Joseph and Mary Fels were also dedicated Zionists. However, they realized that attempting to carve out a Jewish state in the Middle East would engage the Jewish people in centuries of war with the very tribal Arab peoples. Their thought was to negotiate the purchase of territory somewhere in the western hemisphere not already occupied by a large number of people.
Same as Einstein and others against Jewish state. Some were thinking of Argentina. The problem of course with democratic state is that they do not solve the Land Problem so lead inevitably to wealth disparities and corruptions of multiple varieties.
The idea of the JNF bought land in Israel being kept for eternity by the national government was never properly withheld after statehood. This was mostly due to the first socialist governments under Ben Gurion, which behaved to support the apparent need for giving the kibbutzim sites that was theirs, and not merely leasing the land to them as originally proposed. (Incidentally my parents gave public concerts to help collect money for this kind of land purchase from local sources, well before the State was established in 1948.)
In my opinion this land distribution was a disaster and it was fortified by the creation of the separate organization of The Israel Lands Authority, which had the power to sell useful sites of land to private and commercial organizations. Gradually the JNF were forced to exchange their now valuable sites for less well developed places, on which many could be forested and not used for urban developments. In 1960 Ben Gurion got a law passed which regarded the total value of a developed site as one thing, not requiring the evaluation for sale of real estate in its more rightful two kinds of separate values, land and buildings separately.
By the means of the most useful land now being sold, less taxation was required on an already overburdened population, all of which had to pull itself up without causing such offense, were the government to rely only on producer/consumer based taxation sources.
David - I appreciate your details about these land issues in Palestine / Israel. Is there anyone besides you in Israel who understands the land value tax policy?
Some years ago I was in touch with a investment broker who was a Georgist here. He had little hopes for LVT finding its place here and I was inclined to agree with him. There may be other Georgists here, but I have not communicated with them. When Netanyahu first took office I sent him a long explanation and recommendation that LVT should be seriously be considered with the change in government. There was no reply.
In my text and discussion with Robert V Andelson, I showed how relatively easy, considering how the history of the policies supporting land ownership by individuals was introduced here, might be reversed. But in his second edition of "LVT around the World", Robert rejected my chapter after several of my attempts at rewriting it, (as my first time of serious chapter composition it was a good lesson for me, I now regard it as how I learned to become a competent writer), and so this situation and claim never came to light.
It is my impression that the leaders of the Israel Land Authority know perfectly well what they are doing and for reasons that are probably selfish these policies will continue and real-estate prices will continue to require mortgages for new families that take up to 25 years to be paid off, when up to about half the average earnings after income taxation go this way. Our military needs are one big reason why the taxes and this exploitation by the government of the natural resources, are so high here.
Fact #1--that some Zionists had some good general ideas about how society should be--is far less important than fact #2--that the Zionist project was to remove the non-Jews from most of Palestine in order to create a state (supposedly*) ONLY of "the Jews."
Fact #2 POISONED with racism any otherwise positive effect of fact #1. For example, the Jewish National Fund may have had some Georgist ideas about land but its main role was to buy land from absentee Palestinian land owners and then evict the Palestinian farmers who rented that land, all for the purpose of removing non-Jews from as much of Palestine as possible. When the Palestinians figured out what the JNF (and the Zionist movement generally) was aiming to do to them it led to the violence of Palestinians against Jews that broke out in 1936.
* I say "supposedly" because in actual fact Israel is no more a state of, by and for the ordinary Jews who live there than the United States is a state of, by and for the ordinary people who live there; both are dictatorships of the rich that treat the ordinary people like dirt. It is important to realize that Zionist leaders had nothing but contempt for the welfare of ordinary Jews (not to mention Palestinians) as I prove at https://johnspritzler.substack.com/p/why-really-zionist-leaders-have-always?r=1iggn .
Joseph and Mary Fels were also dedicated Zionists. However, they realized that attempting to carve out a Jewish state in the Middle East would engage the Jewish people in centuries of war with the very tribal Arab peoples. Their thought was to negotiate the purchase of territory somewhere in the western hemisphere not already occupied by a large number of people.
Same as Einstein and others against Jewish state. Some were thinking of Argentina. The problem of course with democratic state is that they do not solve the Land Problem so lead inevitably to wealth disparities and corruptions of multiple varieties.
The idea of the JNF bought land in Israel being kept for eternity by the national government was never properly withheld after statehood. This was mostly due to the first socialist governments under Ben Gurion, which behaved to support the apparent need for giving the kibbutzim sites that was theirs, and not merely leasing the land to them as originally proposed. (Incidentally my parents gave public concerts to help collect money for this kind of land purchase from local sources, well before the State was established in 1948.)
In my opinion this land distribution was a disaster and it was fortified by the creation of the separate organization of The Israel Lands Authority, which had the power to sell useful sites of land to private and commercial organizations. Gradually the JNF were forced to exchange their now valuable sites for less well developed places, on which many could be forested and not used for urban developments. In 1960 Ben Gurion got a law passed which regarded the total value of a developed site as one thing, not requiring the evaluation for sale of real estate in its more rightful two kinds of separate values, land and buildings separately.
By the means of the most useful land now being sold, less taxation was required on an already overburdened population, all of which had to pull itself up without causing such offense, were the government to rely only on producer/consumer based taxation sources.
David - I appreciate your details about these land issues in Palestine / Israel. Is there anyone besides you in Israel who understands the land value tax policy?
Some years ago I was in touch with a investment broker who was a Georgist here. He had little hopes for LVT finding its place here and I was inclined to agree with him. There may be other Georgists here, but I have not communicated with them. When Netanyahu first took office I sent him a long explanation and recommendation that LVT should be seriously be considered with the change in government. There was no reply.
In my text and discussion with Robert V Andelson, I showed how relatively easy, considering how the history of the policies supporting land ownership by individuals was introduced here, might be reversed. But in his second edition of "LVT around the World", Robert rejected my chapter after several of my attempts at rewriting it, (as my first time of serious chapter composition it was a good lesson for me, I now regard it as how I learned to become a competent writer), and so this situation and claim never came to light.
It is my impression that the leaders of the Israel Land Authority know perfectly well what they are doing and for reasons that are probably selfish these policies will continue and real-estate prices will continue to require mortgages for new families that take up to 25 years to be paid off, when up to about half the average earnings after income taxation go this way. Our military needs are one big reason why the taxes and this exploitation by the government of the natural resources, are so high here.
Fact #1--that some Zionists had some good general ideas about how society should be--is far less important than fact #2--that the Zionist project was to remove the non-Jews from most of Palestine in order to create a state (supposedly*) ONLY of "the Jews."
Fact #2 POISONED with racism any otherwise positive effect of fact #1. For example, the Jewish National Fund may have had some Georgist ideas about land but its main role was to buy land from absentee Palestinian land owners and then evict the Palestinian farmers who rented that land, all for the purpose of removing non-Jews from as much of Palestine as possible. When the Palestinians figured out what the JNF (and the Zionist movement generally) was aiming to do to them it led to the violence of Palestinians against Jews that broke out in 1936.
* I say "supposedly" because in actual fact Israel is no more a state of, by and for the ordinary Jews who live there than the United States is a state of, by and for the ordinary people who live there; both are dictatorships of the rich that treat the ordinary people like dirt. It is important to realize that Zionist leaders had nothing but contempt for the welfare of ordinary Jews (not to mention Palestinians) as I prove at https://johnspritzler.substack.com/p/why-really-zionist-leaders-have-always?r=1iggn .