In an episode of The Tom Woods Show published on August 30, 2024, comedian and libertarian political commentator Dave Smith debated the topic of Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip with academic Walter Block, who argued in favor of the debate resolution that “The proper libertarian position is to support Israel in its war with Hamas.”
Dave Smith rightly argued that supporting Israel’s brazen war crimes in Gaza is totally incompatible with the libertarian principle of non-aggression, while Walter Block defended his view by characterizing the situation in Gaza along with the broader Israel-Palestine conflict in ways that bear no relationship to objective reality.
Indeed, Block’s position is irreconcilable with libertarian principles, and his arguments are absurdly self-contradictory and dependent on demonstrably false claims about the history of the conflict, as I will elucidate below.
You can watch the full debate between Dave Smith and Walter Block here:
This debate follows two that I did on The Tom Woods Show with two coauthors of Block’s, Rafi Farber and Alan Futerman, respectively. In 2016, Block, Futerman, and Farber wrote a paper titled “The Legal Status of the State of Israel: A Libertarian Approach.” In 2021, Block and Futerman reiterated their arguments with the book The Classical Liberal Case for Israel.
After the publication of their paper in 2016, I debated Farber, who argued in favor of the resolution that “Israel was founded on the basis of legitimate homesteading of land and reclamation of lost Jewish property from previous generations of Jews.” I argued that Israel was rather founded through the ethnic cleansing of most of the Arab population of Palestine, which is completely incompatible with the libertarian principle of non-aggression.
In October 2023, after Block and Futerman published an article in The Wall Street Journal defending Israel’s military operation in Gaza, I debated Futerman, who argued in favor of the resolution that “Israel is justified in doing ‘whatever it takes’ to ‘completely destroy’ Hamas in Gaza.” I argued that, no, Israel does not have a “right” much less a “moral duty” to commit war crimes in Gaza.
The debate between Dave Smith and Walter Block is important because Block has claimed to represent the “libertarian” view despite being an ardent Zionist, which raises the question of what libertarianism is and how the basic principles of this political philosophy should properly be applied to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
At its simplest, to be a libertarian is to believe in the principle of non-aggression. Basically, everyone has a right to do whatever they like as long as they do not infringe upon the equal rights of others. The non-aggression principle (NAP) applies to all human rights, including property rights, which are particularly relevant to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
While Walter Block would have people believe that libertarians should share his view of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the libertarian community has roundly denounced his position as fundamentally incompatible with the non-aggression principle.
To demonstrate this, I will first examine Block’s vain attempt to reconcile libertarianism with his Zionist ideology. Then I will review the libertarian community’s response to his vocal support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Finally, I will review Block’s arguments during the recent debate to further illuminate why the position maintained by Dave Smith is the correct one.
Walter Block’s Hoax Paper on Palestine
Block has long claimed to represent the proper “libertarian” position on the Israel-Palestine conflict while vainly trying to reconcile that claim with his extreme Zionist ideology, which is an exercise in futility requiring an adherence to delusional beliefs about history and the fundamental nature of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
In their 2016 paper “The Legal Status of the State of Israel: A Libertarian Approach,” Walter Block, Alan Futerman, and Rafi Farber argued that all the land of Palestine belonged to “the Jews” due to the Jewish people having an ancient historical connection to the land. Therefore, they argued, the means by which the state of Israel was established in 1948 was legitimate.
That paper, however, does not present a scholarly historical account, as it purports, but is instead a regurgitation of tired Zionist mythology. It presents a fictional narrative including outright hoax claims. This is demonstrable even just by consulting their own primary sources, which in numerous instances not only fail to support their claims but directly contradict them.
Their paper is constructed as a rejoinder to the great libertarian thinker Murray Rothbard, who in 1967 wrote an essay titled “War Guilt in the Middle East” criticizing the Zionist project and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians as incompatible with libertarian principles. But despite their claim to represent the true libertarian position, the paper’s entire argument is premised on an explicit rejection of the non-aggression principle and the libertarian conception of individual property rights that follows logically from it.
Deceiving About the Root Cause of the Conflict
To illustrate, Block et al. argued that the root cause of the conflict is inherent Arab hatred of Jews, and to support that claim, they cite outbreaks of Arab violence against Jews in 1920, 1921, and 1929, during the British occupation of Palestine under a League of Nations Mandate. One of the sources they cite to support their contention that the violence was rooted purely in anti-semitism is the “Survey of Palestine” prepared for the 1946 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry. However, that source not only does not support their claim but directly contradicts it.
As noted by their cited source, the British government’s own commission of inquiry into the root cause of the violence in 1920 determined that the outbreak stemmed not from anti-semitism but from “Arab disappointment at the non-fulfillment of the promises of independence” made by the British government in exchange for Arab support for the war effort against the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
The Arabs were frustrated and angered by the “denial of the right of self-determination” resulting from Britain’s belligerent occupation under a Mandate aimed at facilitating the Zionist project, which the Arabs reasonably feared “would lead to their economic and political subjection to the Jews.”
(As the 1937 Peel Commission observed on page 28 of its report, the Mandate was actually drafted by Zionists for the purpose of facilitating their settler-colonial project to reconstitute Palestine into a Jewish state.)
The Survey of Palestine also referenced the 1921 Haycraft Commission, which inquired into the root causes of the violence occurring earlier that year and found that “the Arabs were aware that Jewish predominance was envisaged not only by extremists but also by the responsible representatives of Zionism.”
(The “extremists” referenced included the Zionist terrorist organizations Lehi, or the Stern Gang, and the Irgun, or Etzel.)
As the Haycraft Commission concluded, “there is no inherent anti-Semitism in the country, racial or religious. We are credibly assured by educated Arabs that they would welcome the arrival of well-to-do and able Jews who could help to develop the country to the advantage of all sections of the community.”
The commission also confirmed that the Arabs’ fears were well-founded. The Zionists were open about their intention to subjugate and dispossess the indigenous Arab population. As the Haycraft Commission further observed, when the acting Chairman of the Zionist Commission was interviewed,
“[H]e was perfectly frank in expressing his view of the Zionist ideal…In his opinion, there can only be one National Home in Palestine, and that a Jewish one, and no equality in the partnership between Jews and Arabs, but a Jewish predominance as soon as the numbers of that race are sufficiently increased.”
Similarly, a British inquiry into the 1929 Hebron massacre, the Shaw Commission, determined that there was “no doubt that racial animosity on the part of the Arabs, consequent upon the disappointment of their political and national aspirations and fear for their economic future, was the fundamental cause of the outbreak.” [Emphasis added]
The Shaw Commission further noted:
“In less than ten years three serious attacks have been made by Arabs on Jews. For eighty years before the first of these attacks there is no recorded instance of any similar incidents. It is obvious then that the relations between the two races during the past decade must have differed in some material respect from those which previously obtained. Of this we found ample evidence. The reports of the Military Court and of the local Commission which, in 1920 and in 1921 respectively, enquired into the disturbances of those years, drew attention to the change in the attitude of the Arab population towards the Jews in Palestine. This was borne out by the evidence tendered during our enquiry when representatives of all parties told us that before the War the Jews and Arabs lived side by side if not in amity, at least with tolerance, a quality which to-day is almost unknown in Palestine.”
In sum, the root cause of the conflict is emphatically not inherent Arab hatred of Jews, as Walter Block has vainly attempted to maintain, but the Zionists’ aim to subject and dispossess the indigenous Arab population of Palestine—which is to say that the Arab animosity toward Jews stemmed not from anti-semitism but anti-Zionism.
We’re just getting started, but already we can see that Block has chosen to supersede his proclaimed adherence to libertarian principles with his Zionist ideology, which requires extreme cognitive dissonance on his part.
Lying that Palestine Was Mostly Unpopulated
An old Zionist propaganda slogan that many people are still familiar with today due to popular repetition is that Palestine in the early twentieth century was “a land without a people for a people without a land.”
Block et al. echo that slogan by propagating the hoax claim that when Jews began immigrating into Palestine, the land was “almost unpopulated,” and Arabs only subsequently immigrated en masse into Palestine to take advantage of the economic development by the Jews.
In the early 1900s, Palestine was “almost unpopulated,” they claim, citing a paper titled “Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab Israeli Conflict” by Mitchell G. Bard, whom they describe as “one of our best sources to refute common myths against Israel.”
The fact that they regard this source as one of their best is highly instructive since Bard, too, perpetrates demonstrable hoaxes.
In the passage they quote from this supposedly great source, Bard cites the 1937 Peel Commission Report, selectively quoting from a description of land considered uncultivable as though it was characteristic of the whole of Palestine. Apart from this blatant cherry-picking, by simply consulting the primary source, Bard’s intent to deceive is provable by comparing his claim with what the commission really said about the population of Palestine at the time.
According to the 1937 Peel Commission, Palestine in 1914 was “overwhelmingly Arab in character.” In 1919, there was a population in Palestine of about half a million Arabs, “with a small minority of 65,000 Jews.” From 1920 to 1921, around 16,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine, where the Arab population was about 600,000. As the commission remarked:
“It would be a very long time, it seemed, before the Jews could become a majority in the country. Indeed, as late as 1926, a leading Zionist stated that there was ‘still little prospect of the Arabs being overtaken in a numerical sense within a measurable period of time.'”
Elsewhere in their paper, Block et al. again quote Bard describing “a flood of Arab immigrants,” a claim for which Bard cited the 1930 Hope Simpson Commission report on the causes of the 1929 Arab riots. According to Bard, that report on page 126 “said the British practice of ignoring the uncontrolled illegal Arab immigration…had the effect of displacing the prospective Jewish immigrants.”
But that is yet another outright hoax claim, as proven again by simply checking the primary source. The cited page of the 1930 Hope Simpson report is from Chapter 10, which dealt entirely with Jewish immigration, and page 126 describes the “pseudotraveler” who entered the country with permission but ended up staying illegally, the numbers of whom were subtracted from the legally permitted quota of Jewish immigrants.
In other words, the primary source cited by Block et al., far from showing that illegal Arab immigration was displacing prospective Jewish immigrants, instead showed that illegal Jewish immigration was doing an injustice to Jews desiring to emigrate to Palestine legally.
(And libertarians might debate what “legally” means in this context, but to avoid the tangent, we can accept Block’s acceptance that “illegal” meant whatever the British said it meant.)
Similarly, to support their claim that Arabs en masse were “immigrating to Palestine at the same time and because of the economic development that the Jews created,” they cite the 1972 book The Case for Israel by Isi Leibler, who in turn cited the essay “Land Ownership in Palestine, 1880-1948” by Moshe Aumann, who in turn cited page 279 of the Peel Commission Report as the source for his claim that Palestine after World War I became “a country of Arab immigration.” That British report, Aumann claimed, “devotes a special section to illegal Arab immigration,” estimating that “between 60,000 and 100,000” Arabs illegally immigrated into Palestine during that time.
Further into their paper, Block et al. repeat their claim that:
“Actually, most of the Arab population of Palestine by the first half of the 20th century arrived to the land because of Zionist growth and development. The same Arab population that was, according to Rothbard, being “expropriated” was actually moving to Palestine in order to work with the Jews…”
Here, they directly cite Moshe Aumann citing page 279 of the Peel Commission Report.
Once again, by simply examining their primary source, we can see that Block et al. are propagating yet another hoax claim. Turning to that page from the 1937 Peel Commission Report, we can see that it not only does not support the claim for which it was cited but directly contradicts it.
In fact, while estimating that 282,645 Jews immigrated into Palestine between 1920 and 1936, the total non-Jewish immigration, which included a considerable number of non-Arabs, was estimated at 19,073—not 60,000 (much less 100,000) as claimed by Block et al. Moreover, that was an estimate of immigration in general, not illegal immigration, which the report otherwise described, as far as Arab immigration was concerned, as “casual, temporary and seasonal.”
Thus, we can see once again that Walter Block’s claim that Palestine was mostly uninhabited, and Arabs only mass emigrated to Palestine to take advantage of the economic development of the Jews, is directly contradicted by the primary sources they cite to support their untenable position.
The census taken in 1922, as we can learn from the 1930 Hope Simpson Report, estimated the population of Palestine at 757,182, which consisted of about 11% Jews, 11% mostly Arab Christians, and 78% Arab Muslims. That is, at the very start of the Mandate era, after significant Jewish immigration had already occurred, Palestine was 89% Arab in character.
The 1930 Shaw Commission report noted that Palestine had a population of “approximately ninety persons to the square mile even when the desert and other uncultivable areas are included.” While this is not a high population density, neither is it “almost unpopulated.”
To put the nail in the coffin on Block’s hoax claim, the 1946 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry noted that the population of Palestine had increased from about 750,000 in 1922 to 1,765,000 at the end of 1944. The committee further observed that while most of the increase in the Jewish population was due to immigration, immigration accounted for only about 4% of the increase in the Arab population; and as the committee remarked, “The expansion of the Arab community by natural increase has been in fact one of the most striking features of Palestine’s social history under the Mandate.” [Emphasis added]
Their entire paper is characterized by this type of deception, presenting itself as a scholarly account but instead delivering uncritical regurgitations of ahistorical Zionist propaganda, resulting in an overall fictional narrative belied by the actual documentary record—including their own primary sources.
Defending the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
As another example of intellectual dishonesty, Block et al. tried to deny that Israel was created in 1948 through the ethnic cleansing of Arab Palestinians, and to that end they brazenly lied that that “Jews did not come in and destroy Arab towns and build over previously homesteaded territory.”
The truth, as I documented in my book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, is that Jews owned only about 7% of the land in Palestine by the end of the Mandate. Arabs owned more land than Jews in every single district of Palestine. Israel was established by ethnically cleansing most of the Arab population from their homes, resulting in about 750,000 Palestinian refugees. Hundreds of Arab villages were literally wiped off the map to make sure that Palestinian refugees had no homes to return to.
For an unimpeachable source debunking the lie that Jews did not destroy and build over Arab towns, we can turn to Moshe Dayan, who was a commander of Zionist armed forces during the 1948 War and as Israeli Defense Minister in 1967 acknowledged the following:
“We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here. In considerable areas of the country [i.e., nearly 7% of Palestine] we bought the lands from the Arabs [the rest of the territory of what became Israel having been acquired by war]. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either…There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.” [Emphasis added]
After denying the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Block et al. argue that even if it had been ethnic cleansing, that would have been justified. In their words, supposing “that the Jews took this land by force,” they “still would have been justified in doing precisely that” since Jews had homesteaded the land “some 2,000 years ago.”
Thus, Block et al. try to defend the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which is how the “Jewish state” of Israel was created, and which is, of course, completely incompatible with both the non-aggression principle and the libertarian concept of individual property rights. For Walter Block to claim that his view represents the true “libertarian” position is monstrously perverse.
Rejecting Individual Property Rights
To further illustrate the perversity of their claim, Block et al. directly contradict themselves by explicitly acknowledging that their conclusions depend on a rejection of libertarian principles.
Ironically, they criticize Murray Rothbard for having used the phrase “Arab lands” in his 1967 essay “War Guilt in the Middle East.” Here is the relevant excerpt from Rothbard:
“Because of the Arabs resident in Palestine, Zionism had to become in practice an ideology of conquest. After World War I, Great Britain seized control of Palestine and used its sovereign power to promote, encourage, and abet the expropriation of Arab lands for Zionist use and for Zionist immigration. Often old Turkish land titles would be dredged up and purchased cheaply, thus expropriating the Arab peasantry on behalf of European Zionist immigration. Into the heart of the peasant and nomadic Arab world of the Middle East there thus came as colonists, and on the backs and on the bayonets of British imperialism, a largely European colonizing people.” [Emphasis added]
In response, Block et al. write:
“It is difficult to see why Rothbard would prefer a collectivist national concept as a justification for land ownership such as “Arab land” rather than concrete homesteading of land and purchase…To say that an entire terrain is occupied (and also talking about ‘Arab land’) is an expression of unwarranted collectivism, something explicitly opposed in Rothbard’s work. He seems to be replacing homesteading (and therefore legitimate land ownership) by definition.”
This is a remarkably dishonest argument for two reasons.
First, Rothbard wasn’t applying a collectivist concept of land ownership. By “Arab lands,” he simply meant land that had been homesteaded by and that was therefore rightfully owned by Arabs, and Rothbard was correct in his observation that the Zionists exploited feudalistic Ottoman land laws to deprive the rightful property owners of their homesteaded land by purchasing it from absentee landlords in whose names various land tracts had been registered under Ottoman rule.
This process was discussed, for example, in the 1929 Shaw Commission report, which noted that it sometimes resulted in whole Arab villages being expelled by the Zionists who expropriated the land in this manner, a means that must be considered fraudulent according to libertarian principles.
In their attempt to defend the Zionists’ illegitimate acquisition of Arab lands, Block et al. resort to even more hoax claims. For instance, they claim that “Most of the land purchased had not been cultivated previously because it was swampy, rocky, sandy or, for some other reason, regarded as uncultivable.” But here, again, they quote fellow hoaxer Moshe Aumann, who cites page 242 of the Peel Commission Report, which does not support the claim for which it is cited.
The earlier 1930 Hope Simpson report had noted, to the contrary, that of the 1,200,000 Turkish dunams of land Jews had acquired, only 17% was considered “uncultivable,” and the Peel Commission seven years later put the proportion at 22%. Page 239 of the Peel Commission report states, “Arabs hold 12,160,000 dunams of which 6,037,000 are classed as cultivable, and Jews 1,208,000 with 939,000 dunums of cultivable land.”
So much for yet another fabrication from Block and his coauthors! When they claim that the state of Israel was “built virtually entirely on homesteaded or purchased areas, labored on and developed by Jewish majorities,” they are lying, brazenly. The narrative they present is a fabrication bearing no resemblance to the historical documentary record.
Second, it is an extraordinarily hypocritical criticism of Rothbard to accuse him of utilizing a collectivist approach not only because it is untrue, but also because, to arrive at the conclusion that Rothbard was “not correct,” it is Block and his coauthors who explicitly rely on a collectivist concept of land ownership, completely rejecting their own explanation of what would be required by libertarian principles. Their whole argument is thus logically incoherent, an irreconcilable self-contradiction.
By their own admission, a Rothbardian approach to land ownership must rest on individual property rights. As they write, “First of all, possession is nine tenths of the law. He who now possesses the land is presumed to be the rightful owner of it. It is up to the one who wants the territory, but does not now occupy it, to make the case for transfer.”
Thus, during the Mandate era, we must presume that the Arab inhabitants were the rightful owners of the lands in their possession, and it was up to individual Jews to prove their case that they were instead the rightful heirs to specific plots of land. Neither ancestral DNA nor religion is a legitimate basis for property rights, according to libertarian principles; that would be a collectivist conceptualization premised on a rejection of individual rights.
For Jews to legitimately reclaim land in Palestine then occupied by Arabs, according to libertarian theory, they would have to show that their direct ancestor had homesteaded that same piece of land and had been illegitimately deprived of it. Individual Jews would have to prove that they were the legitimate heirs by tracing their property rights directly to a specific ancestor’s ownership of that specific plot of land.
It is not sufficient, according to libertarian principles, to say that “the Jews” had inhabited the land 2,000 years earlier. Such a tribalist or collectivist concept is irreconcilable with the concept of individual property rights.
Block et al. also acknowledge that the passage of time itself serves as a natural statute of limitations because the further one goes into the past, “the more difficult it is to encounter any relevant evidence.”
As they further concede:
“We readily admit that there is no single Jew who can trace his ownership rights over any specific piece of land from 2,000 years ago. And this, indeed, would be the criterion for transfer of land titles if we were discussing individual rights. But we are not now doing so.” [Emphasis added]
Block et al. admit that their argument necessarily requires “departing from strict libertarian principles.” They “are not analyzing the behavior of private individuals” in dealing with the actions of Israel but are instead “focusing on these actions from a point of view of a government, which is per se an evil doer according to libertarian theory.”
In other words, to arrive at their conclusion that all the land of Palestine belonged to “the Jews,” they explicitly reject the application of libertarian ideals with respect to individual property rights and instead adopt of alternative frameworks of statism and collectivism.
So much for Block’s ridiculous pretense of representing the proper “libertarian” position on the Israel-Palestine conflict! Their whole paper is an exercise in futility demonstrative of extreme cognitive dissonance.
Block’s Advocacy of Criminal Violence Against Palestinians
As mentioned, in addition to their 2016 paper falsely claiming to represent the true libertarian position on the conflict, Block and Futerman also wrote the book The Classical Liberal Case for Israel, published in 2021, which features a foreword by war criminal extraordinaire Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel.
During his debate with Dave Smith on The Tom Woods Show, Block proclaimed how proud he is to have had a pathological liar and mass murderer contribute the foreword to his book.
Block has a persistent record of advocating criminal violence against Palestinians. As I documented at great length in my book Obstacle to Peace, with a particular focus on “Operation Cast Lead,” Israel’s prior military operations in Gaza have been characterized by the deliberate use of disproportionate force, or what the Israeli military established called the “Dahiya Doctrine.” But in an October 2021 article in The American Spectator, Block argued that Israel’s prior military operations in Gaza had been too tame, and what Israel should do instead is “pulverize” Gaza—the same way the U.S. pulverized Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan and the Allies pulverized Dresden in Germany during World War II.
As already noted, after the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023, Walter Block and Alan Futerman essentially argued in The Wall Street Journal that Israel has not only a “right” but a “moral duty” to commit war crimes in Gaza for the purpose of destroying Hamas.
Such advocacy of criminal violence prompted other prominent libertarians to speak out and correct the record about the proper position logically following from adherence to the non-aggression principle.
As mentioned, I debated Futerman on The Tom Woods Show in late October, arguing the negative to the position he and Block had taken in their Wall Street Journal article.
In an article at LewRockwell.com in November, Kevin Duffy, co-founder and principal of Bearing Asset Management, responded to their Wall Street Journal article by expressing sorrow that “the great Murray Rothbard is not with us to condemn the recent slaughter of innocents in Gaza at the hands of Israeli soldiers.” He quoted Rothbard describing war as “mass murder” and affirming that “the libertarian opposes war. Period.” Duffy wondered whether there was “a fracture within the libertarian community regarding the killing of civilians in war” or whether Walter Block had “simply gone AWOL.”
On Substack, Block objected that he had not departed from libertarian principles. He argued that, to the contrary, Murray Rothbard had done so. Block contended that Rothbard was contradicting himself by saying that “the libertarian opposes war” because Rothbard had also favored, for example, the side of the American colonists against the British government in the Revolutionary War.
But this argument of Block’s is an absurd strawman fallacy. Rothbard was by no means contradicting himself because the observation that war is “mass murder” logically follows from the fact that, in every war, there is at least one aggressor. By saying that libertarians oppose war, Rothbard was obviously not saying that armed force may not be used in self-defense. It’s just that war logically could not exist in a world in which the libertarian principle of non-aggression is respected.
By utilizing that strawman argument in response to Rothbard’s observation, Block avoided having to address the fact that Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity are, by definition, not legitimate acts of self-defense. Rather, according to both international law and libertarian principles, Israel’s actions constitute criminal violence.
In another Wall Street Journal article published in mid-December 2023, Walter Block and his coauthor Alan Futerman again tried to maintain the absurd false pretense that Israel’s actions in Gaza and throughout its history have been purely defensive.
On January 31, 2024, LewRockwell.com published a scathing indictment of Block’s support for Israel’s criminal violence by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, an Austrian school economist, libertarian philosopher, and—like Walter Block—a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute, which also published Hoppe’s “Open Letter to Walter E. Block” the following day.
As Hoppe noted, Block’s defense of the expulsion of Arabs from their homes by Zionist forces during the 1948 War depends on an abandonment of “the methodological individualism underlying and characteristic of all libertarian thought”; it depended instead on “some form of collectivism that allows for such notions as group or tribal property and property rights, collective responsibility and collective guilt.” Block’s defense of ethnic cleansing was “not only obviously incompatible with libertarianism” but “also plain absurd.”
If that “collectivist nonsense” were “not enough to disqualify Block as a libertarian,” Hoppe wrote, then his defense of Israel’s war crimes in his Wall Street Journal article from October “should remove even the slightest remaining doubt that he is anything but a libertarian, a Rothbardian or a sweet and nice person.” It revealed that Block is “an unhinged, bloodthirsty monster, rather than a libertarian committed to the non-aggression principle.” Block’s arguments “have nothing whatsoever to do with libertarianism,” Hoppe reiterated. To the contrary, “to advocate the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents is the total and complete negation of libertarianism and the non-aggression principle.”
On February 5, 2024, the Mises Institute published a review of Block’s book The Classical Liberal Case for Israel by David Gordon and Wanjiru Njoya, who rejected Block’s defense of what Murry Rothbard had rightly characterized as Zionist aggression against the Arab inhabitant of Palestine. They also repudiated Block’s claim to represent the libertarian position on this question and concluded that, “Whatever that theory of justice is, property rights based on ethnicity, DNA and genetic entitlement to ancestral lands corroborated by religious texts and cultural inheritance is not a libertarian theory of private property rights.”
On February 8, Block wrote an “Open letter to the children of Gaza” characterizing all adult Palestinians in Gaza as legitimate military targets and all Palestinian children as “human shields” by virtue of their being born in Gaza. Block thus attempted to justify Israel’s killing of what was estimated at the time to be over 25,000 Palestinians, with approximately 70% of the dead being women and children.
That proportion is roughly equivalent to the proportion of Gaza’s population who are women and children, which is exactly the outcome we would expect if Israel were bombing indiscriminately. The obvious explanation for this is that Israel has been bombing indiscriminately.
The same day Block’s open letter was published telling Palestinian children why their death and suffering was their parents’ fault and not Israel’s, the Mises Institute published an article written by myself and Scott Horton, the director of the Libertarian Institute, titled “The Israeli State’s Assault on Gaza Must Stop,” in which we again refuted Block’s position that Israel has a right to commit war crimes. To that end, Horton and I sufficiently documented the genocidal nature of its assault on Gaza, which I further documented in my March 19 article for the Libertarian Institute, “U.S. Humanitarian Aid to Gaza Is a Cynical PR Ploy.”
Indeed, by the time our article was published by the Mises Institute, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in a case brought by the government of South Africa, had issued preliminary measures ordering Israel to demonstrate compliance with the 1948 Genocide Convention on the grounds that its actions in Gaza amounted to a plausible genocide.
In April, the Mises Institute appropriately expelled Block from his position as a Senior Fellow because of his vocal support for Israel’s brazen war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The situation at that time was that 1.5 million Palestinian civilians were sheltering in Rafah in southern Gaza because they had been ordered to flee there by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), with Gaza City in the north and Khan Younis in between having already been devasted by Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment (after civilians were first told to flee from the north to Khan Younis in the south). Israel was nevertheless threatening to do the same to Rafah as it had done to the rest of Gaza, and United Nations and international human rights agencies were decrying this threat and warning the world that an invasion of Rafah could only result in an unacceptable escalation of what was already a horrifying humanitarian catastrophe.
Walter Block’s response to that situation was to characterize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “heroic” and “courageous” for defying the international community by persisting to declare his intent to invade Rafah. Block urged Israel not to wait but to “Invade Rafah Now!”
The ICJ, by contrast, issued additional provisional measures on May 24 to protect the defenseless civilian population of Gaza, ordering Israel to halt its military assault in Rafah as a necessary measure to demonstrate compliance with its legal obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Having already been booted from his position as Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute, the institute’s president, Thomas DiLorenzo, followed up Hoppe’s scathing indictment of Block’s unhinged bloodthirstiness on May 30 with an article titled “From Mad (Social) Scientist to Mad Zionist.” DiLorenzo wrote that Block “used to be very libertarian on the issue of war” but had “abandoned the principles of libertarianism with his full-throated support of the war crimes committed by the Israeli government by intentionally targeting and killing tens of thousands of civilians, including women, children, and babies in Gaza.”
As DiLorenzo observed:
“Israel has every right to defend itself against future barbaric attacks by the gang of murderous thugs known as Hamas—and anyone else—but that’s an entirely different matter than having a ‘right’ to commence a campaign of genocide against the civilian population of Gaza, as has been occurring in recent months—accompanied by the almost apoplectically enthusiastic support of Walter Block.”
Describing Block’s attempt to justify the massacring of Palestinian children as “sociopathic,” DiLorenzo further noted how Block had criticized the Joe Biden administration for halting a shipment of 2,000-pound Mark-84 bombs out of fear that Israel would use them to commit war crimes in Rafah—as had already occurred with U.S.-supplied MK-84 bombs elsewhere throughout Gaza, including in areas to which civilians were ordered to flee by the IDF.
Block cited the halt of that shipment as proof that the United States was not being supportive enough of Israel’s genocide. As DiLorenzo observed, this demonstrated that Block was “fully in favor using the U.S. government’s powers of legalized theft (aka taxation) to pay for more bombs for Israel,” which “alone should disqualify him as a libertarian.”
Also on May 30, the executive director of the Mises Institute, Ryan McMaken, published an article titled “We Have Standards,” which was a response to mischaracterizations of the institute’s decision to remove Block from his fellowship position as being contrary to the spirit of “debate” and avoidance of “dogmatism”—or, as Block himself described it, “cancel culture.”
“Well, the fact is there are some topics that no longer require debate in the pages of mises.org,” McMaken wrote. “There is no libertarian case for carpet-bombing civilians.” Block’s “enthusiastic support for war crimes and ethnic cleansing” was simply incompatible with the non-aggression principle, period.
McMaken further noted the irony of people accusing the Mises Institute of “excommunicating” Block “when it is Block who is playing the excommunication game” by having “effectively declared that anyone who disagrees with him on Zionism” is taking up an anti-libertarian position. “It is Block who has staked out the extreme position and litmus test here.”
A “final straw” for the institute was “Block’s unrestrained support” for Israel’s war crimes and advocacy for “targeting all children and parents in Gaza,” plus his insistence “that the U.S. government fleece its taxpayers to pay for more foreign aid to Israel.”
The Dave Smith vs. Walter Block Debate
During the recent debate on The Tom Woods Show, Dave Smith presented solid arguments while Walter Block again demonstrated his total dependence on factual and logical errors.
While the focus of the debate was the situation in Gaza, with Block arguing that “the proper libertarian position is to support Israel in its war with Hamas,” historical context was inevitably brought up, including root cause of the Israel-Palestine conflict going back to the Mandate era, the 1967 war and Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories ongoing ever since, and Israeli policy toward Gaza predating its response to the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023.
I will summarize their arguments on key historical events chronologically while providing additional illuminating details.
The Root Cause of the Conflict
Block argued that the conflict was started not by the Jews but by the Arabs, and to support this claim, he cited the 1929 Hebron massacre.
Evidently, Block never watched my debates with his coauthors Rafi Farber or Alan Futerman because I pointed out in each instance that Jews and Arabs had peaceful relations in Palestine before the Zionist movement, and that the British government’s own commissions of inquiry into the outbreaks of violence in 1920, 1921, and 1929 concluded that the root cause was the Arabs’ growing discontent about being denied their right to self-determination under a belligerent military occupation existing for the purpose of facilitating the Zionist project aimed at reconstituting Palestine into a demographically “Jewish state.” (Or Block did watch those debates but persists in his falsification of the historical record anyway.)
Dave Smith likewise pointed out during the debate that Palestine was a refuge for Jews relative to the rampant anti-semitism in Europe and that it was the Zionists who initiated aggression by virtue of their settler colonial project backed by British guns to subjugate and ultimately dispossess the Arab Palestinians.
Zionist Theft of Arab Land
Block started out by saying that he was basing his argument on the non-aggression principle and private property rights based on homesteading, whereby mixing your labor with the soil confers land ownership.
He then proceeded to completely contradict himself by falsely claiming that Jews didn’t steal land from Arabs in Palestine, which he supported by making his usual argument that “the Jews” owned all of Palestine by virtue of Jews having lived in that area 2,000 years ago, which he explicitly acknowledged was a collectivist argument. “There’s nothing wrong with collectivism in property rights because some people own property collectively,” he circularly reasoned.
He misrepresented Murray Rothbard by saying that even Rothbard agreed that Jews had a right to 7% of the land, which is inaccurate because Rothbard rightly criticized how the Zionists exploited feudalistic Ottoman land laws to deprive Arab homesteaders of their rightful property.
Block further argued that if the Jews had tried to establish their state in that 7% of Palestine, the Arabs would have launched a genocidal invasion against it. This is a nonsensical argument for numerous reasons. Those Jewish communities were non-contiguous, for one. They were also already largely autonomous, which didn’t prompt this genocidal war he hypothesizes would occur in the event of Jews exercising independence. But most importantly, it is the fallacy of begging the question because it presumes that the reason Arab military forces fought the Zionists in 1948 was pure anti-semitism as opposed to an attempt to stop the Zionists’ already ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
In fact, by the time armed forces from neighboring Arab states intervened into Palestine, over a quarter million Palestinians had already been ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces. Most of the fighting also occurred in areas that had been proposed for the Arab stated under the UN partition plan, in what the preeminent Israeli historian—and ideological Zionist—Benny Morris described as the Zionists’ “war of conquest.”
Palestinians’ Ancient Historical Connection to the Land
Block also falsely claimed in the debate that Arabs never arrived in Palestine until 1,400 years ago during the Muslim conquest of the region. Dave Smith appeared to tacitly concede that point by describing Palestinians as having lived there “for hundreds of years.” In fact, DNA studies have shown that Palestinians are descended from Canaanite tribes that were inhabiting the land before there ever was an ancient kingdom of Israel.
(Much more information about the pre-Israel history of Palestine is available in my freely downloadable e-book and audiobook A Brief History of Palestine: From Canaan through the Mandate Era.)
Dave Smith, who like Block is Jewish, countered Block’s collectivist argument by rightly ridiculing the idea that because he has Jewish DNA, he could go and kick a Palestinian family out of their home in the West Bank. This, Smith noted, is contrary to the libertarian conception of property rights, and Palestinians had homesteading rights to land they were expelled from. The self-described “Jewish state,” he rightly noted, was in fact created through the mass expulsion of Arabs.
The United Nations Partition Plan
Dave Smith also correctly pointed out that UN General Assembly Resolution 181, the infamous “partition plan,” was never implemented and didn’t grant any legitimacy to the Zionists’ settler-colonial project.
Indeed, as I have detailed in my 2010 article “The Myth of the UN Creation of Israel” and elaborated on in Obstacle to Peace, Resolution 181 neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred any legal authority to the Zionists for their unilateral declaration of the existence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948. By citing Resolution 181 as conferring legal authority, the Zionists were fraudulently declaring sovereignty over land they had no rights to.
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Block persisted in his denial that ethnic cleansing occurred. “Some of them left,” he said. “Maybe they just wanted to go on vacation, who knows?” Others fled out of fear, he acknowledged, but he also repeated the tired Zionist propaganda narrative that Palestinians left voluntarily on orders from Arab leaders to facilitate a “slaughter of all the Jews.”
Block further argued that because the Arabs had tried to wage a genocidal war against Jews in 1948, who had done nothing at all wrong to the Arabs, it is understandable that the Jews did not want Arabs who had fled to come back because, if they were to do so, those hostile people would pose an existential threat to the state of Israel.
Dave Smith countered by accurately pointing out that atrocities like the massacre at Deir Yassin in April 1948 had prompted much of the flight. Furthermore, these refugees of war had a right to return to their homes.
Indeed, to demonstrate that Block’s narrative is fictional and a vain repetition of antiquated Zionist propaganda, we can turn to no less authoritative a source than the Arab Section of the Israeli Defense Forces’ Intelligence Service, which in June 1948 issued a report titled “Migration of Eretz Yisrael Arabs between December 1, 1947 and June 1, 1948.”
The title of the report refers in Hebrew to “the Land of Israel,” which the Zionists envisioned as all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. (The more extreme Zionists also viewed land east of the Jordan River as belonging to the Jews.) However, within the report, they referred alternatively to “the State of Israel,” by which they evidently meant the roughly 55% of Palestine that had been proposed for the Jewish State under the UN “partition plan” (even though Jews were about 30% of the population and owned about 7% of the land, with the majority Arabs owning more land in every single district, as I document in Obstacle to Peace.)
By the start of June 1948, according to the IDF’s estimate, 391,000 Arabs had been displaced from “the State of Israel,” with 239,000 having left the unilaterally proclaimed “Jewish State” and most of the “Arab flight” occurring in April and May.
The IDF detailed the reasons for the “flight” and, as the serious person would expect, didn’t mention anything about Palestinians taking off leisurely on vacations. Neither was it due to Palestinians being ordered to get out of the way by the armed forces of neighboring Arab states intent on killing all Jews. The Intelligence Service rather determined that “political factors had no effect whatsoever on the movement of the Arab population.”
The withdraw of British forces at the expiration of the Mandate in mid-May had “freed our hands to take action,” the IDF reported, and “every district underwent a wave of migration as our actions in that area intensified and expanded,” with “wide-scale operations” that included terrorizing civilians into flight, such as with “long stints of shelling with extremely loud blasts.” Some villages were emptied because residents feared they might experience the same as neighboring villages that had been terrorized by IDF forces (or “Haganah,” as the organization was called prior to the May 14 declaration of Israel’s existence). “In conclusion,” the report stated, “it can be said that at least 55% of the overall migration movement was motivated by our actions and their impact.”
Additionally, there were “The actions of the Dissidents,” meaning the Jewish terrorist organizations Lehi (Stern Gang) and the Irgun (Etzel), which helped create further “panic flight.”
In summary, the IDF determined that “the impact of ‘Jewish military action’ (Haganah and Dissidents) on the migration was decisive, as some 70% of the residents left their communities and migrated as a result of these actions.” [Emphasis added]
There had been only isolated instances of Arab villages receiving evacuation orders from local gangs, the Arab Higher Committee (AHC), or the Transjordan government, which orders were given for various reasons, including fears about villages being overrun by Zionist forces; but “compared to other factors, this element did not have decisive weight, and its impact amounts to some 5% of all villages having been evacuated for this reason.”
Furthermore, “In the early stages of the evacuation, when the scope was still small, Arab institutions tried to counter flight the evacuation and restrain the migration waves.” [Emphasis added] The ACH had imposed restrictions and penalties for fleeing and, with “the help of neighboring countries, which shared the same interests on this point,” they “mostly tried to prevent the flight of young conscription age.”
The IDF determined, however, that “none of these actions were at all successful as no positive action was taken that could have restrained the factors that motivated and pushed the migration.” That is to say, the efforts by Arab leaders to stop the flight were met with total failure due to the sheer terror caused by the Zionist forces. There was a “persistence of calls from Arab countries” not for Palestinians to leave but “for refugees to return to their homes” (or, for young men, “to the front”).
So much for Walter Block’s hoax narrative aimed at trying to justify the ethnic cleansing by which his beloved “Jewish state” came into existence.
The 1967 War
According to Walter Block, in 1967, there was again “a war that was started by the Arabs.”
In fact, it is completely uncontroversial that Israel fired the first shot of that war with a surprise attack on Egypt on the morning of June 5 that destroyed its air force while most of its planes were still on the ground.
Israel claims it was a “preemptive” attack, but the documentary record, far from showing that Israel was facing in imminent invasion by Egypt, instead indicates that President Gamal Abdel Nasser had no intention of striking first, as I also detail in Obstacle to Peace.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) gave President Lyndon Johnson its assessment that if war were to break out, it would be started by Israel, which, because of its qualitative military superiority, would readily defeat the combined Arab armies within just a couple of weeks. The CIA’s prediction proved correct, except that it took Israel just six days (hence it being called “the Six Day War” by Israelis).
A typical example of how Zionist propagandists rely on hoax claims to deceive about the causes of the 1967 war can be found in the book What Justice Demands (2018) by Elan Journo, a Senior Fellow and Vice President of Content Products at the Ayn Rand Institute, who attempts to support the narrative that Israel’s attack was “preemptive” by producing the following quote from Nasser (the ellipses are Journo’s):
“We will operate as one army fighting a single battle for the sake of a common objective—the objective of the Arab nation…The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.”
This is an enlightening example because, to see through the lie, as is so frequently the case with propaganda, all we must do is restore those statements into the context from whence they were carefully selected. Here is the more complete text of the Nasser quote, with my italics to show the text that Journo left out and bold to highlight the key omitted detail:
“We will operate as one army fighting a single battle for the sake of a common objective—the objective of the Arab nation. The problem today is not just Israel, but also those behind it. If Israel embarks on an aggression against Syria or Egypt the battle against Israel will be a general one and not confined to one spot on the on the Syrian or Egyptian borders. The battle will be a general one and our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.” [Emphasis added]
Thus, Journo took a quote in which Nasser said that Egypt, Syria, and Jordan were united in the aim of taking the fight to Israel if Israel were to start a war with them, and he deceitfully turned it into a quote of Nasser proclaiming his intention to start a war with Israel.
To reiterate, Block’s claim that the Arabs were the aggressors in 1967 rests on the absurdly false claim that the war was not started by Israel.
Israel’s Occupation and Settlement Regime
During the 1967 War, Israel invaded and occupied the Syrian Golan Heights, the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, and the Palestinian territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
According to Walter Block, because the territories came into Israel’s possession as the result of “a war that was started by the Arabs,” Israel had a right to keep that land. States are “entitled to take over other people’s property” if conquered through defensive military action, he maintained. Referring to Gaza and the West Bank (or “Judea and Samaria,” as he called the latter in typical Zionist fashion), Block argued that “Israel won that fair and square in the war!”
But the conclusion that Israel is entitled to that land is false for two reasons. First, it depends on a false premise fallacy because, again, it was uncontroversially Israel that started that war. Second, setting aside the bogus self-defense argument, it is a non sequitur fallacy because it does not follow that since a state occupies enemy territory due to defensive military actions that it is entitled to annex that territory.
In fact, the international community has rejected that idea and codified the exact opposite into international law because, obviously, every land-grabbing aggressor state will claim to be acting in defense of its own interests. Furthermore, the civilians inhabiting an aggressor state do not lose their right to self-determination by virtue of living under said regime. Inhabitants of a state have a right organize a military defense and to repel invaders, and occupation of foreign territory is permissible under international law only on grounds of immediate military necessity, with it being the moral and legal obligation of the Occupying Power to administer that territory for the benefit of its civilian inhabitants.
Following the “Six Day War,” in November 1967, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242, which emphasized the principle of international law that the acquisition of territory by war is inadmissible and therefore called on Israel to withdraw its forces to the positions it held before June 5, which were along the 1949 armistice lines, sometimes also called the “1967 lines” or collectively the “Green Line” for the color with which they were drawn on the map.
As a member state of the UN organization and signatory to the UN Charter, Resolution 242 is legally binding on Israel.
In 2004, the International Court of Justice, a UN body whose statute all UN member states are ipso facto parties to, ruled that Israel’s settlement regime in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the construction of Israel’s separation wall within Palestinian territory are in violation of international law.
On June 19, 2024, the ICJ issued an advisory opinion at the request of the UN General Assembly determining not only that a multitude of aspects of Israel’s occupation violate international law, but also that Israel’s prolonged occupation itself is illegal, amounting effectively to an apartheid regime, with the crime of apartheid along with ethnic cleansing and genocide being recognized as “crimes against humanity.”
Walter Block necessarily rejects libertarian principles by supporting Israel’s crimes against humanity as a means of sustaining his opposing ideology of extreme Zionism.
Dave Smith rightly countered that the Palestinians, who have been living under a brutally oppressive Israeli occupation for 57 years, also have a right to self-defense. Indeed, international law recognizes the right of a people living under foreign military occupation to take up arms against their oppressors. Smith also correctly noted that Israel’s settlement regime violates international law.
The So-Called “Peace Process”
In the years following the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 242, an international consensus emerged in favor of what is known as “the two-state solution,” which calls for an independent state of Palestine alongside Israel, with recognized borders along the 1949 armistice lines, with minor and mutually agreed adjustments.
Block offered the usual Zionist propaganda narrative that “Israel has offered the Palestinians a two-state solution ‘til the cows come home,” but “the Palestinian Authority keeps rejecting it” because the Palestinians “want all the land.”
The truth is precisely the converse. In fact, Israel has always rejected the two-state solution because the Zionists want all the land. Hence Israel’s persistent illegal occupation and settlement regime. The internationally recognized Palestinian leadership under the PLO, by contrast, has expressed its acceptance of the two-state solution based on Resolution 242 since the mid-1970s, and it officially did so in 1988.
Walter Block’s hero Benjamin Netanyahu, it should also be said, has been absolutely explicit about rejecting the two-state solution, as Block must surely know but chooses to overlook because, well…cognitive dissonance.
His tired argument alludes to the U.S.-led so-called “peace process,” which, as I document in meticulous detail and at extraordinary length in Obstacle to Peace, was always the means by which Israel and its superpower benefactor blocked implementation of the two-state solution.
Block’s false premise is that the “peace process” was aimed at achieving the two-state solution, but when U.S. government officials would refer to a two-state solution, that is emphatically not the same thing as the two-state solution.
The two-state solution is premised on the applicability of international law to the conflict, including the requirement for Israel to withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territories, whereas the “peace process” was premised on a rejection of the applicability of international law to the conflict.
The key deception was the Israeli and U.S. governments’ false claim to accept Resolution 242 as a basis for a two-state solution under the Oslo framework. That was always a lie. In fact, both governments rejected that UN resolution, and what was instead adopted as the framework for the “peace process” was Israel’s own unilateral misinterpretation of Resolution 242.
Under this absurd alternative framework, the people living under a brutal foreign military occupation must negotiate with their oppressors over how much of their own land they could live in and maybe someday exercise some kind of limited autonomy over.
That framework is completely contrary to Israel’s obligations under international law and completely incompatible with the libertarian principle of non-aggression.
Incidentally, the ICJ’s recent ruling that Israel’s occupation is illegal effectively repudiated the whole framework for the faux “peace process.” As the court noted, the Palestinians right to self-determination is inalienable, and Israel may therefore not place conditions on their exercise of that right.
The Hamas Charter
To advance his argument that the reason for the violence is that Palestinians just hate Jews, Block cited Hamas’ 1988 charter. By his account, Hamas wants to kill not only Israelis but all the Jews. He further generalized that intent to all Palestinians by paraphrasing Benjamin Netanyahu (who in turn was paraphrasing former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir) to the effect that “Palestinians hate Jews more than they love their own children.”
Thus, Block utilized a fallacy of composition by trying to lump all Palestinians together with Hamas while absurdly maintaining that Palestinians have no legitimate grievances against Israel whatsoever—a premise that falls back on his make-believe explanation for how the conflict got started during the Mandate era.
As for Hamas’ charter, Block was referring to a quote sometimes misattributed as being from the Quran, but which is actually a hadith, or a saying attributed to the Prophet Mohammed, according to which, before Judgment Day in the end of times, Muslims will fight against Jews who join with the forces of the anti-Christ against the armies of Jesus (who is recognized in the Quran, as in the Christian New Testament, as both a prophet and the Messiah, which practicing Jews reject).
That is the context for a passage quoted by Hamas in its charter, which says that the stones and trees would say to the Muslims, “there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” (Other variations of the hadith don’t specify Jews but instead say something like, “Here is a rejector of truth hiding behind me!” or “Here is a solider of Antichrist!”)
This is certainly not to say there is no anti-semitism within the criminal Hamas organization. There is. But it remains true that the fundamental cause of the conflict is not inherent Arab hatred of Jews but Israel’s systematic violation of Palestinians’ fundamental human rights. If a people treated you the way Israel treats the Palestinians, as subhuman, you might hate them, too.
Furthermore, in May 2017, Hamas published a policy document described by some Western media outlets as a “new charter,” which described a “strong consensus” among its leadership on policy positions. That document stated:
“Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.”
That document also reiterated Hamas’s longstanding policy of expressing a willingness to accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel along the 1949 armistice lines, with a long-term truce to establish mutual intent.
Israel’s Collective Punishment of Gaza’s Civilian Population
Block also rolled out the standard Zionist trope that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, even forcibly expelling Jewish settlers. Yet, what did the Palestinians do? Did they develop their society? No! Instead, they just started firing rockets at Israel for no other reason than Jew hatred.
At the same time, Block acknowledged that Israel has long maintained a policy of collectively punishing the entire civilian population of Gaza by saying,
“Yes, Gaza is an open-air prison! Why is Gaza an open-air prison? Why do they have the blockade? Because they keep sending in rockets! The Jews don’t send in rockets first, the Palestinians keep sending in rockets, they keep sending in suicide bombers, so of course Israel is going to defend itself.”
Block thus framed the situation as one in which Israel had no choice but to collectively punish the civilian population in response to the threat to Israeli civilians posed by Hamas. The question isn’t how good Israel is but how good it is compared to Hamas, Block argued.
Dave Smith illustrated Block’s non sequitur fallacy with an apt analogy, pointing out that just because Saddam Hussein’s regime was worse than the U.S. government doesn’t mean that the 2003 invasion of Iraq wasn’t an act of aggression under international law. (Indeed, aggressive war is “the supreme international crime,” as defined at Nuremberg, “differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”)
Smith also repeated that the aggression began with the Zionists’ military-backed settler-colonial project to reconstitute Arab Palestine into a demographically Jewish state, and he correctly observed that it isn’t true that Israel ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005, as it would have done had the Israeli government really wanted Gazans to be prosperous and happy, as preposterously contended by Block.
While Israel did withdraw settlers and soldiers, it remained the Occupying Power in Gaza under international law by virtue of its continued control over Gaza’s land boundaries, airspace, and coastal waterway, as well as its continued imposition of administrative functions over the strip.
Before the withdrawal and siege, in 2004, the Head of the Israeli National Security Council, Giora Eiland, described Gaza as “a huge concentration camp”; and the purpose of the economic blockade was described by Ariel Sharon’s senior advisor, Dov Weissglas, as being “like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner but won’t die.” The U.S. State Department confirmed with Israeli officials that the aim was “to keep the Gazan economy functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis,” and “to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.”
Block’s defense of this is another fallacy based on a lie. He draws the conclusion that we already know what it looks like when Palestinians are given their freedom from the ludicrous false premise that Israel, as an act of pure benevolence, has already tried ending its occupation, and all it got in return was rocket attacks.
It is logically absurd to point to what is in fact a consequence of Israel’s persistent systematic violation of Palestinians’ human rights as though it were proof of what would happen in the absence of Israel’s persistent violation of Palestinians’ human rights.
As Dave Smith observed in response, Block’s characterization of the 2005 withdrawal as demonstrating benevolent intent by Israel toward the Palestinians in Gaza is simply untenable. Peaceful coexistence has never been the Israeli government’s goal because the Zionists want all the land, and they explicitly say so. As an unambiguous example, Smith reminded how Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking before the UN General Assembly on September 22, 2023, held up a map of what he labeled “The New Middle East” showing no Palestine and no Palestinian territory, only Israel—from the river to the sea.
Dave Smith is right. The truth is that the 2005 withdrawal was part of Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement plan,” the “significance” of which—as candidly explained by Dov Weissglas—was “the freezing of the peace process,” which was necessary to “prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state”; the “disengagement plan” was the “formaldehyde” that was “necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
Moreover, it has frequently been Israel that initiates rounds of violence with Hamas, perhaps the clearest example of which was its violation of the ceasefire agreement in place before Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s military invasion of Gaza lasting from December 27, 2008, until January 18, 2009. Setting aside Zionist propaganda bearing no resemblance to the documentary record, there is no controversy whatsoever that it was Israel that violated that ceasefire, which Hamas had until then been strictly honoring.
Additionally, Hamas in early 2004 announced a policy shift away from armed violence and toward diplomatic engagement, with Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin issuing a statement that Hamas would be willing to accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel within the 1967 borders, with a long-term truce to establish mutual intent. Israel’s response was to assassinate him. Following that, Israel continued to take actions that served to sideline the more moderate elements within Hamas while empowering the extremists. Nevertheless, Hamas officials repeatedly reiterated their offer for a long-term truce for many years afterward.
Block also quoted Netanyahu saying that if Israel were to put down its arms, there would be no more Israel, but if the Palestinians were to put down their arms, there would be peace.
Dave Smith retorted that it was “bizarre” to be presented with a statement from a lying government official as though we were supposed to consider it evidence.
For Palestinians to disarm would mean that Israel would have all the power, Smith argued, and we have already seen what results from the Zionists having dominated the Palestinians since before Israel even existed. “So, we’ve seen what happens when the Palestinians are essentially toothless,” he continued, “and what happens is they get subjected forever.” Plus, he added, Netanyahu had been explicit that permanent subjugation of the Palestinians is precisely the Israeli government’s aim.
Netanyahu’s Use of Hamas as a Strategic Ally
During the debate, Dave Smith also pointed out that Netanyahu had maintained a policy of utilizing Hamas as a strategic ally to block any movement toward peace negotiations with the Palestinians.
Indeed, when Hamas first arose on the scene, Israel initially supported it as a counterforce to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which had dangerously accepted the two-state solution premised upon the applicability of international law to the conflict, including implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 242.
During Netanyahu’s time as prime minister, he had been explicit in his aim of preventing peace negotiations as justification for his policy of treating Hamas as a strategic ally.
Block conceded the point by saying that Netanyahu’s policy had been a mistake, to which Smith responded that he could call it a “mistake,” but it worked. It succeeded in its aim of thwarting any movement toward peace negotiations. Additionally, Block was missing the whole point of his having raised that point, which was to further demonstrate how ridiculous his argument is that all Israel wanted is what’s best for the Palestinians.
“This is what’s truly bizarre to me,” Smith added, “like, the idea that I have to convince Walter Block that governments are not in fact benevolent actors who really just want what’s best for the people underneath them. That’s not what’s going on here.”
Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
Coming to the main focal point throughout the debate, Israel’s assault on Gaza, Dave Smith opened by noting that, at a foundational level, the idea of supporting Israel, like any state, is anathema to libertarian principles.
Regarding Israel’s conduct, he anticipated Block’s argument that Palestinian civilians are only killed because Hamas uses them as “human shields,” which he preempted by rightly noting that the mere presence of a combatant among civilians does not deprive those civilians of their protected status under international law. Disproportionate use of force in such a circumstance is prohibited. Smith illustrated the point about the need to protect civilians with the analogy that if a killer took a bunch of children hostage inside a school, we wouldn’t respond by just bombing the school.
Despite this, Block responded by persisting in the anticipated argument that the killing of more than 40,000 Palestinians, with the dead being mostly women and children, is justified by Hamas’s use of civilians as “human shields.”
Block might as well be a spokesperson for the IDF. His use of the term “human shields” bears no relationship to its definition under international law and instead is a euphemism meaning any Palestinians civilians killed in Gaza by virtue of their being in Gaza.
By this means, Block reversed the burden of proof, presuming Israel’s innocence in every instance of Palestinian civilians being killed, when under basic principles of morality and justice as well as international law, it is rather Israel’s burden to prove that any given attack is militarily justified and will not cause disproportionate harm to civilians.
Block explicitly rejected the applicability of the principle of proportionality under international humanitarian law, such as the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit attacks that would cause excessive harm to civilians relative to the anticipated military advantage gained. He argued that this principle is not applicable because Israel has a right to defend itself, which is essentially a reiteration of his argument in The Wall Street Journal that Israel has a right to do “whatever it takes” to eliminate Hamas, i.e., to commit war crimes, which is obviously irreconcilable with the non-aggression principle and international law, as well as being plainly nonsensical.
Block preposterously tried to maintain that Israel was only targeting military objects and combatants and that the charge of genocide is baseless. “Genocide is when you aim at civilians,” he said, asserting that the killing of 1,269 people in Israel on October 7 was a genocide. “Israel doesn’t aim at civilians. Israel aims at Hamas fighters, and it gets civilians because it’s collateral damage.”
But this is just another example of Block’s logical inconsistency. The deliberate targeting of civilians is known as “terrorism,” whereas “genocide” involves the targeting of civilians at the population level. Acts of genocide, as defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention, aim “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
The killing of 1,269 people in Israel on October 7, including 887 civilians, was a horrific atrocity and certainly an act of terrorism, but the limited aim of “Operation Al Aqsa Flood” was to shatter the status quo. Given the disparity of power, Hamas, a non-state actor, would simply not be capable of perpetrating a genocide against Israelis even if it tried, whereas the state of Israel, thanks in no small part to the U.S. government, not only has this capability but has been observably aiming to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza as a people.
Block rejected Smith’s analogy of a killer holding schoolkids hostage, but the truth remains that Israel has systematically targeted Gaza’s education system, including bombing UN schools being used to shelter civilians, with 85% of school buildings being directly hit or significantly damaged as of July 6. UN officials and international human rights organizations have repeatedly condemned Israel’s attacks on schools for having no possible military justification.
The systematic destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure has not been limited to schools, of course. Israel has also targeted Gaza’s health care system. It has damaged or destroyed over 60% of residential buildings along with 80% of commercial facilities. It has wantonly destroyed greenhouses and agricultural land and otherwise turned much of Gaza into a moonscape with the aim of rendering Gaza uninhabitable. Again, Israel’s indiscriminate bombing has killed over 40,000 Palestinians, with thousands more missing and presumed dead under the rubble, and with most of the dead being women and children. And as if that weren’t sufficient evidence of an ongoing genocide, Israel has maintained a policy explicitly aimed at depriving the civilian population of Gaza of goods and services essential for their survival, including food and water, which UN officials and international human rights agencies have condemned as the use of starvation as a method of war.
Dave Smith responded to Block’s arguments by expressing dismay at hearing him use the military euphemism “collateral damage” to refer to dead civilians and again correctly observing that the presence of a Hamas member in his home does not render that residential building a military target or deprive it or its inhabitants of their civilian status under international law.
He refuted Block’s repeated analogy that what Israel was doing was like killing babies strapped to the chest of a Hamas terrorist out of the unavoidable necessity to stop the terrorist from killing Israeli civilians. “That’s not the situation,” Smith noted. “The situation is they’re leveling entire cities and killing people by the tens of thousands…This is very clearly an act of aggression to kill innocent people who had nothing to do with October 7.”
Block next responded with the ridiculous strawman argument that Smith was essentially saying that Israel should just not defend itself, which is an impossible conclusion to draw given Smith’s actual arguments. Block also cited as evidence of Israel’s intention to avoid harm to civilians the IDF’s dropping of leaflets warning civilians to flee.
A particularly relevant detail that Block neglected to mention is the fact that Israel then proceeded to bomb the same locations to which it had warned Palestinians to flee, repeatedly.
Smith countered Block’s dishonest strawman argument by reminding him that he was holding to Rothbardian principles and by no means arguing that Israel cannot act in self-defense. It’s just that war crimes are, by definition, not legitimate acts of self-defense.
At the end of the debate, Smith summarized the true libertarian position on the Israel-Palestine conflict by reiterating that American taxpayers should not be forced to fund the state of Israel, that Israel’s decades-long blockade aimed at collectively punishing the civilian population of Gaza is wrong, and that Israel’s indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians in retaliation for Hamas’s atrocities on October 7 is wrong.
And the Winner Is…!
There is no question that the winner of this debate was Dave Smith. His arguments were solidly grounded in the documented facts and well-reasoned, whereas Walter Block’s attempts to characterize his position as the “libertarian” one were entirely dependent on demonstrably false claims, logical fallacies, self-contradictions, and an unambiguous rejection of both the non-aggression principle and individual property rights.
The inescapable conclusion is that Walter Block is not a libertarian. He’s an unhinged Zionist extremist trying to defend a U.S.-backed genocide. It is not logically possible for him to be both.
