Transcript: In Defense of Israel: Walter Block and Alan Futerman

 

Date of recording: May 20, 2024, The Savvy Street Show

Hosts: Roger Bissell and Marco den Ouden. Guests: Walter Block and Alan Futerman

 

For those who prefer to watch the video, it is here.

Editor’s Note: The Savvy Street Show’s AI-generated transcripts are edited for removal of repetitions and pause terms, and for grammar and clarity. Explanatory references are added in parentheses. Material edits are advised to the reader as edits [in square brackets].

 

Roger Bissell

Hello and good evening or whatever time of day it happens to be where you are. Welcome back to the Savvy Street Show. My name is Roger Bissell, and I’m standing in here for our regular host, Vinay Kohatkar, who is off on another assignment, as they say. This evening we have not one but two distinguished guests whom you will meet in just a moment. Some of you are subscribers and may already be acquainted with my co-host, Marco den Ouden. Marco is a well-known libertarian and the publisher of the blog The Jolly Libertarian and he is going to introduce our special guests. So welcome to the show, Marco.

 

Marco den Ouden

Thank you, Roger. One of our guests is very well known to our audience and to libertarians in general. Walter Block made a huge splash in the libertarian scene in 1976 with his book, Defending the Undefendable, which has become a libertarian classic and is still in print. He’s an anarcho-capitalist, a student of Murray Rothbard, and widely regarded as the preeminent anarcho-capitalist today. Alan Futerman is a PhD candidate in political economy at King’s College, London. We actually have a truly international show because Alan is in London right now, and we’re spread all around the world. And he has a BA in economics from UCEL Argentina and a master’s degree in finance from Torcuato de Tela University in Argentina. I hope I pronounced that right.

 

Alan Futerman

Wonderful.

 

Marco den Ouden

He’s been an adjunct professor of institutional economics at UCEL. And his work has been published in journals such as the International Journal for Finance and Economics, the Review of Austrian Economics, and the Journal of Financial Economic Policy. His work has also been featured in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the Jerusalem Post. He co-authored Commodities as an Asset Class with Ivo A. Sarjanovic and two books with Dr. Walter Block. One of them is The Austro-Libertarian Point of View, and the other one is The Classical Liberal Case for Israel which we’re going to be discussing today. Walter and Alan, first let me say that in the grand scheme of things, Roger and I both support the right of the State of Israel to exist unmolested. We think there’s a lot of truth in your arguments that Israel has been under attack since day one by Arabs who resent the idea of a Jewish state in their midst. That said, we have some challenging devil’s advocate questions to ask about your book and the thinking that went into it, especially the role of history and recent Middle East politics, libertarian principles, and possibly solutions. So let’s get started.

I think the essence of your argument is well captured in chapter five, where you argue that attacks on Israel and Zionism are antisemitic. Specifically, you outline three things that distinguish anti-Zionism. These are demonization, double standards, and delegitimization. While I’m sure you’ll agree that not all attacks on Zionism are antisemitic, and that there can and often are legitimate criticisms, nevertheless, the three distinguishing features certainly are present. Israel is demonized regularly with the usual antisemitic tropes. Jews are out to control the world. They control the banks, they control Hollywood, and they control the media, and they use the blood of Palestinian children to make matzoh. Then they are the subject of double standards. You gave many examples in your book. And then they are delegitimized with assertions that they stole the land from the Arabs.

But the same could be said possibly about your arguments against the Palestinians. Throughout your book, you demonize the Palestinians. The demonization of Palestinians in your book is of them collectively being wantonly evil instead of treating them as individuals. One double standard is your rejection of Palestinian property claims because they didn’t quite do a proper job of homesteading, a concept that you actually admit in your book is open to interpretation and is possibly a weak point in your argument. Another double standard is condemning the Palestinian authority for not being able to rein in and control terrorists in their midst. But you whitewash or decline to mention Zionist terrorism such as the Deir Yasin attack or the bombing of the King David Hotel and 60 other acts of terrorism against Palestinians and the British by the Irgun and the Stern Gang from 1920 to 1948. So you’re applying sort of double standards here, and you delegitimize Arab claims to their land. You have nothing good to say about the Palestinians and no consideration seems to be given for individual Palestinians, many of whom are average people trying peacefully to go about their lives. You collectivize Palestinians as a group, not recognizing them as individuals. Isn’t this a bit of a double standard on your part?

 

Alan Futerman

We do not claim that attacks on Israel and Zionism are antisemitic, but rather that the modern form of anti-Zionism is antisemitic.

Okay, so these are many points. So let’s try to tackle them one by one. Now, it’s interesting the way that you frame it, but actually we do not claim that attacks on Israel and Zionism are antisemitic, but rather that the modern form of anti-Zionism is antisemitic. So there is a distinction there, because for example, you could claim that there were different movements within the Jewish people actually, 150-years ago, opposing Zionism. But those were of a philosophical nature. For example, let’s say Martin Buber, at the beginning, he could have been described as anti-Zionist. But the point is that this was before the creation of Israel. After the creation of Israel, anti-Zionism has a very practical meaning, which is the destruction of the state of Israel with that which it entails, which is basically the genocide of a large part of the Jewish people, because that is what the disappearance of the state of Israel would imply. To believe otherwise would be very naive, to say the least. To say for example, let’s say Israel disappears and so everyone will be happy living in one state. This is absurd.

So it’s very important to make the distinction that anti-Zionism before the state of Israel was a political philosophy, if you will, or a philosophical perspective on a political issue or an ideology that had prominent defenders, such as, for example, Martin Buber at one point and others. But after the creation of Israel, it’s something completely different. It’s the obsessive focus on one state and one state only. And basically, as you say, of course, attacks on Israeli policies need not be antisemitic. Now, we do not, in a sense, want to say that every attack on Israel is necessarily a form of anti-Zionism, because it isn’t. Why is it that there is a reason to believe, and we believe it’s a very strong reason to believe, that the modern form of anti-Zionism is antisemitic? Precisely because it reproduces those features of antisemitism that you mentioned, which is demonization, double standard, delegitimization. So that’s the thing.

Now, we do not demonize Palestinian Arabs in our book. You said that, but we describe the violent culture in which they live. There is a very important difference here: it is a description of their culture and leaders, but not of individual Palestinian Arabs. Let me give you an example of what we mean by this. 20% of Israel’s population is Arab, and these are Palestinian Arabs, and they are peaceful, and they basically mind their own business, and they live productive lives. They thrive in Israel. And so what can we say about that? Wonderful. At the same time, and we say so in the book, I was looking for the quote, which is basically page 182 of the book, we say the following:

Of course, the Mufti, Ayamin al-Husseini, which is the father of the Palestinian National Movement, won over public opinion, and Jew hatred turned common in the Middle East in general, and Palestinian Arab society in particular. However, in the modern era, nearly 20% of Palestinian Arabs are willing to live in peace with Israelis. Yet, this minority is still, unfortunately, politically irrelevant.

Now, what is 20% of the Palestinian Arabs? Let’s remember, there are two million in Gaza, and three million, roughly, in Judea and Samaria, otherwise known as the West Bank. So, we are talking about nearly one million people, right? It’s a lot of people, and these people have said, in polls, that they are, again, willing to live in peace with Israelis. They just have, and that’s right. And then you have 20% of Israel’s population within Israel, Israeli Arabs. They already live side by side with Israeli Jews. So we don’t want to be portrayed as demonizing Palestinians, because that is not what we are doing. But what we are doing, in effect, is to say not only that there is a proportion of the Palestinian Arab population that wants to live side by side with Israel, but they are irrelevant politically. So it’s a very important point.

Much of the land regarded as Arab was not homesteaded because it was regarded as uncultivable, which makes homesteading impossible.

There is another point that you make about the property or territorial claims of Palestinian Arabs. Now, we do not reject those Palestinian property or territory claims as such. What we reject is the claim that the entire land was owned by them, while Jews own none. Much of the land regarded as Arab was not homesteaded because it was regarded as uncultivable, which makes homesteading impossible. So, I don’t remember exactly where we say that it’s open to interpretation. Perhaps you could point to that part of the book. But essentially, in the land where the state of Israel was born, we could say that about 9% was owned by Jews, about 20% by Arabs. That is about 16% that was abandoned by Arabs that left when the state of Israel was born, and 3.3% that was owned by Israeli Arabs. The other 70% was ownerless, basically. It was owned by the government. And also a part of that 20% that was owned by Arabs was regarded as uncultivable. So it was not homesteaded by them. Now, this is supported by other facts that we could discuss. But the point is, what we reject is the claim that they own the land as such, and that the Jews own nothing, and so they had no right to create Israel.

There is another point that you make, which is with respect to the Palestinian Authority (PA). Now, we do not condemn the PA for, as you say, not being able to rein in and control terrorists or something along those lines, but for promoting terrorism by themselves, through their educational programs, and by paying wages to mass murderers, among other policies that they follow. So, it’s not the case that we are demonizing the PA in order to say, no, no, there is no legitimate leadership in order to make peace. The PA does this stuff, so it’s not that we are making it up.

Now, regarding Jewish acts of violence against innocent civilians, we talk about that in our book. For example, we say that there were instances during the War of Independence where Palestinian Arabs were displaced by the advance of the IDF. Most Palestinian Arabs fled due to fear, but some were expelled. Now, we say that, but the point is who launched the war? It was the Arab states that launched the war. And you could see very easily that it was not in the interest or in the goals of Jewish leaders in Israel to commit ethnic cleansing against the Arabs there because about 150,000 Arabs remained in Israel, which are the base of what today are nearly 2 million Arabs that comprise 20% of Israel’s population.

Now, you could ask another question, which is, where are the Arab Jews? And we can answer that question easily. They were ethnically cleansed, about 1 million of them, during and after the War of Independence. And where are they? Well, most of them are either in Israel or in the United States and in some other foreign countries, like for example, France. But what we know for sure is that in Israel there are 20% Arab citizens. In the Arab world, there are almost no Jews. Okay, so that’s one point.

Now, regarding Deir Yasin and the King David Hotel, we treat that in the book as well. What happened in Deir Yasin is controversial, right. It was part of the advance of the army during the war. And it’s a very complex topic to discuss because there are very contradicting accounts of what happened. With respect to the King David Hotel, that is quite more straightforward because the King David Hotel was a military headquarters, basically, and there were all sorts of measures before the blow-up of that hotel that the Irgun took. They basically let people there know that they were going to do that. So, I mean, you could say, you could mention other acts, let’s say, by the Lehi [Lohamei Herus Israel], which you name as, you call the Stern Gang, right? You could find instances of violence, of course, but these were, and this is the point, these were not the rule, these were the exception. And basically that’s what we can say about that.

So regarding acts of violence on the part of Jews against innocents, now we never claim that no mistake was ever made or no attack against innocents took place, but rather that these were exceptions and not the rule. In the case of the Palestinian Arab Society, that is a feature, not a bug. So what do I mean by this? It’s whether it is hijacking airplanes or bombing, let’s say, pizzerias, the entire Palestinian Arab National Movement was based on attacking innocent Israeli civilians. That, of course, does not mean that every Palestinian Arab is a murderer or is evil, as I said a few minutes ago. 20% at least want to live side by side with Israelis. But the culture in which they are embedded certainly is. So, if you will, it’s an institutional problem based on their underlying philosophy. Now, not because they are Palestinian Arabs, but because of what they believe. Because, and I end with this, what is the difference between an Israeli Arab who lives in Yaffo, in Israel, and has a cousin in Ramallah, let’s say? What is the difference between both? Well, the difference perhaps is that the one that lives in Ramallah has an ideology where he wants to see the land rid of Jews, while the guy that’s in Yaffo, he wants to continue and move on with his life and live side by side with his fellow citizens, his fellow Jewish citizens. And so that’s what we try to tackle in the book mainly.

Walter, would you like to add something?

 

Walter Block

Golda Meir said, peace will come when the (again, a paraphrase) peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.

Yeah, I’d like to add quite a bit. I think you did a magnificent job, but I approach it from a slightly different perspective. I want to start with two quotes, one from Bibi Netanyahu and the other from Golda Meir. Before I do that, the book has been mentioned, so I thought I’d show at least the front cover of the book, given, you know, that the book was mentioned and we’re talking about the book, so you might as well see the front cover of it. Bibi Netanyahu said that if Israel puts down its weapons, there’ll be no more Jews and no more Israel. Paraphrase. And if the Arabs put down their weapons, there will be peace. And I think no truer words were ever said. Secondly, Golda Meir said, peace will come when the (again, a paraphrase) peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us. Right now, they hate us, the Israelis, more than they love their children. Hamas embeds itself in the civilian population. They use their children as shields. They put rocket launchers in the middle of a hospital or in the middle of the school. And then they start whining when Israel bombs that. When ever did any Arab ever put a leaflet down saying that we Arabs are going to do this to you, go away? Never. How often has Israel put down leaflets here, there, and everywhere saying, look, we’re going to bomb here? We’re going to bomb this hospital. Why are we going to bomb this hospital? Because it’s used as a launching pad for bombs. So there’s a gigantic bifurcation here.

Another point I wanted to make on the antisemitism and anti-Zionism or anti-Israel, the two are conceptually distinct. For example, the Hasidic Jews, the pious Jews, the ones with the long beard and the yarmulke—I have a long beard but no yarmulke—when the state of Israel was formed in 1948, they were bitterly opposed to it. Why? Because in the Bible, in their interpretation of the Bible, the state of Israel is not justified until the Messiah comes, and the Messiah hadn’t come in 1948, so they bitterly opposed the state of Israel. But they’re hardly antisemitic. I mean, the very opposite.

You say that homesteading is a weak part and we admit that the homesteading is a weak part of our theory? I would say that there are two aspects of our theory. One is the hatred as a cause of what’s going on and the other is homesteading. From a libertarian point of view, homesteading is A through Z or A through Zed as they say in Canada. Homesteading is crucially important. The first person that homesteads is the rightful owner. And as Alan said, a lot of the Arab land that was claimed was really Ottoman land, government Ottoman or the British government. It was uncultivable and therefore uncultivated, therefore unhomesteaded, therefore unowned. Now the Jews were a lot better because of technology or other reasons to make the deserts bloom. Well, when you make the desert bloom, that means you’re homesteading it. So a lot of the Arab claims to the land, you have to deprecate or diminish, and you don’t have to do that as much with the Israeli. Yes, there’s a continuum in homesteading. You know, how intensive does the homesteading have to be? You have to put a corn plant every square foot, every square yard, every square whatever, 10 yards. How many years do you have to do it? Yes, there were continuums. But in terms of any reasonable understanding of homesteading, the Jewish case was a lot stronger than the Arab.

Another point I wanted to make is, I think it was Naftali who said, look, in terms of genocide, if we had no consideration for Arab civilian lives, this war would have been over in six hours. It’s been more than six months. Why? Because the Jews are over-concerned about collateral damage. I mean, whenever you have a war, there’s going to be collateral damage, especially if the enemy embeds himself among the civilian population and uses them as shields. The point is that this war could have been over in hours or days instead of months. And the reason it wasn’t is because Israel has a lot more concern for civilian lives than the Arabs have for civilian Israeli lives. What happened on October 7th, 2023? They attacked some sort of music festival. A music festival. They were just civilians and they were slaughtering them. There were 1,200 people slaughtered. Israel never did anything like that. Yes, many more people now have died. According to the Hamas statistics, it’s something like 30,000. You have to take Hamas statistics with a grain of salt or maybe in a bucket of salt. But who started this?

You know, Marco, if I start punching you and you punch me back, you are the good guy. I’m the bad guy because I started this. Now they might say, well, Israel really started it because they were brutal and it was an open-air prison. The whole Gaza was an open-air prison. But why was it an open-air prison? It was an open-air prison because they keep sending out suicide bombers. They build tunnels with the cement that they were given instead of houses or desalinization plants, and they come over and kill Israelis. So, of course, you have to be very careful about them.

One last point I wanted to make was this ethnic cleansing. And Alan mentioned the 20% of Arab citizens in Israel. Not only are they just sitting there and being grocers or carpenters, they’re also cops. They’re also judges. They’re also politicians. They sit in the Knesset. And South Africa has the nerve to call it ethnic cleansing? How did the whites treat the blacks in South Africa? Did they allow the blacks to be cops and judges and politicians? Of course not. So these are the additions that I would add to Alan’s point.

 

Roger Bissell

Great. You’re not going to get any argument from me about any of the points you made. I think in regard to the South Africans, there’s nothing worse than a reformed alcoholic for telling you how you should live your life, right? Gentlemen, Alan and Walter, it’s really good to meet both of you for the first time, and you really have done your historical homework. Back in the mid-20th century there’s an awful lot of detail to cover, and you really did it. I know some people think, wow, that’s ancient history. This is now, and that was then. But I want to go into really ancient history, all right? And I know you’ve done a lot of historical research on that, also. You were trying to connect present land claims to the people living there, like maybe 3,000 years ago in the time of Solomon’s temple, et cetera. And it’s true that they were, and you have noted it. There’s a lot of archeological as well as historical evidence for it. The question I have, and I’m going to actually ask two questions, and you can really stretch out on this once I’m done laying it out. My concern is whether the ownership was legitimate back then, not now. I mean, I understand the point about taking uninhabitable land and making it work. It’s just like the Saudis wanting to nationalize the oil wells that corporations went over and developed and, oh, okay, gee, we didn’t know what to do with it, but now we’ll take it, thank you. I really don’t like that. Get your mitts off. I worked hard to make this bloom.

My understanding of ancient history, part of it comes from the Bible, part of it from Josephus who was the Jewish historian (Flavius Josephus, if I said his name right). They had a big famine. Abraham’s descendants, I think Isaac and his sons, and so they left the area and went down to Egypt where they had food and they were down there supposedly for 250 years, and when they did return, there were people living there, the Canaanites and other tribes, and they battled them for the land. They killed some of them, they subjugated some of them, and they took the land over. And I don’t recall you mentioning this in your book. You said instead it was the Jews that in 1,300 BC were in possession of the disputed lands, and then 2,000 years ago, they were unjustly dispossessed, and it was stolen from them by who, the Romans and the Turks and everybody else who saw a good thing and wanted to grab it. So, my question is why are Israel’s present land claims over disputed areas—I’m not talking about the uninhabitable stuff that they said, hey, we can fix this and make it work—why are their claims any more legitimate going back to say, well, we can genetically prove that our ancestors lived there, so that is the basis for a claim? I’m wondering why is that any more legitimate than, for instance, Romans, people descended from Romans and Turks saying, hey, we used to have that too.

And then the second part of my question is—as if it needs a second part, anyway, here it comes—why not accept Israel’s own history, that they were there and then they were gone for 250 years and it was kind of like an absentee landlord. And then they came back again and they admitted that they raised an awful lot of Cain coming back and taking this land their ancestors lived on. According to their account, they were doing it because God commanded it, and he threatened that he would do it to them if they wouldn’t carry out his direction. So it seems that the Jews or the, I don’t know what to call them, the Hebrews, were not really righteous homesteaders back in the biblical times. So this is part of the historical record from the best record we have. And the Hebrews didn’t shy away from admitting that they had done this. They admitted that indeed they had. And so I’m wondering why we should privilege Jewish history from 1,000 BC onward and not look at what happened several hundred years earlier when there was really a lot of mayhem going on that they were directly responsible for. Now, you are the historians and I’m not, but I really am interested in what you have to say.

 

Alan Futerman

Okay, we’re not historians, but for the research we’ve done, basically what I can say about that, which is very interesting to delve into the biblical history and stuff like that, but we don’t make a biblical claim to the land of Israel, which is why we don’t focus mainly on what happened or may have happened 3,000, 3,500 years ago, according to the Bible, but to what happened 2,000 years ago, according to historical accounts of the Roman period. Now, we do not resort to theology, okay? In this sense, irrespective of how the Jews got to the land 3,500 years ago, which may well have involved the conversion of much or most of the inhabitants of the area at the time instead of their displacement or killing as in the biblical account. The fact is that Jews were there 2,000 years ago. Nobody else had claims to those lands from the biblical times because basically none of those peoples any longer existed then nor exist now as independently identifiable nations or groups. For example, there are no Canaanites going around the place. What does it mean to be a Canaanite today? Or a Jebusite? And the ones who invaded the land were the Romans. Now, unlike the Canaanites, which no longer exist, the Jews do exist. And they are the descendants of those who also existed at that time in Judea, the land of Israel. They have always lived in the land, no matter in how small numbers. But more importantly, the fact that Jews were there is not what explains why Israel has a right to exist today, but why the Jews wanted to go back to what they have always seen as their land and never forgot. So, the justification, if you will, of why Israel belongs to the Jews is not only that they fought for it, but also in accordance with our philosophical perspective that is classical liberalism and libertarianism, they built and homesteaded their land once again.

Now, in a sense, you could always go back in time and see how one group of people slaughtered or expropriated one another. What you don’t see, however, is a group of people that never relinquished the right to their land. A land that had no significant development for the two thousand years during which this group was essentially expelled from it. If any other group would have developed the land during that time, that would be definitely a different story. In reality, it wasn’t, irrespective of the fact that some land was indeed homesteaded by Arabs, and we recognize that. But that doesn’t mean that the Jews didn’t have a right to form their own state, right?

Again, we don’t make a biblical claim to the land of Israel. Although Walter has a nice beard, he’s not a rabbi and we are not rabbis. And our case is not based on the Bible. So why should we consider the theological aspects of the conquest of the land and how the Jews got there 3,500 years ago? In the book we always make emphasis to say that the Jews were there 2,000 years ago. That is a fact. Quite the opposite now, military conquest and war were the rule rather than the exception during history for all groups. The difference, however, is civilization. That is where you have to begin and the fundamental distinction that you have to make. And Western civilization is a mixture of both the Greeks and the Jews, between Athens and Jerusalem, if you will.

So it would not make any sense to focus on what was equal in all groups in ancient history. That is, conquest, war, mass slaughter, you name it, as it is recalled in the Bible. But you have to focus on what was new and the basis for progress through cultural evolution. Now, the Jews were there. They developed a society with advanced notions of ethics, private property, law, literature, education, architecture, the Temple in Jerusalem, for instance. Those were features of a society that were both developed in the land of Israel and that developed the land of Israel. And the people that actually did that were the Jews. So concepts such as property rights, individual rights, etc. are not self-evident truths. They are discovered through a process of cultural evolution. So to take into consideration what your argument implies would mean, for instance, to condemn, in a sense, a society that abolished slavery, let’s say, because it had slavery before it abolished it. Essentially that is what the argument ends up. So that’s why I don’t think, you know, it leads to where you think it leads.

The biblical account is irrelevant because we cannot and do not use it as an authoritative source of history.

But more importantly, the biblical account is irrelevant because we cannot and do not use it as an authoritative source of history. What we know for a fact is that Jews were living in Judea 2,000 years ago and that they had been there for centuries. Not how they got there. And the other good point is that it is not only the case that the Jews were there 2,000 years ago, but they massively went back between 150- and 100-years ago. And they developed the land, basically. They built the state of Israel with their own hands. So that is why Israel has a right to exist. That is why Jews have a right to be there, because they homesteaded the land, they worked the land, and they got back.

 

Walter Block

Let me talk about the statute of limitations. What’s a statute of limitations? What a statute of limitations is, is I steal something from Marco, and 10 years later, Marco finally finds me and he says, hey, give it back or put me in jail or something, and my lawyer says, well, the statute of limitations for this is over, and too bad on you, Marco, too bad. I stole it. I’m getting away with it. That is the law of the land. Of most lands, there are statute of limitations. And the reason for statutes of limitations is that people say, well, if you could go back 10,000 years, we’d never have any security of anything. That would be the argument for a legal statute of limitations. I believe that libertarians do not favor that kind of a statute of limitation. Rather, we favor a natural statute of limitations—namely, what a natural statute of limitations is, is whenever anyone claims any property from someone else, the burden of proof is on the plaintiff because possession is nine-tenths of the law and whoever’s got the thing is presumed to be the owner of it and the burden of proof is on the plaintiff who wants to get the property away from him. And the further back you go in history, the harder it is to prove anything. I mean, you go back 10 years, you can prove stuff. You go back for the Japanese internment camps in World War II, we had a written language, they could prove stuff. You go back to slavery, and there was less of a written language, and it was way longer ago, and it’s harder to prove. However, if they can prove something, then from the libertarian point of view, at least the way I understand libertarianism, then the plaintiff should win. Now you go back 2,000 years and that’s really hard to prove anything. So the possessor is presumed to be the rightful owner. Okay, so much for a natural statute of limitations versus a legal statute of limitations.

Hans Hoppe never says if there are any problems with the Arab claims.

Now, one of the problems with the critics of us, for example, Hans Hoppe, what he does is he says, well, look, the Jewish claim is: the problem is here, the problem is there, the problem is there, and he never says if there are any problems with the Arab claims. It’s just a criticism of the Israeli or the Jewish claims and nothing of the other side, but it’s a comparative thing. We’re now comparing Jews and Arabs to see who is the rightful owner of contested land. The Canaanites are not involved. The Romans are not involved. The Turks are not involved. If they want to step up to the plate, let them step up to the plate and say, well, they’re the rightful owners, but they haven’t. So to bring in Turks or Canaanites or Romans I think is irrelevant because the issue that is now on the table is not Turks and Romans and Canaanites. I’m not sure there are any Canaanites anywhere anymore. It’s rather Arabs versus Israelis. And here what we have to do is a comparative advantage, not an absolute advantage and say, well, is the Jewish case perfect? And then we conclude, well, no, the Jewish case isn’t perfect. Therefore, the Arabs are right? No, that’s not logical. Take the case of the Second Temple and the mosque. Which is built on top of which? Well, the mosque is built on top of the Second Temple. The Kohanim were there first.

A big consideration in homesteading is not who homesteaded it later, but who homesteaded it first. Now I have a wristwatch here. Here’s the wristwatch. And it’s got a picture of Marco’s great-great-grandfather who lived 500 years ago, let’s say. And what happened is that it went here and it went there. And then finally I got it. And it’s got a picture of Marco’s great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather, and Marco can prove that that’s his watch. Well, Marco was an absentee owner of that watch for two hundred years. He is the rightful owner. He should get it back. And I would say that the Jews should get it back because there’s nothing wrong with an absentee landowner or an absentee landlord or an absentee anything, especially if the reason for the absenteeism is that the Romans kicked you out. I mean, you know, there is such a thing as abandoning property, but the Jews didn’t abandon anything. They were kicked out. Yes, they might have kicked out the Canaanites and the Canaanites would have a better claim, possibly. Let them step up to the plate, whoever they are, and if they can prove that they are the rightful owners, God bless them. And the Jews should leave and the Canaanites take over. But there are no Canaanites. The question is who is the rightful owner, not between the Canaanites and the Jews and the Arabs, but rather just between the Jews and the Arabs. And here I think that yes, the Jewish case is not perfect; nothing on this side of the Garden of Eden is perfect, but it is better than the Arab case in terms of homesteading, in terms of 2,000 years ago, in terms of 200 years ago, in terms of 50 years ago.

Let me talk about, well, 75 years ago, what happened with the people who abandoned their property in 1948. As Alan said, many of them just were afraid of a war and they wanted to leave, but others, the seven invading armies in 1948, sent out a message to all these Arabs and they said, look, get out, go away for two weeks. We will kick the butt of the Jews. (I’m paraphrasing again. They didn’t quite say it this way.) And then when we kick the butt of the Jews and they’re all gone, you come back and you take over your vineyards and all will be well. Whereas if you stay, it’ll be harder for us to slaughter the Jews because we’ll have to watch out for you. Well, then they left and then they wanted to have the right of return. At the same time, a roughly equal number of Jews were kicked out of Egypt and Syria and Iraq and all those other Arab countries. And it might have been a switch. That might have been just. But to allow all those people back, some of them were really problematic in the sense that they were aiding and abetting the invading Arab armies. And when you invade and when you aid and abet the enemy, your position is not as sacrosanct as it otherwise would have been.

 

Roger Bissell

Thank you very much. Marco, to you.

 

Marco den Ouden

Yes, the original UN partition plan tried, in my opinion, to resolve the conflict in the area by following the wisdom of Solomon, who, when asked by two mothers disputing the other’s claim to a baby, suggested cutting the baby in half. Now, the territory in dispute is not a baby, of course, but symbolically, it could be said that the UN, acting like Solomon, cut the territory in half, offering half to the Jewish people and the other half to the Arabs. The Jews responded by accepting the offer. Half a baby is better than no baby. But the Arabs rejected it. They wanted the whole baby or nothing at all. They have been offered variations on the original deal many times and have always rejected it. Often the response has been accompanied by terrorist violence, such as suicide bombings, killing civilians. Now, you reject the two-state solution because it has failed in the past, but Israel has successfully negotiated peace with Egypt, and a deal with Saudi Arabia was in the making, a deal that was hailed by the International Bar Association as the deal of the century. Quoting them, they say that the idea is that “all Arab nations will finally become allies with Israel, bringing peace to the previously tumultuous region.”

Now, if such deals can be struck, why do you reject the prospect that they can happen between Israel and Palestinians as well? In fact, it’s been alleged, but not mentioned in your book, that Netanyahu’s government has been actively propping up Hamas through backdoor channels in Egypt and Qatar. This could be a cynical ploy to weaken the Palestinian Authority, which despite its flaws is decidedly more likely to agree to a two-state solution. Now while you argue that the Palestinians don’t want a two-state solution, isn’t the case that the Netanyahu government also doesn’t want one? And that they may be playing a divide and conquer game by supporting Hamas to scuttle the possibility of a two-state solution happening?

 

Alan Futerman

Okay, many points. Now, first, we don’t deny that there are peace prospects between Israel and Palestinian Arabs. What we say is that it cannot be achieved as long as the fundamental root of the entire situation doesn’t change, which is the rejection of Jewish presence in the area, whether or not in the form of a state. And so until that changes, it’s very difficult to conceive that there will be peace—with Hamas, definitely not; with the Palestinian Authority, also. Because consider what I said before, in the educational programs, paying wages to mass murderers, I mean, those are not policies that promote peace, right?

This idea that Netanyahu is to blame for Hamas, I think it’s deeply misguided.

In the same respect, this idea that Netanyahu is to blame for Hamas, I think it’s deeply misguided. Why? Fundamentally, because Palestinian Arabs elected Hamas in 2006 in the Gaza Strip. And then Hamas basically took over the Gaza Strip after a civil war with the PA there. Basically they formed a quasi-state in the Gaza Strip. And I mean, Palestinian Arabs voted for Hamas. It was not Netanyahu. At the same time, Hamas was not created by Israel either, as anti-Zionists claim. Hamas was created by followers of the Muslim Brotherhood in the ’80s and is basically supported by Iran, Qatar, and Turkey, not by Israel. Now, given the situation in the area, that Hamas controlled the Gaza Strip and formed a sort of government there, you have to recognize that you have two options, basically, if you are Israel. You either destroy Hamas, which entails a full-scale operation, as we are seeing right now, or you reluctantly tolerate Hamas, which in the case of Israel implied every two years or so, launching a defensive operation in order to stop the massive launching of rockets from the Gaza Strip to Israeli civilians or to create the Iron Dome.

But at the same time, you have to understand that if Hamas is going to govern the Gaza Strip, you need to allow certain financial flow there in order for them to be able to form their government or to, for example, accept flow of goods or people. For example, there were between 20- and 25,000 work permits for Gazans to work in Israel that ultimately benefited about 100,000 people in the Gaza Strip. And so Israel also provided electricity to the Strip. It also provided healthcare for Gazans in Israel. So you could interpret those things as either accepting the status quo or as propping up Hamas. But I think that the fundamental premise behind the idea that this entails (these policies that I mentioned) propping up Hamas, is the idea that Palestinian Arabs have no agency and ultimately Israel is the only one that can make decisions and is to blame. Because if Palestinian Arabs create an organization, a fanatic, a theocratic organization, that then establishes a totalitarian dictatorship in the Gaza Strip, and most Palestinians elect this group to run the place, and they keep launching rockets, one after the other, against Israeli civilians, Israel is to blame for that. At the same time, if you don’t want Israel to allow this support of Hamas by Qatar, Turkey, you name it, and Israel launches an operation in order to get rid of Hamas, people will claim, oh, they are committing genocide, they are committing ethnic cleansing. So, I mean, there’s no way to win, basically. Israel is going to be blamed no matter what, whether it gives healthcare to Palestinians, whether it gives electricity to the Gaza Strip, or if it doesn’t basically tolerate that Hamas launch thousands of rockets against its own civilians. So whatever Israel does is going to be seen as a mistake.

Now, in this sense, we reject the premise, in a sense, that there cannot be peace between Israel and Palestinian Arabs. But in order for peace to happen, there is a quote that I was looking for here that I’d like to read, which was written by Daniel Doron on 2016. And it’s the following,

Peace can evolve between Israelis and Palestinians, but only once the Palestinians have been freed from the rule of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. It will require time and patience, but it is achievable. It will come when people realize that peace improves their lives, that peace brings prosperity. Alas, the Oslo Accords put an end to what was once an informal economic peace process that could have evolved into a political settlement, perhaps in the form, as in Switzerland, of a loose Arab-Israeli federation of independent cantons. The corrupt government begun by Arafat—imposed on the Palestinians by a clueless Israeli leadership—put an end to this promising evolution.

And in this sense, and we quote this in our book, Ruth Wisse, 2019, said the following:

Peace will come, but only once the aggression and the intent to destroy Israel stops, as it has happened with many Arab countries, like Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, all those who signed the Abraham Accords.

Self-proclaimed idealists in the late 19th century and early 20th century had attributed pogroms and antisemitism to Jewish deficiencies that were presumably correctable by Jewish reforms. Russian Jewish revolutionaries promoted the renunciation of capitalist occupations in favor of communist or socialist commitment. Their modern Israeli counterparts advocated renunciation of land won in a defensive war. About all this I wrote: “Since Israel’s acquisition of the disputed territories was the result of the Arab war against Israel, it could not retroactively have become its cause.”[ This is important.] The unilateral aggression would stop and peace might come only when Arab leaders agreed to coexistence. Until then and beyond, Israel would need to prove stronger than those seeking to destroy it. [emphasis in the original]

And so, why do I mention this? Because peace will come, but only once the aggression and the intent to destroy Israel stops, as it has happened with many Arab countries, like Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, all those who signed the Abraham Accords. So it can happen, but first the impulse of aggression must end.

Walter?

 

Walter Block

Yes, I would like to add a little bit. The Arabs had a state, in effect. Up until 2005, there were many Jewish people living in the Gaza, just as there are many Jews and Arabs now living in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank. But in 2005, the Israeli government compelled all the Jews to leave. They compensated them, they bought them a house in Israel, but they kicked them out. And in 2007, Hamas really had a government. It wasn’t called a government, but it was a government. They ran it. They had cement imports voluntarily. And what did they use that cement for? Did they use it for desalinization plants, for hotels on the beach? No, they used it for tunnels. They used it for rocket launching pads. This is the kind of government that they had. And the Hamas Constitution says not only should all the Israelis be killed, but all the Jews anywhere should be killed. And not only all the Jews, but all the Arabs who are friendly with the Jews should be killed. I return to Golda Meir: “Yes, peace will break out when they stop hating us, us Jews or us Israelis, more than they love their children.” They hate Israelis and Jews more than they love their children. How can you make peace with them? Even my buddy Bernie Sanders—I went to high school with him; I was on the track team with him; we were buddies—even Bernie Sanders, no Zionist he, said that it is impossible to make a deal with Hamas. But these people voted for Hamas. When 9/11 occurred, they were dancing in the streets. When October 7th occurred, they were dancing in the streets. They were not compelled to dance in the streets. They did it out of their own interest or their own philosophy.

You know, we, Alan and I, are anarcho-capitalists, but the book was not an anarcho-capitalist case for Israel. It was a classical liberal case for Israel. Why? Because we followed Murray Rothbard. Murray Rothbard warned against sectarianism. What’s sectarianism? Sectarianism is this idea you’re an anarcho-capitalist and all governments are evil and they’re equally evil. We have equality here. They’re all evil. They’re all a bunch of gangsters. And Murray said, we can do better than that. We can say that some governments are a little worse than others. The Nazi Germans were a little worse than the Monaco government, a lot worse obviously. I’m being silly when I say a little worse. And Murray asked us to figure out, well, who is worse here? Well, the Gazans, the Hamas people are very, very bad. Not everybody has a right to make a state, even from classical liberalism. Did Hitler have a right to make a state? No, Hitler had a right to be executed. That was his right. And Hamas has a similar right. They don’t have a right to make a state.

One of my recent publications was, yes, we should have many Palestinian states, not just one, but not anywhere near Israel. Let them go to Saudi Arabia and have a Palestinian state. There are Palestinians there. King Hussein killed, what was it, 25,000 Palestinians who were trying to overturn him? [Alan: Jordan] I’m sorry? Jordan, sorry. Let them have a Palestinian state somewhere else. Why does it have to be right next to Israel where they send over suicide bombers and rockets and stuff like that? So imagine if Vancouver started sending rockets over to Seattle, or Toronto started bombing Buffalo, which would be the city right opposite it. What would the US response be? That the Canadians should have a state and we’re worried about them? I mean, it’d be no more Canada if Canada did anything like that. If Monaco started attacking France and dropping bombs on France, the French probably wouldn’t retaliate right away. They would call the Monacans and they’d say, hey, what happened? What did you do? Let’s make sure this doesn’t happen again. But then the Monaco people would say, oh, we’re going to keep doing this. Well, there’d be no more Monaco.

You have to sometimes make a little bit of an analogy here. Israel is way more powerful than Hamas. But Israel deals with them with kid gloves. And Biden stops military materiel if they go into Rafah. If they don’t go into Rafah and root out Hamas, Hamas wins. And then many, many other ISIS and other terrorist groups will embed themselves in the civilian population and we’ll have anarchy, not the anarchy that an anarcho-capitalist wants, but the chaos that people falsely attribute to anarchy. So I think that this idea of a second Palestinian state, sure, let them have two or three or four of them, just not near Israel, not in the Gaza Strip and not in the West Bank or Samaria and Judea. Let them have it in the middle of Iraq or Egypt or…you know, at one time Israel controlled the Sinai Peninsula in the ’56 War. Let them have a Palestinian state somewhere in there. That would be my response.

 

Roger Bissell

Or Iran because Iran likes to sponsor them so much!

I think that’s our time for this evening. Walter Block and Alan Futerman, I want to thank you both. It was a pleasure meeting you and hearing what you had to say. I hope we can do this again. I know you have more good ideas to share with us and we have more questions too. I want to thank my co-host, Marco den Ouden. Thank you, Marco. And in the words of our regular host, Vinay Kohatkar, I wish you all a good night and good luck.

 

Alan Futerman

Thank you.