The Abraham Federation would aim at bringing a higher order of justice than any nation has ever offered its citizens. It would offer acceptable safeguards to Israeli demands for security and guarantee the right of all Jews and Palestinians to visit and settle in the "Holy Land." It would offer Palestinians "self-determination" and a religiously pluralistic "democratic state" that would insure everyone complete freedom of religion. It would also offer Jewish and Christian settlers the opportunity to become citizens of the Abraham Federation. It would be neither a collectivist Zionist state nor a collectivist Palestinian state, but a new form of nation that members of all faiths could build together.
(Naturally, as we have pointed out in previous postings in this series — numbers VI, VII and VIII — neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians can force themselves on the others, any more than they can forget legitimate concerns about personal safety. Further, it is not practicable that a solution simply be imposed. Even the best solution — as we believe the Abraham Federation to be — will have to be phased in more or less gradually.)
Politically, the new nation's constitution would guarantee a Jeffersonian form of democracy, open to all, with clearly defined and limited functions given to government and all political institutions. In addition to normal democratic checks and balances on the "minimalist" government of the nation, the major check on future concentrations of power would be outside of government, based on "Capital Homesteading" policies and institutions that would systematically spread economic power and free enterprise ownership broadly, right down to the individual level.
Widespread diffusion of property would become the ultimate constitutional safeguard for all human rights. Although the new nation would have no "official" state religion, by systematically spreading property and economic power among its citizens, it would insure that freedom of religion, of association, of the press and other protections of individual human rights vis-à-vis the government would be built upon a solid economic foundation.
Thus, the new nation would be built on a foundation of personal (as opposed to collective) political sovereignty, and that foundation would in turn rest on personal economic sovereignty. It would be a nation whose sovereignty is built from the ground up, rather than from the top down. Individual, family, community and minority rights would thus be protected from the potential abuses of political majorities or traditional power elites. In this way, religious freedom and cultural pluralism would have stronger economic supports than other world trouble spots that breed organized terrorism.
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THE Global Justice Movement Website
This is the "Global Justice Movement" (dot org) we refer to in the title of this blog.
