by Michael Greaney

Created on: June 20, 2008   Last Updated: June 25, 2008

While laudable, current efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East are ultimately doomed to failure. There is a seemingly inherent avoidance of the single most important factor in the peace equation: the dignity of the ordinary human person.

All current and past solutions are based on the assumption that one side can only win at the expense of the other side; there is no god but scarcity, and Malthus is his prophet. This ignores the fact that every single human being, regardless of his or her religion, politics, state of economic development, or even physical or mental health or lack thereof shares the same inherent rights as every other human being. The same Creator made all of us, and all of us are thus equally human. This means that each human being, by the mere fact of being human, has as much right to inhabit a country and enjoy his or her natural rights to life, liberty, and private property as every other human being.

What happens, however, when you have competing claims to the same territory?

The answer is to realize that, while the number of things (including land) that can be owned may be limited, the number of owners need not be limited. The number of people who own a particular thing can be expanded indefinitely through the use of some form of corporate ownership. The corporation, in fact, is a mechanism specifically invented to allow countless people to own a single thing, regardless of the objective size of the thing.

Applying this concept to the situation in the Middle East, competing claims can be satisfied by creating a new form of the nation state. Instead of basing it on the assumption that somebody can only gain by making somebody else lose, the new type of nation state can embody the realization that, by joining together through the use of a corporate mechanism, everyone with a legitimate claim can be satisfied.

Something called "The Abraham Federation" has been designed employing advanced concepts of economics and respect for the dignity of the human person. Using the corporate form to own the land, natural resources, and infrastructure of even a very small area allows (in theory) an infinite number of people to have a defined ownership stake in that same area, regardless of size, thereby permitting all legitimate claims to be satisfied. Each permanent resident can be given a single non-transferable, dividend-paying share that defines his or her ownership stake in the country. Each individual can also, through democratic access to capital credit, participate in economic growth and the development of private sector industries and businesses on the land, both as a wage-worker and as an owner.

In this way, residents in the Middle East can come together on a basis that all can share: cooperative economic activity. Once economic democracy has been established, political democracy will necessarily follow. Universal moral principles common to all faiths and ethical systems can be integrated into the institutions of the new social order, while at the same time the free exercise of all religions is protected as a natural right.

By exploring the Abraham Federation concept, today's leaders as well as ordinary people concerned with the drift of the world away from respect for essential human dignity can develop a specific program that holds promise to deliver peace through justice by achieving a "win-win" situation, instead of the usual one in which everyone loses.

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