The state acquires its revenue by physical coercion (taxation) and achieves a compulsory monopoly of force and ultimate decision-making power over a given territory. Hence, there is no just state in Rothbard's libertarianism.

The State of Israel

In 1948, within the boundaries of what was then known as Palestine, David Ben-Gurion announced the independence of the State of Israel. There, by 1949, as Rothbard recounted, "600,000 Jews had created a state which had originally housed 850,000 Arabs." Three-quarters of a million of Arabs "had been driven out from their lands and homes, and the remaining remnant was subject to a harsh military rule." And the homes, lands, and bank accounts of the fleeing refugees "were promptly confiscated by Israel and handed over to Jewish immigrants."

Israel claimed that the three-quarters of a million "were not driven out by force but rather by their own unjustified panic induced by Arab leaders," but as Rothbard pointed out, "everyone recognizes Israel's adamant refusal to let these refugees return and reclaim the property taken from them."

Rothbard saw two absolutely irreconcilable claims in the region:

On the one hand, there are the Palestinian Arabs, who have tilled the soil or otherwise used the land of Palestine for centuries; and on the other, there are a group of external fanatics, who come from all over the world, and who claim the entire land area as "given" to them as a collective religion or tribe at some remote and possibly legendary time in the past.

76 years later, the Israeli state remains undefined in its borders, expanding its territorial monopoly and maintaining state ownership of almost all the country's land. The political movement behind all this conquest that still continues is called Zionism.

Interstate Wars and the Israeli-Palestinian Case

According to Rothbard, the myth that enables states to wax fat off war is the canard that it is fought by them in defense of their subjects. The facts are the reverse:

For if war is the health of the State, it is also its greatest danger. A State can only "die" by defeat in war or by revolution. In war, therefore, the State frantically mobilizes the people to fight for it against another State, under the pretext that it is fighting for them.