≡ Menu

Ammous, Property Rights: The Root Cause of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

Saifedean Ammous, “Property Rights: The Root Cause of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict,” Property and Freedom Journal (May 7, 2026)

See also PFP309 | Saifedean Ammous: Property Rights: The Root Cause of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict (PFS 2025)

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the inevitable result of the destruction of a centuries-old system of private property rights and its replacement by race-based state ownership. Since 1947, property rights in Palestine have been replaced by a government agency that owns the majority of land, constantly steals more, never sells, and only leases land to one racial group. Religious and racial conflict are not destined in Palestine; they are historically rare occurrences, but this system of property rights would create violent conflict anywhere.

In 1945, the British mandate government surveyed land ownership in Palestine and found that Jews owned 5.67% of the total land, while Muslims, Christians & other denominations owned 48.31% of the land. The remaining 46.02% was public land, mainly in the sparsely inhabited desert in the south, most of which was de facto owned by the Bedouins who herded there. Among the privately-owned lands, only 10.5% was owned by Jews, while 89.5% was owned by non-Jews. There was not a single district in Palestine in which Jews owned a majority of the land, as this illustration makes clear.

Read more>>


Discover more from The Property and Freedom Society

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

{ 1 comment… add one }

Leave a Comment

Discover more from The Property and Freedom Society

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

Creative Commons License
Except where otherwise noted, the content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.