By denying private property to its people, Israel opened the door to totalitarianism and put its very sovereignty at risk
In 1948, as the State of Israel was forged in the crucible of war, the American philosopher Richard M. Weaver published a book that served as a profound and chilling diagnosis of the modern world’s maladies. In Ideas Have Consequences, he argued that the West’s turn from transcendent truths had set it on a path to ruin.
Central to his argument was a chapter titled “The Last Metaphysical Right,” a defense of private property not as a tool of economic utility, but as the final bastion of human freedom and dignity. “In private property,” he wrote, “there survives the last domain of privacy of any kind. Every other wall has been overthrown.”
For Weaver, property was far more than a bundle of legal rights; it was an ethical and spiritual necessity. It was a buffer between the individual and the omnipotent state, a domain where a man could be sovereign, a space for the cultivation of virtue, and a tangible connection to reality itself.
The person who owned his own home, his own land, his own tools, was a person grounded in responsibility. He could not easily be swept away by abstract ideologies or herded into dependency by a bureaucratic state. The erosion of this right, Weaver warned, would produce a society of “propertyless dependents,” morally adrift and ripe for a new, insidious form of totalitarianism.
Seventy-five years later, Weaver’s prophecy serves as the most incisive, if uncomfortable, lens through which to understand the State of Israel’s deepest and most persistent crisis.
Continue reading on Jewish Home News by Mordechai Sones
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