by Juan I. Núñez

Preface

The essay you are about to read is certainly polemical. It is a heavily revised version of a writing only shared privately through correspondence with Walter Block, inspired by the reactions to his arguments on Israel. Its true subject, therefore, is not the State of Israel itself, but the state of libertarian intellectual consistency.

Let me be clear from the outset: I am not a Zionist. I believe the state of Israel to be as illegitimate as any other. The essay is not written as its defense, but as an indictment of the selective outrage and glaring hypocrisy that has poisoned the discourse within our movement. Let it be clear, too, that I do not seek to attack the intellect or ideas of any individual person, and that by “Libertarian movement”, I do not mean only our big figures, but rather, all the people who believe in the ideas of true individual liberty.

The arguments that follow are intended to challenge. My request to you, my most esteemed reader, is simple: engage this writing of mine thoughtfully; with the logic, not the emotion. My goal is not to attack anyone’s conclusions, but to test their foundations against the bedrock of our principles: consistency, property rights, and an unwavering, absolute opposition to the State in all its forms.

Clarifications

• Illegitimacy is a binary.
• The severity of rights violations is graded.
• Strategic preference is contextual and contingent, not a categorical duty.

The Israel Question Trap

Libertarianism has always prided itself in being an ideology that was, over anything else, consistent and unyielding in its criticism of any one of those who would be willing to tread on the freedom of any individual. However, in recent times, it would seem as if many within this movement are now failing a crucial test of such consistency. This failure is on the Israel “question”. A hypocritical, emotionally-driven stance is taking hold, which risks allowing the logical rigor of a centuries-old philosophy, to be replaced by what amounts to selective, fashionable outrage. This stance is none other than the idea that Israel, above all others, is uniquely illegitimate.

Many are the arguments that have been used for decades to justify that Israel, seemingly above all other nations, has less of a right to exist than Denmark, the United States, Luxembourg or any other State. One such argument, and perhaps the most popular, is that “The Arabs were the first”. This assertion is presented as moral trump card, but it fails on two fundamental levels. First, if applied consistently, then it would logically invalidate every other nation on Earth. Every single border on a map was drawn over the land of previous people; to single out Israel only would simply be an act of supreme intellectual dishonesty. Second, this argument is historically illiterate. It ignores that Jews have claimed and occupied those lands for millennia, predating even the conception of a distinct Arab identity. This argument is not only wrong; it is a convenient fiction created to justify a predetermined conclusion.

When the “prior occupancy” argument fails, two new fallacies are brought up. The first is that Israel’s illegitimacy stems from its birth being by conquest. As with the previous argument, using this standard with any shred of intellectual honesty or consistency proves it to be self-refuting. I dare anyone to name a single nation not forged by violence and plunder, either directly, or by inheriting the conquests of a predecessor­¹. The second fallacy is the appeal to Israel’s “arbitrary” creation by the United Nations. This, too, involves a staggering hypocrisy. Are we then to erase Monaco, San Marino, and the entire post-colonial map of Africa from the ledger of legitimate States? Their borders are a clear example of lines drawn on a map by foreign powers, without any remote consideration for geographical, linguistic or ethnic barriers. These are far from any form of genuine principles for legitimacy; they are post-hoc rationalizations manufactured only to justify this particular stance while dodging consistency like Neo dodges bullets in Matrix.

All of this brings us to the core of this intellectual failure. The attempt to declare Israel uniquely illegitimate is not merely inconsistent; it is philosophically incoherent from a libertarian perspective. It implies that a legitimate state could exist, which is a concept that we² outright reject. A state, no matter where nor when, is a criminal gang built on violence and coercion. To grade their criminality on a curve, or to put it in a spectrum, as some sort of tier list of evilness, is nothing short of a profoundly Orwellian exercise.

It is here, however, that the great Murray Rothbard, a man of immense wisdom, uncharacteristically faltered. In his 1967 essay, War Guilt in the Middle East, Rothbard argued against Israel and its legitimacy by painting it as far more egregious, due to it being uniquely ongoing in its dispossession. Later, in 1982, in an essay written for The Libertarian Forum, titled The Massacre, Rothbard wrote:

Libertarians are opposed to every State. But the State of Israel is uniquely pernicious, because its entire existence rests and continues to rest on a massive expropriation of property and expulsion from the land.³

Thus, Rothbard directly stated the idea being discussed, singling out Israel for a claim that is universal throughout time and space. Mass expropriation is not Israel’s original sin; it is in the foundational DNA of every single modern nation-state. The consequence of this misstep, though, is that it creates the perverse logic of “lesser evilism” in reverse. Then, the argument that “well, at least that’s not Israel” becomes a form to sanitize a State and its actions. However, legitimacy is not a spectrum; it is a binary. It’s either a 1, or a 0, and the State is always a 0. The moment we create a scale of legitimacy, we concede the possibility that a “most legitimate”, or perhaps even a “truly legitimate” State could exist. It is through this act of relativism that our entire philosophical opposition to State authority dilutes into subjective outrage which serves emotion or personal interests, rather than principle.

Walter Block and Alan Futerman, in their 2021 book, The Classical Liberal Case for Israel, argue that the Jews homesteaded the land by laying claim to it over 20 centuries ago. This line of reasoning, however, is highly problematic, as it opens a Pandora’s box of ancient, collective claims. David Gordon, in his review of the aforementioned book⁴, noted that this argument resembled ethno-nationalist entitlement, rather than libertarian theory. This leads us to my favorite essay by Rothbard, Confiscation and the Homestead Principle (1969)⁵. Here, Rothbard argued that any stolen property may be taken back from the thieves who took it, and that, preferably, it should be returned to the original owner or any identifiable heirs, which is the concept Block and Futerman appeal to. To apply this principle across twenty centuries of convoluted history, though, is an impossible and unreasonable task.

However, we need not go back dozens of generations to find valid applications of the Rothbardian restitution principle. In the more recent history of the Ottoman Empire and Mandatory Palestine, many individual Jews were dispossessed of their property. Clear examples include the Nebi Musa and Jaffa Riots, the 1929 Hebron Massacre, and the later seizure of legally purchased land in Gush Etzion by Jordan. In these cases, identifiable Jewish individuals and families had their property destroyed or seized, and were forced to flee. While these events absolutely would not justify the creation of any state, they demonstrate that the principle of restitution can be applied to justify at least a portion of Jewish settlement. The victims or their direct heirs had a legitimate, traceable right to reclaim what was stolen from them, a fact that shatters the simplistic, one-sided narrative of dispossession⁶.

Let us return to Rothbard’s critique. His analysis of Israel’s expansion as criminal was, of course, correct. Yet perhaps we should heed the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu, who wrote that a man’s writings are not more than the dregs of his true thought, for their real knowledge and ideas were clear to themselves only, and could not be translated to words. We are left only with Rothbard’s written ghost, and we will never know the full nuance of his position. But whether intended or not, his painting of Israel as particularly illegitimate has had a clear effect: it has been weaponized by modern libertarians as a litmus test, a golden standard to separate the pure from the apostate.

And what is this standard? Mass expropriation. Let us apply it universally, as principle demands. Were the states of Eastern Europe not reconstituted on mass dispossession? Were the Americas, Australia and New Zealand not built on the expropriation of native peoples by the steel and powder of the European colonial powers? Was all of Russia and China not founded on the Bolsheviks seizing the property of peasants, proletarians and bourgeois alike through the barrel of a gun? These nations share the same legacy and foundation of brutality, supremacy and coercion. The only distinction offered for Israel is its relative recency. So, is that the principle? That a crime becomes legitimate once enough time has passed? If so, history is merely a laundry service for the sins of the State, and deontology dies on the altar of the calendar.

The final redoubt for the critic is the argument from recency: the victims of the Nakba, or their heirs, are still alive, and their property deeds still exist. Let us apply this standard consistently. Are the claims of those expelled from Zaire after its civil war any less valid? Or the millions dispossessed by communist revolutions, many still living, in China, Cuba, Vietnam, and across Eastern Europe? Or, to bring the point home, the countless Jews expelled from Europe and Arab lands whose property was also seized? The selective moralist is now trapped in a dilemma of their own making. Either recency is the defining principle, which means Israel’s guilt has an expiration date tied to the lifespan of its victims. Or, recency is irrelevant, and justice is intergenerational, in which case we must pay for the sins of fathers we never knew. This is a moral absurdity that would paralyze humanity under the weight of near-infinite, unpayable historical debts. If historical claims to property or homeland are valid without an expiration date, then the world order is a sham built on theft. Every border, every capital, and every small countryside town stands atop someone else’s grave.

This exposes the final hypocrisy: the romanticized notion of a pre-existing, legitimate “Palestine” being violated by Israel’s creation. What was the reality of the land prior to 1948? It was not a sovereign state. Palestine was a British Mandate carved from the Ottoman Empire, a territory consumed by a flickering civil war between two nascent nationalisms competing for dominance: Arab and Jewish. The “State of Palestine”, therefore, is a concept just as modern and arbitrarily defined as the “State of Israel”. Let us not forget that it was Israel which accepted the United Nation’s arbitrary partition, and the Arab League which answered to this with an invasion seeking to annihilate it. If we entertain the perverse, false premise that conquest grants legitimacy, then a state forged in a successful defensive war has a stronger claim than most. This forces the question: if Palestine’s nationhood predates its legal declaration, then when did it begin, precisely? And what is the limiting principle that prevents this vague logic from dissolving the legitimacy of every other nation on Earth?

This selective outrage led directly to Walter Block’s excommunication from the Mises Institute for his pro-Israel views, turning him into a pariah for most libertarians. His unforgivable sin was, principally, expressing a pragmatic preference for one state over another in a conflict⁷. Yet where was the outrage when F.A. Hayek, in a 1983 letter to The Times⁸, proposed to the British Government that Buenos Aires should be bombed as retaliation for the Falklands War? Who criticized Murray Rothbard, the staunchest of anti-war libertarians, when he admitted he would have supported the Allied war against Nazi Germany? And what about when Randy Barnett stated that the Iraq War was legitimate action? The double standard is not just blatant; it is absolute⁹. Block’s crime was not a betrayal of principle, but the violation a new, unwritten taboo peculiarly specific to Israel.

This brings up a fundamental truth, and one which we cannot just blissfully ignore: in a world of states, pure ideological agnosticism is often a functional impossibility. Preferences are forced by reality. Ask Hans-Hermann Hoppe if he prefers to live under the boot of the United States, or the boot of Iran; the answer is obvious, yet it doesn’t imply the legitimization of the American state by Hoppe. Block’s position, while perhaps clumsily argued by his own admission, was hardly different in principle. He made little more than a comparative judgment, which he then argued in favor of. To punish him so severely for this, while granting a pass to other intellectual giants for doing the same, is far from a defense of libertarianism. It is tribalist policing, and the hypocrisy runs deeper still. Many who now demonize Block have defended Javier Milei, a staunch Zionist, for his reforms, or voted for Donald Trump as a “lesser evil”, even as he enabled an escalation of Israeli aggression, at the expense of American taxpayers. This is not intellectual consistency. It is a symptom of a deep ideological rot that has begun spreading through our movement.

As per Randolph Bourne, “war is the health of the State”, but while true, reality demands that we make distinctions. A principled libertarian can, and should, distinguish between aggressors and defenders, between relative liberty and absolute tyranny. To feign pure agnosticism in any conflict is to risk becoming an accomplice to the greater evil. It would not be possible for a libertarian to coherently claim neutrality between the Allies and the Axis during World War II, for such a stance would amount to passive acceptance of genocide, as Murray Rothbard himself recognized. It would be absurd to not at least morally prefer the West over the Soviet Union, to prefer Ukraine overs its Russian invaders, or prefer Taiwan over a likely Chinese aggression. We can hold that all wars are atrocious, while still recognizing that in most, there’s is a preferable side.

So, let’s apply this same ruthless realism to the presently discussed conflict. We can recognize that many of Israel’s actions are criminal, a charge whose full extent will only be known once the fog of war is lifted. But what about Hamas? Here, the reality is not ambiguous. We have a military conflict between two illegitimate entities: on one side, we have a flawed, quasi-theocratic state built on a foundation of Western liberal values; on the other, an autocratic, fundamentalist death cult whose charter and leaders openly call for genocide. To ask where any reasonable person would prefer to live is to directly answer the question. A victory for Hamas, and I speak of the organization, not of all the Palestinian people it holds hostage, would almost certainly lead to a new pogrom; to mass slaughter. The victims of such violence would not be the skeletal or ashen remains of the founders of the state of Israel, but the millions of innocent civilians born and raised there, who have no obligation to pay for the sins of their fathers¹⁰. Can we truly then pretend to have no preference whatsoever?

It is so that I come to a simple conclusion: the Israel question is a trap. It is a manufactured dilemma which tries to apply pure deontology to reality, but that seemingly most libertarians do so arbitrarily. It is designed to divide our movement, the State’s most principled opponents, ensuring that no matter the outcome, the principle of State power wins. The libertarian stance must begin with equal condemnation for both illegitimate entities. However, this deontological purity does not absolve us in any way from the pragmatic duty of making a comparative judgment, especially when one side’s victory is likely to mean a far greater catastrophe for human liberty than the other’s.

This brings us to the pragmatic question, the very one for which Walter Block was demonized: in a forced choice, who would we prefer to see victorious? I am sure that no honest libertarian, from Hans-Hermann Hoppe to Tom Woods, would wish for a Hamas victory. Block’s only sin was to make this obvious judgment and then say the quiet part out loud; the part that resides in the back of every realist’s mind, but which today’s ideological police refuse to acknowledge.

Despite the necessity of navigating a world not built around our idealisms, we must still recall them. The individuals of Israel and Palestine should be left to work out their claims voluntarily and peacefully, as free people, and not as pawns of collectivist states that foster mutual hatred. Let us not forget the cores of our ideology: let us not choose reason over emotion, and let us never again mistake pragmatic preference for a grant of legitimacy. Israel, just like every other state, is illegitimate. Not more, not less, just plainly illegitimate. One or zero.

Footnotes

1 Some detractors may point out to certain nations, such as those island nations in the Pacific (Kiribati, Tonga, etc.) as examples of States born from something that may be considered homesteading. This argument is a fatal category error, as it confuses the homesteading of unoccupied land by individuals, with the illegitimate creation of a State over them, thus allowing for the legitimization of said State. A State is never homesteaded; it is always imposed. Even if these nations were not born from external conquest, they were necessarily born of internal conquest. A ruling faction had to conquer individual sovereignty through the imposition of a monopoly on law, justice and violence, where none previously existed. People who were previously free individuals on their own homesteaded property were subjugated, not by invaders, but by members of their own kin.

2 “We” as in anarchists. Classic liberals, objectivists, minarchists and others might not reject the legitimacy of the State at a philosophical level. I find the idea that “a small state is necessary” to be flawed, but that’s a discussion for another day, and certainly one that many before me have already touched on extensively.

3 Rothbard, Murray N. (1982, October). The massacre. The Libertarian Forum, Vol. XVI, No 8. Retrieved from https://www.rothbard.it/articles/libertarian-forum/lf-16-8.pdf

4 Gordon, David, & Njoya, Wanjiru (2024, February 5). Review: The Classical Liberal Case For Israel. Mises Institute. https://mises.org/mises-wire/review-classical-liberal-case-israel

5 Rothbard, Murray N. (1969, June 15). Confiscation and the homestead principle. The Libertarian Forum, Vol. I, No. 6. Retrieved from https://panarchy.org/rothbard/confiscation.html

6 I recognize that in this paragraph I am walking a fine line, so I must make clear that in no way do I believe this justifies Israel’s existence, but rather, that it shows that not all of the Jewish conquest of Arab lands is necessarily an act of unethical robbery. Whether those Arabs who had their land stolen from them were the ones who stole it from the previous owners or not is simply something we will never be able to prove, but the possibility exists, so this may be approached with at least a degree of ambiguity.

7 To be clear, this is not an endorsement of every claim Block has ever made regarding Israel. His description of child deaths as “collateral damage necessary for Israel to defend itself” is, at best, a ghastly euphemism that’s hardly compatible with libertarian ethics, if at all. Whether statements like this are poorly worded, malicious, or justified can be discussed infinitely. Nevertheless, reality forces such brutal calculations, and Block simply cared to make his known. Similar utilitarian calculations have historically been made with things such as the Korean War, the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, or the interventions in the Middle East. The issue at hand is not the morally questionable statement made by Block, but that seemingly only his statement led to excommunication, while others who made similar arguments about other conflicts at best received light criticisms.

8 Hayek, F. A. (1983, February 17). Holding the Falklands [Letter to the editor]. The Times, p. 11. Retrieved from https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/117186

9 Yes. I know. You, the reader, are likely currently arguing against an imaginative version of me that was temporarily granted access to your mind, making the statement that these cases I mentioned are different to the Israel-Hamas war. And you are right, they are different, every conflict is unique. We could debate endlessly about the nuances of each case: the Falklands Wars was defensive for the United Kingdom, but over land seized by force in 1833. The United States was an aggressor in against Nazi Germany, but was on the defensive against Imperial Japan; they fought two monsters while allied with another, the Soviet Union. The Iraq War was an act of aggression against a dictatorship known for widespread human rights violations. In every instance, many moral lines were blurred, war crimes were committed, and innocent people were killed. How exactly is Israel’s case in Gaza uniquely damning, while all these other conflicts are often rationalized or ignored? Let us not forget that the use of two nuclear bombs over civilian populations is, to this day, rationalized as “necessary”, even against all evidence to the contrary. How is this one conflict beyond the pale, while others are to be debated politely and with nuanced, or considered merely tragic necessities?

10 Whether Israel harbors similar genocidal intent towards Palestinians and other Arabs is a subject of serious and extensive debate not fit for this essay. Many have argued that this is the case, based on Israel’s historical actions and the statements of its government officials. Others have countered this by citing Israel’s battlefield tactics of using “roof knocking” to warn civilians, and the creation of safe corridors, as evidence of a more humane approach which critics ignore. I do not necessarily take any of these two sides as an absolute, but I am more partial to the first idea; Israel cannot be trusted to be fair with the people it has subjugated. In fact, it already is not, but whether these injustices will escalate to mirror the explicit, programmatic exterminationism of Hamas is one that only time can answer.