Background:
My heart is with Israel, my brain is with the Palestinians.
- A Tour Through Walter Block’s Oeuvre
- Ammous vs. Block on Israel
- Walter E. Block & Alan G. Futerman, “Rejoinder to Hoppe on Israel vs. Hamas,” MEST Journal (2024), which is a response to
- Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “An Open Letter to Walter E. Block,” LewRockwell.com (Jan. 31, 2024).
- David Gordon and Wanjiru Njoya, “The Classical Liberal Case For Israel,” LewRockwell.com (Feb. 2, 2024; Mises.org version)
- and Walter’s response, Alan G. Futerman and Walter E. Block, “Rejoinder to Gordon and Njoya on Israel and Libertarianism,” MESTE Journal (Position Paper) (2024).
Some recent twitter posts:
Isn’t being anti war a gutless, virtue signaling position? I mean, most people would rather there not be a need for war, but sometimes it’s either war or being conquered.
— Michael Liebowitz (@Lieboisout) April 24, 2025
Not any more than your being opposed to aggression is virtue-signaling. Your way of wording is loaded since it subtly implies an analogy or similarity between self-defense by an individual and that by a state. This is a bit disengenuous. As I pointed out previously…
— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) April 24, 2025
I haven't weighed in much on the Walter Block/Mises Institute/Hoppe Israel stuff, since I know what areas I specialize in and this is not one of them (libertarians often want to chime in about things they know little about; I try to resist this or provide appropriate…
— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) September 6, 2024
Completely disagree. Just like with IP. The case against IP is not anarchist and doens't rest on anarchy, only on understanding the nature and basis of property rights. Similarly even if you are a minarchist you can recognize that justifying individual self defense is different…
— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) April 24, 2025
I had actually written about this after talking about Israel with Block.
“My heart is with Israel, my brain is with the Palestinians” is, in a way, the opposite of my stance. I believe it to be logical to prefer Israel to Palestine, based on a consequentialist judgment of a lesser evil, but to be moral to prefer Palestine to Israel, considering Israel is guilty of what may amount to the genocide of Palestinians, ignoring a counterfactual possibility of Palestinians doing that on Israelis.
https://libertarianism.uk/2025/07/26/the-israel-trap/