Efficiency

Abstract

Attempting to establish liberal guidelines for territorial entitlement, Margaret Moore briefly considers, and abruptly dismisses, any possibility of establishing territorial rights on the basis of efficiency arguments. She naturally associates the view that the efficient use of land has something to do with its rightful ownership, with the Western settlers of North America and, more recently, with the Jewish settlers of Israel – left and right, past and present. Alluding to the old Zionist slogan proclaiming the historical land of Israel prior to its Jewish resettlement as ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’, she states: In the first part of the twentieth century, when early Zionists began to settle in Israel, the efficient use of the land argument was used to justify rights to land. Although some early Zionists claimed that there were few people or no people in Palestine, the evidence is that this wasn’t meant literally…but rather that there were no people using the land.