I was recently interviewed by economist and author Saifedean Ammous for The Bitcoin Standard Podcast to exchange knowledge about the history of Palestine and Israel. We dispelled pervasive myths and set the historical record straight about the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Saifedean is the author of The Bitcoin Standard, The Fiat Standard, and Principles of Economics. While I haven’t yet been able to make time to read the latter two books, I highly recommend The Bitcoin Standard for a succinct lesson in economics and to understand why bitcoin has the potential to liberate us from the tyranny and theft of the central banking system.
While the topic of economics—and banking, in particular—did relevantly come up during our discussion of British policy, and while I would love to discuss economics with Saifedean at much greater length, we stayed focused on the Israel-Palestine conflict during this episode. Specific topics we discussed include:
- How the infamous British “Balfour Declaration” was originally drafted by Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, a prominent Jewish banker and representative of the Zionist Movement.
- The three key reasons why the British decided to support the Zionist project to reconstitute Palestine into a Jewish state despite their promise to support the independence of Palestine’s majority Arab inhabitants from Turkish rule, which was made to gain Arab support for the British war effort against the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
- How the secular political movement of Zionism was initially opposed by many Jews, including Orthodox Jews who viewed it as heretical to Judaism.
- The underappreciated role of extreme Christian Zionism in perpetuating the conflict in ways that many Christian extremists actually intend to cause World War III.
- How the British enforced a belligerent occupation of Palestine after WWI for the specific purpose of preventing the native inhabitants from exercising their right to self-determination.
- How native Jewish and Arab inhabitants of Palestine had amicable relations prior to the Zionist Movement, and why it was anti-Zionism and not anti-Semitism that led to outbreaks of violence during the Mandate period.
- How the Zionist Organization exploited feudalistic Ottoman land laws to purchase land from absentee landlords, thus disenfranchising the rightful owners and homesteaders of the land, at times also expelling Arabs from the acquired land, and subsequently refusing Arab employment in Jewish colonies.
- How it was a central tenet of Zionist ideology to rid Palestine of its Arab inhabitants, particularly after the British Peel Commission in 1937 proposed a partition of Palestine involving a “compulsory transfer” of hundreds of thousands of Arabs away from their homes to facilitate the establishment of a demographically “Jewish state”.
- Why the claim that the UN created Israel is a myth.
- How the UN partition plan endorsed in General Assembly Resolution 181 was wholly inequitable and in fact premised on an explicit rejection of the right of the Palestinians to self-determination—despite this right being recognized in the UN Charter.
- How Resolution 181 neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionist leadership for their unilateral declaration of the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948.
- How Israel was rather established by ethnically cleansing most of the indigenous Arab inhabitants of Palestine from their homes and literally wiping over 500 Arab villages off the map.
- The role of the inflationary monetary policy of central banks in world conflicts.
- How the British effectively disarmed the Palestinians while enabling the armament of the Zionists in pursuance of the Zionist goal of ethnically cleansing the land of its indigenous population.
- How one of the requirements of statehood under international law is legally defined borders, which Israel still does not have to this day.
- Why the claim of Jewish land ownership of Palestine based on there once having been a kingdom known as Israel over 3,000 years ago cannot be taken seriously.
- The critical importance of individual property rights, and why civilization cannot exist without respect for individual property rights.
- How today’s Palestinians are descended from the inhabitants of Canaan who lived in the land before there was ever an ancient kingdom called Israel.
- How the UN’s admission of Israel as a “peace-loving” member state in 1949 was an act of extreme prejudice against the rights of the Palestinians that violated the UN Charter, thus effectively sanctioning the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
- How Israel has always rejected the two-state solution premised on the applicability of international law to the conflict, and how the entire US-led so-called “peace process” was the means by which Israel and its superpower benefactor blocked implementation of the two-state solution.
- Why the claim that Palestinians left their homes voluntary in 1948 because they were told by Arab leaders to do so is complete ahistorical nonsense intended to try to justify the crime against humanity known as ethnic cleansing.
- How Jews with absolutely no connection to the land of Palestine whatsoever can, under Israeli law, immigrate to Israel and own property while the non-Jewish indigenous inhabitants who were ethnically cleansed from Palestine remain forbidden to return to their homes.
- Why Israel is a Jewish supremacist state intent on brutally subjecting the native Palestinian population.
- The role of Western media in propagating false narratives designed to manufacture consent for Western governments’ historical role in supporting the systematic violation of Palestinians’ fundamental human rights.
- Why the claim that Israel has made generous offers and made concessions to the Palestinians only for the Palestinians to reject a state of their own is ahistorical nonsense.
- How the mainstream media fulfill the propaganda function of manufacturing consent for criminal government policies, the realization of which is the reason I got started doing independent journalism.
- How, consequently, most of what people think they know about the Israel-Palestine conflict just isn’t true.
- How, for example, people believe that Israel’s surprise attack on Egypt on the morning of June 5, 1967, which is how the “Six Day War” was started, was a “preemptive” attack.
- Why a single state in which the equal rights of all citizens is the solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but why that is regretfully not a realistic outcome at this particular moment in history during which Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian population of Gaza.
- Why the goal of anyone interested in a peaceful resolution to the conflict must be to make it political infeasible for the US government to continue its policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.
- How Hamas came to power in Gaza as a direct consequence of Israeli government policies.
- How Israeli Prime Mininster Benjamin Netanyahu had maintained a policy of treating Hamas as a strategic ally to ensure that there would be no movement toward negotiations with the Palestinians toward a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
- How Israel’s military operations in Gaza since Hamas’s atrocities against Israeli civilians on 10/7 have been aimed at making Gaza uninhabitable.
- How the number of children killed in Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza in just the first three weeks exceeded the number of children killed annually in all the world’s conflicts from 2020 – 2022.
- Why hope for the future is dependent on Americans rising up and speaking out to make the US government policy of supporting Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians politically infeasible.
During our discussion, Saifedean brought up a debate he had about the Israel-Palestine conflict with prominent libertarian thinker Walter Block, who has written a paper with Rafi Farber and Alan Futerman attempting to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by which Israel was established. More recently, Block and Futerman authored an article in the Wall Street Journal attempting to justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza. I happen to have debated both Farber and Futerman on the Tom Woods Show, which you can learn more about and watch here.
To purchase a signed copy of my book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, click here.
