplate the 
idea, let alone give it a try. In spite of history's 
testimony, men still believe that force and violence can 
achieve peace and freedom.

     A single stateless zone, even a tiny one, might 
teach the world a priceless lesson. A stateless Palestine 
could become the beacon of freedom America once was.

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