David Klefeker

Israel's claim to Palestinian land based on Israelis having descended from inhabitants of the land 2,000 years ago is absurd. Property rights are individual, not ethnic. There is no sane way of establishing a peaceful civilized society if property rights were subject to dispute by collective entitities with vague ancient tales. Civilization can only function if individual property rights are respected and pre-1948, anyone of any religion could own land in Palestine and the system of property rights was accepted by all inhabitants. European Zionist migrants to Palestine accepted the legitimacy of the system of property rights prevalent there and bought many properties from the locals. They then decided these property rights are invalid, massacred and expelled Palestinians, and refused to allow them to return to their property. No matter what the ethnic history of the land is, nothing justifies these crimes. Yet what makes them even more absurd is that the Zionist claim based on ethnicity doesn't even survive simple genetic analysis: Palestinians are genetically closer to the inhabitants of Palestine 2,000 years ago than the European Zionists who expelled and murdered them based on their supposed ethnicity. And so today more than 90% of the land controlled by Israel is owned by the Israel Land Authority, a government agency that only allocates it to people who identify as Jewish, regardless of their link to ancient descendants, while denying property rights to the locals who descended from the original inhabitants. Property rights are the root of this conflict, and not some insane nonsense about religions hating each other. Muslims, Jews, and Christians coexisted peacefully for hundreds of years in Palestine as long as they all had the right to property. Zionism made property rights available only to adherents of a political movement claiming to be an ethno-religious group, and there hasn't been peace since.