Saifedean Ammous on Property Rights and the Palestinian–Israeli Conflict – PFS Bodrum 2025

Property and Freedom Society, Bodrum 2025
Saifedean Ammous on “Property Rights: The Root Cause of the Palestinian–Israeli Conflict”
Reported by Sebastian Wang

Note: This is a report of a lecture delivered at the Property and Freedom Society conference in Bodrum. It is a faithful summary of the speaker’s words. Nothing here should be construed as my own advocacy, nor as contravening any law, including the British Government’s Terrorism Act.

The Bodrum meetings are famous for their intellectual range, and this year’s conference was no exception. Among the most striking speeches was that of Saifedean Ammous, the Palestinian-Jordanian economist best known for his book The Bitcoin Standard. Normally Ammous is heard on subjects of money and inflation. Here he drew on his personal experience of life as a Palestinian and on years of research into the history of land tenure in the region. His thesis was that the Palestinian–Israeli conflict is not ultimately about religion, nor even about nationalism in the abstract, but about property rights.

He began with numbers. According to the British Mandate Land Survey of 1945, Jews owned around 5.67 percent of the land of Palestine. Muslims, Christians, and others owned about half. The remainder was “public land,” much of it desert but long used in practice by Bedouin tribes under customary tenure. Of privately owned land, Jews held barely ten percent. The demographic picture was similar: in 1917 Jews were about ten percent of the population; by 1948, still only thirty-one percent. Ammous’s point was not that numbers decide morality, but that the Zionist aspiration to build an ethno-national state required, from the beginning, a programme of transfer.

He quoted David Ben-Gurion’s private statements in the 1930s. “With compulsory transfer,” Ben-Gurion wrote in 1937, “we would have a vast area for settlement. I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” In 1938 he admitted to colleagues: “Politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down.” And on the eve of independence in 1948: “We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”

The means to achieve this were provided, Ammous argued, by the British. During the 1936–39 uprising against colonial rule—the largest anti-colonial revolt before the Second World War—the British disarmed the Palestinians, destroying their political leadership, and tilted the balance towards the better-organised Zionist militias. When Britain withdrew in 1947, the balance of force was unequal. Plan Dalet, drawn up by the Haganah, provided the blueprint for territorial control and expulsions. By May 1948, before the first Arab armies had intervened, some 300,000 Palestinians had already been displaced. By the end of the conflict, the figure had risen to 800,000, with more than 500 villages erased. Ammous described this as not incidental but structural: the creation of a state for a minority required the abolition of property rights for the majority.

This abolition was codified in Israeli law. The Absentee Property Law of 1950 transferred the assets of those who had fled or been expelled to the Custodian of Absentee Property. The Present Absentees Law extended dispossession to those who had remained but not in their original homes. Altogether, around three-quarters of the land was vested in the state, specifically the Israel Land Authority. Its charter was to lease land to Jews, whether local or foreign, and to deny it to non-Jews. Ammous’s verdict was severe: “Zionism is a land-theft agency with a military funded by foreign goyim, stealing the land of Palestinian goyim, murdering dissenters, and granting the land to foreign Jews.”

After 1967 the pattern repeated. The Six-Day War gave Israel control of the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. Palestinians abroad were effectively exiled for good; their properties were declared abandoned and confiscated. Jewish-only settlements proliferated in the occupied territories. Legal dualism entrenched itself: settlers governed by civil law, Palestinians by military orders, tried in military courts, often subject to administrative detention and, in some documented cases, torture. Ammous highlighted the extraordinary fact that children as young as twelve could be tried in these courts, with conviction rates approaching certainty. He cited figures suggesting nearly a million Palestinians have been imprisoned since 1967.

Day-to-day life, he said, remained structured by property denial. Palestinians are frequently denied building permits. Houses are demolished on the basis of legal irregularities that could never be applied to Jewish neighbours. Fields are expropriated without compensation. Cold-blooded killings by soldiers are recorded on video yet rarely punished. The underlying logic, as Ammous saw it, is not primarily security but property: to constrain and shrink Palestinian presence until it disappears.

Against this bleak account he set a historical counterpoint. For centuries under Islamic rule, Jews, Christians, and Muslims had lived in Jerusalem and Hebron under regimes of recognised property rights. He quoted Rabbi Avraham Gershon of Kitov, who in the eighteenth century wrote with warmth about Jewish–Muslim coexistence in Hebron, the unlocked doors and mutual celebrations. Ammous’s point was not to idealise the past, but to show that peaceful pluralism was possible, and that its foundation was property. “If history teaches anything,” he reminded us with Mises, “it is that private property is inextricably linked with civilisation.” Where property rights exist, calculation and cooperation follow. Where they are destroyed, conflict takes their place.

From this base he drew a further conclusion: Zionism is unsustainable. Colonies in the New World had become viable states because property was broadly respected and transferable. The aboriginal populations were sometimes dispossessed, and were sometimes murdered. But often, there were no pre-existing property rights, and the doctrine of terra nullius was not always a fiction. By contrast, the Israeli project, in Ammous’s view, can only survive on foreign subsidy. First British support, then American aid, then the vast privileges of the U.S. dollar system. Trillions have been expended to defend it. Wars have been launched across the Middle East. Free speech in Western countries is curtailed in its defence. “Normal countries,” Ammous said, “do not require foreign subsidies to survive.”

Listening in Bodrum, I found the argument both compelling and disturbing. It is tempting to reduce the Israeli–Palestinian struggle to an insoluble religious quarrel, or to treat it as the inevitable clash of two nationalisms. Ammous cut through those frames with a disarming simplicity: it is about property. In 1948, an existing system of ownership was overturned. In its place a racialised regime of state land was imposed. Until that fact is addressed, he implied, the conflict cannot end.

Ammous then turned to the present, and here the lecture grew more sober. The property problem, he said, is not a matter of history alone. It shapes every detail of Palestinian life today. The division of the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C leaves Palestinians confined to fragments of territory while most of the land is designated for settlement. Legal doctrines allow confiscation of “state land” even when cultivated by Palestinians for generations. Home demolitions continue. Families see their houses flattened because of a missing permit, while settlements expand on adjacent hills with government blessing. Every incident, Ammous suggested, is part of the same logic: to strip one group of property and hand it to another.

The economic consequences follow naturally. Without secure property rights, no economy can flourish. Investment stalls, agriculture withers, enterprise dies. Palestinians are locked into dependency, while the wider society must absorb massive subsidies to sustain the system. Ammous stressed that this parasitism extends beyond Israel itself. By binding its survival to the American dollar, the project draws on the hidden subsidy extracted from the world through U.S. monetary policy. Dollars printed in Washington finance aid and arms. Wars are fought and justified. The costs, he argued, are exported globally.

At this point he returned to theory. Mises and Rothbard both insisted that property rights are not incidental but foundational. They are the ground on which social cooperation stands. Once property is collectivised or racialised, the calculative function of the market disappears. In its place comes conflict—whether in the slums of Gaza or in the bureaucracies of Brussels and Washington. Ammous’s contention was that Zionism, in its property arrangements, had set itself against the grain of civilisation. As such, it could not last without continuous outside support.

To illustrate this, he went back on himself and contrasted Zionism with other settler projects. Colonies in the Americas, once they had secured property rights for settlers, developed into societies capable of growth and self-sufficiency. Even when the moral foundations were ugly, the property regime allowed calculation and accumulation. Zionism, by contrast, denies property to the indigenous while offering privileged access to any Jew worldwide. That denial blocks integration, ensures hostility, and necessitates endless subsidy. The fact that American aid and global monetary privileges are still required after more than seventy years, Ammous said, is proof of the scheme’s artificiality.

There was also a cultural note. The destruction of property is not just an economic act but a moral one. A family’s home is not merely bricks but memory and dignity. To take it and hand it to another is not only to wound economically but to humiliate. Ammous suggested that the bitterness of the conflict flows not from religious slogans but from the daily injury of confiscation and displacement. He was blunt: “Peace without property is not peace, but the quiet of the prison.”

In closing, he offered no political blueprint. He is not, he reminded us, a politician. He is an economist who believes in first principles. The principle here is plain: “Where property rights are upheld, peace is possible. Where they are abolished, conflict is inevitable.” For him, the Palestinian–Israeli conflict is simply the most glaring modern illustration of this axiom.

As he finished, the room was quiet. There had been no theatrical delivery, no bombast. Instead, a patient exposition of figures and laws and consequences, tied to the Austrian insight that property is civilisation.

I came away uneasy, but convinced that the point deserved reflection. Ammous’s lecture was not a rallying cry but a reminder of how much of modern politics can be traced to the destruction of ownership. Whether in Palestine, or in the fiscal systems of Europe, or in the monetary policy of the United States, the erosion of property rights always breeds resentment and decay. One need not accept every word of his analysis to see its force.

It is worth repeating what I said at the beginning. This was a report of a conference speech. It is not my advocacy, nor should anything here be construed as support for any organisation or action proscribed under British law. The Terrorism Act is explicit in its prohibitions, and nothing in these pages should be read as falling foul of them. What Ammous provided was an interpretation of history through the lens of Austrian economics: property or conflict. To record it faithfully is not to endorse it, but to note what was said in Bodrum in September 2025.