Ron Paul’s stance to end all foreign aid across the board and overall non-interventionist position and record on US relations with other countries, is clearly superior to all other Republican candidates.
However, in his book "Liberty Defined", the chapter “Zionism” contains very flawed thinking and history, and is significantly at odds with libertarian principles. When the book first came out, much of that chapter was available online at Amazon.com, which is where I read it. That chapter is no longer available there, and I don’t yet own the book, so I unfortunately can’t quote from it here. Israel isn’t remotely a friend of libertarian principles, or Liberty, if that is approximately what one means by Liberty.
To start with in the chapter, as I recall, he shows the belief in the diaspora myth, that the Israelites of 2000 years ago are the same people as those who identify themselves today as Jews; and he justifies a property rights claim by this.
Following up with the above post, in the chapter "Zionism" of Ron Paul’s “Liberty Defined”, he writes the following:
There is no doubt that Jews have a historic claim on the land itself. The Bar Kochba revolt in AD 135 against' the Roman Empire prompted a large number of Jews to be exiled from the area now known as Israel. Some historians report that the Jewish population of 300,000 was further reduced to a thousand families during the Christian Crusades in the Holy Lands.
This is Zionist fiction. Those who call themselves Jews today are not an ethnic block with lineage back to the territory of historic Palestine 2,000 years ago.
He also writes:
From the 1890s until 1948, when Israel became a sovereign nation carved out of Palestine, immigration was mostly voluntary, gradual, and accomplished with due respect for existing land titles. Zionism, during the first forty years of this movement, was not about taking land by force nor was it about militarism.
This is grade A Zionist fiction. One can start with the many words and observations of Jewish Russian Ahad Ha'Am
here.
Then there’s Attorney Stephen Halbrook’s well sourced article titled “
The Alienation of a Homeland: How Palestine Became Israel*", published in the The Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol. V, No. 4 (Fall 1981), that lays out in detail what really happened. It begins with the following:
“Attorney Stephen Halbrook traces the origins of Palestinian displacement from their homeland to the organized band of robbers known as the Ottoman Empire who presumed to transfer title to land long inhabited by Palestinians to absentee Arab and Turkish landlords. These State-enforced titles were in turn transferred to Zionist organizations who were in turn backed by organized bands of Zionist terrorists—the earliest manifestations of the statelet of Israel.”
There’s also the ruthless
Special Night Squads led by psychopath British Officer Orde Wingate in 1938-39, to put down any Palestinian resistance to the ongoing Zionist land theft and intended takeover of Palestine.
The Special Night Squads were a joint British-Jewish counter-insurgency unit, established by Captain Orde Wingate in Palestine in 1938, during the 1936-1939 Arab revolt. The SNS comprised British infantry soldiers and Jewish Supernumerary Police. Wingate hand-picked his men, among them Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan, and trained them to form mobile ambushes...
Ron Paul also writes:
A continual peaceful transformation would probably have occurred except for the political actions after World War II in which the United Nations turned a local and demographic issue into an international and highly politicized one.
This is just nonsense. The Zionist movement, from the beginning and throughout, has been an international and political movement, never local; and the few Palestinan Jews that there were in Palestine, opposed Zionism. In 1947, Jews, comprising around a third of the population, virtually all recent arrivals from Eastern Europe, held around 6 percent of the land of Palestine (largely acquired by force through the use of absentee landowners). Then, using largely British and US military weapons, they ruthlessly drove most of the Palestinian population off the land they had lived on for centuries or more, and destroyed hundreds of villages. It’s well documented that the Zionist treatment of the Palestinians, over 100 years now, has been antithetical to everything libertarian principles (or Liberty) are about. Ron Paul's way off the mark on this subject.
There’s also
Murray Rothbards article on the subject.
