Empathy for the Palestinian people for being in an “occupied” territory and without their own sovereign government is horribly misguided. This is a people, aside from a few voiceless individuals, who chose as their leader an oppressive dictator who not only supports terrorism against Israel, but who also has a Gestapo-like internal secret police, prohibits freedom of speech and freedom of the press, routinely has summary executions, and who has even employed death squads to eliminate political adversaries. This is a people who clearly do not value individual freedom.
Unlike America’s founding fathers, who sought independence to liberate themselves from a government that denied their individual rights, the Palestinians’ war for independence is born out of a desire to have a sovereign dictatorship of their own, one that is merely free from Israel. In fact, the majority of Palestinians want the annihilation of Israel, more than they want independence. This is despite the fact that Israel is inordinately more free and respectful of individual rights, and unique among Middle Eastern nations in this regard. The Palestinians who live within Israeli society enjoy the same rights as Jews, and are infinitely freer than their brothers subjected to the Palestinian Authority.
The United States of America’s Declaration of Independence defines best when people have the right to form their own government. Because people have “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” they need a government whose function is to protect those rights. If their government “becomes destructive to these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Government to better protect their rights.” Yet individual rights are an anathema to the Palestinian people: they prefer dictatorship and subjugation, as demonstrated by their chosen leader. Yassir Arafat is more like Hitler and Stalin than like Washington and Jefferson.
The bromide of “a right to self-determination” for a people is nonsense. The meaning of that phrase is that a people have a right to choose a dictatorial form of government, and that free countries must recognize and respect it. One fallacious premise to this claim is that the majority within a country is always right, and that the minority’s opinion is always wrong. Should free countries have respected Germany’s election of Hitler and his totalitarian regime? What about those Germans who opposed him? Was the Holocaust the German people’s “right to self-determination”? Clearly the majority can want what is wrong and even evil, and that is one reason why the claim to “a right to self-determination” is nonsense.
Another fallacious premise to this claim is that different people have different needs for government: while free countries respect individual rights, other people may not need them and may do better under a dictatorship. There is not one example in human history to defend this point, for every dictatorship has led to nothing but misery, poverty, stagnancy, and often to war. The freest countries, on the other hand, have brought comfort, wealth, advances in all fields, and peace.
Finally, the other fallacious premise to the claim of a “right of self-determination” is that a people’s choice in government is no other country’s business. Modern history shows that dictatorships tend to make war with freer countries as a means to acquire wealth they cannot produce. A dictator also blames other nations for his people’s suffering and is compelled to make war to pacify internal dissension.
For these three reasons the idea of there being “a right to self-determination” is wrong because it is unjust to the minority among a people who oppose dictatorship, contradictory to the fact that all people benefit from freedom, and ignores the fact that dictatorships are dangerous to free countries because they tend to make war against them.
The best thing that Palestinians could do for themselves is to make peace with Israel and ask to be allowed to participate in its government as equals. If accepted, the Palestinians would enjoy far more freedom than they have ever experienced in history. “All men are created equal”: they have the same rights, and they have the same need for a government to protect those rights–be they Americans, Jews, or Arabs. If Israel were to not accept this proposal, then the Palestinians should translate into Arabic Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and begin their revolution from there.
