Ammous vs. Block on Israel

As I tweeted here:

Walter Block’s pro-Israel WSJ article from October, “The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas” (substack version) upset lots of libertarians, e.g. Scott Horton who says, at about 1:08:00 here, that Walter is now kicked out of libertarianism because of his Israel-Gaza views.

Kevin Duffy also criticized him; Walter responded here: “Have I Gone AWOL?” He argued that his views on Gaza are fine since it’s okay to disagree with Rothbard and still be a libertarian.

Walter has another pro-Israel piece up in the WSJ today — “How Jews Escaped Their Dismal Fate.” Saifedean Ammous and Walter had debated this topic previously and after the October editorial, Walter asked Saif to co-author something with him to show that even libertarians who disagree can collaborate on issues they agree on.

This is Saif’s response to Walter (he gave me permission to post it):

“Walter,

Our debate made it very clear that you refuse to accept the legitimacy of private property rights for Palestinians, and you support the continued monopolization of Palestine’s land by a socialist government agency, the Israeli Land Authority, which means you are a socialist. Also, your recent unhinged bloodthirsty WSJ editorial made it clear to me you think carpet bombing innocent civilians is acceptable if they do not belong to your tribe, which means you do not view me as a human being. Both of these facts mean there is no room for any sort of constructive dialogue between a civilized human being like me who accepts property rights as the basis of human interaction, and renounces the initiation of aggression, and a barbaric socialist monster like you who supports violence and theft. There is absolutely nothing anyone can offer me to sully my name by associating with anyone who thinks like you.

Rather than trying to assuage your guilty conscience over supporting a genocide by writing an irrelevant paper with me, I would encourage you to read Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action to understand the inextricable importance of property rights to civilization, and to read Professor Hoppe’s argumentation ethics to understand why it’s meaningless for me to engage with socialists who reject property rights. I also discuss these points in detail in my latest book, Principles of Economics, attached here. I realize these authors write at a level far more intellectually advanced than your moronic brand of shock-jock shallow libertarianism dedicated to defending prostitution, political Zionism, and other types of detestable degeneracy, but I have hope that if you persist and push yourself, you may yet come to understand how human society can function peacefully and redeem yourself in your latter years.

If you read these books and come to your senses, and are willing to publicly support the privatization of the land of historic Palestine, and to denounce the bombing of civilians, I would be happy to consider working with you. Until then, I will continue to only cooperate with civilized human beings, while you and your work continue to fade to hypocritical irrelevance.

Saif”

Update: See also—

• Saifedean Ammous’s discussion of this issue with Robert Breedlove here
• “Randians Are Genocidal Collectivists,” by Fernando Chiocca.
• Block arguing here that Native Americans do not own the United States (unlike Israeli Jews’ claims…).
• Re Walter’s views on Covid lockdowns/restrictions, see his article My Response to Jeffrey Tucker on Covid, responding to Tucker, The Downfall of the Gurus
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “An Open Letter to Walter E. Block,” LewRockwell.com (Jan. 31, 2024).
• Ron Unz, Prof. John Beaty and the True Origin of the Jews. The material towards the end argues that the Palestinians are very probably the direct descendants of the ancient Jews who converted to Christianity and then to Islam, and never left; i.e., that the ruling Askenazi Jews are descendants of converts. See other Unz pieces on this topic.
• Kevin Duffy’s longer essay on the Israel-Palestine conflict
• Someone sent me this: comment: “About Block’s case of property rights being justified by genetics, this should make him reverse his position on the Israel-Palestine war”: Zionism: The Secret Evidence Israel Tried to Bury
• Scott Horton’s tweet
• Michael Rectenwald’s tweet: “For a long time, I’ve had my own internal struggle with Walter Block’s anti-libertarian stance with reference to Israel. Block, I thought, was simply wrong on this one issue. And Walter has been a good friend to me. But at this point, with a heavy heart, I must disavow Walter Block as a failed libertarian thinker, due to his egregiously erroneous claims that the Jewish people have some collectivist rights to property and thanks to his insanely blood-thirsty stance on the Palestinian people, replete with horrendous recommendations that Israel violate the non-aggression principle in the case of the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Therefore, I have decided to remove Block from my list of campaign endorsers. Hans-Hermann Hoppe destroys Block’s anti-libertarian stance in this recent article, proof that Hoppe remains the leader of true libertarianism.”
• Rothbard, War Guilt in the Middle East
• Stephen P. Halbrook, “Alienation of a Home-land: How Palestine Became Israel“
• Michael Rectenwald, “Statism Is the Cause of the Israel-Hamas War“
• David Gordon & Wanjiru Njoya, “The Classical Liberal Case For Israel“