Locke Would Have Liked Israel

Before you decide I've gone totally meshuggeneh and it's time for me to take a break from studying... I can explain.

No, really.

It all started in my Property Law class (which is quickly becoming one of my favorite areas), when we were discussing the initial land acquisition. The first case that we read was Johnson v. M'Intosh. The first US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall concluded that US has a right to its own land acquired by discovery... and yes, conquest of the Native Americans, who live. That's the major point of the case. The minor point, however, is the philosophy that influenced the decision... and which established a precedent for many a land dispute later on. The decision, was, in part, influenced by Lockean philosophy. John Locke's idea of ownership consisted of deciding on how much work you put into land. This type of ethic later developed into what became known as "adverse possession." Have you cultivated the land?

If you didn't put any work into it at all, and it lay fallow for years, during a property dispute, the case would be more likely than not decided against you. When looking at the Johnson/M'Intosh case, and the acquisition by discovery, Marshall also considered cultivation of the land as a factor. The Native Americans, which the colonists found upon arriving here, lived mostly in the forests, and weren't very involved in agriculture, unlike the Europeans, who were more adapted to farming. Hence, it looked like the Europeans had done more to improve the land than the Indian tribes. Whether that was actually the case or not is an argument I won't go into here, but I do find the idea of ownership and cultivating the land very interesting and compelling.

Guess where I'm going with this? That's right. Israel's *legal* claims to its land. If you follow Lockean view of land ownership, your claim on land is likely to be a lot more justified, if you put a lot of work into it. Let's say you share a plot of land with the neighbor. You're cultivating your piece of land, and it blossoms, but your neighbor allows his part to fall into disarray. And let's say, there are no clear boundaries separating your halves. And you wind up in court suing over a piece of land. An early judge would take the cultivation of land into consideration when dividing the plot. Even if your neighbor had a title to his plot of land, even if he had owned it for generations, even if he weren't bothering you at all by living there... he'd risk losing the disputed territory to you, if you were doing a significantly better job of making the land useful and prosperous, for your own benefit and the benefit of others.

That's exactly what happened in Israel, strictly speaking. While Zionist settlers cultivated a very rocky/deserted land, their neighbors devoted much less time to agriculture. Consequently, by the time Israel was ready to become a state, its land was already very well developed and there was something where you could build the land. This economic development is extremely underrated in the hasbara. There's much to be said for Israel's technological and scientific advances, and I'm sure many investors, such as Warren Buffett, are very aware of that. I'm sure even the public knows of many scientific developments, which come from Israel. Not many people, who haven't visited the country, however, know how beautiful it is, how well developed agriculturally, and how much hard work has been put into it to improve it, to become a flowering land from nothing. Jews certainly speak of it often enough, but often, more as a metafor. Personally, although I've heard about all the labor that went into the extremely difficult development, when I visited Israel, it was a shock for me.

We speak of the way we could make our Hasbara more effective. I think it's not enough to discuss terrorism and its devastating effects on society. I think a lot of positive, affirmative Hasbara is missing. Israelis and Israeli advocates fail to discuss this land-development side of Israel, the side that if presented in the right terms, would certainly appeal to anyone who's ever had to work to get a piece of property, to build on it, and improve it. In the early United States, relationship with one's property was more than just about owning a piece of land. The land expressed your identity. You put some of yourself into that when you cultivated it, and that's why it was valued so highly. The land had linguistic qualities; by working and improving on it, you marked it as you own. The more work you did on it, the more you demonstrated to the world how valuable it is to you, so if you had to sue, the judges unconsciously considered not only the economic benefits of your toil, but the sentimental ones.

I think this special understanding of relationship to one's property is still an important underlying fabric in the highly individualist American psyche. And that, I think, is one of the reasons it's so important for Israeli advocates to put much more emphasis on their own relationship with the land, not just the principal economic ownership of it, not just the historic and religious connotations, but the very act of becoming one with one's property, by putting some of oneself into one's land, as one cultivated rocks and sand to make them blossom.

Enchanted,
Irina