A Palestinian State?
June 6, 2002
I recently read that Im
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.
Israels 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? Weve 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 régime. 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 isnt encouraging. Revolutionaries, filled with high hopes,
have repeatedly bought a pig in a poke, only to discover too late that
theyve 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 states 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
cant 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 historys 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.
Joseph Sobran
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