Debates aren’t a reward for good behavior. You do them because you disagree with the person at the other podium or the other side of the YouTube split-screen. And Walter Block is very far from being the worst person I’ve debated. At the end of the day, he’s an academic with a lot of opinions I dislike.
That said, my debate with him included one of the most revealingly disturbing moments of any debate I’ve ever done with anyone. I said that, like other apologists for Israel’s crimes in Gaza, Walter seemed to believe that “nothing could ever justify October 7th, but October 7th can justify everything.” As I said it, Walter looked up and nodded vigorously, like, yep, that’s what I think.
If Liz Bruenig is right that “half the point of a debate is to get the other person to tell you what they really think,” this was a particularly valuable moment, albeit hard on the stomach. Israel has expelled millions of Palestinian civilians from their homes at gunpoint in the last seven months (in a war allegedly directed against 30,000 Hamas fighters). Thanks to a never-ending supply of American bombs, the 25-mile-long Gaza Strip now has the world’s largest population of child amputees. And Israeli soldiers keep posting videos on social media where they rifle through the lingerie drawers of Palestinian women who had to flee for their lives. Or where they play with toys abandoned by children who might now be dismembered or dead.
In circumstances like that, if someone says that you think “everything” Israel does is justified, and instead of taking it as a mortal insult, you nod along with the characterization, something has gone terribly wrong with your basic humanity. I hope that much is obvious.
Here, though, I’ll focus not on the state of Walter’s soul but on the merits of his reasoning. Allegedly, he’s a libertarian. That’s a worldview I don’t share. I’m a staunch egalitarian about normative political philosophy, and I think Marx’s theory of history is basically correct. But the more I think about Walter’s position on Palestine, the more it seems to me that he’s actually farther than I am from a genuinely libertarian worldview.
In June, Walter wrote an article for Merion West called “Yes, to a Palestinian State—Just Not Inside or Right Next to Israel.” In it, he argued that “if” Palestinians “deserve a state,” which of course he thinks they don’t, it should be established somewhere far from where they currently live.
One of the editors of Merion West had recently interviewed me about my support for the anti-war encampments on college campuses, and he invited me to respond to Walter’s essay. As I wrote at the beginning of that response, my first instinct was to decline on the grounds that “the article responds to itself.”
I ended up thinking better of this for two reasons. First, Walter is performing a valuable public service by explicitly arguing for something that so many others in his camp clearly believe but are too squeamish to say out loud. Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, recently voted by a margin of 68-9 to oppose the very idea of a two-state partition. (Some opposition figures skipped the vote so that they wouldn’t have to go on record one way or the other, but no one in the country’s Zionist mainstream actually voted against it.) Pretty clearly, none of those 68 people want a binational state either. Do they seriously believe that several million Palestinians will just roll over and submit to spending the next, say, hundred years as permanently stateless and rightless non-citizen untermenschen? Please. The logic of the position, and of the actual actions of the Israeli government in annihilating Gaza so thoroughly that the UN estimated back in March it would take 80 years to rebuild the territory, and increasingly applying a slowed-down version of the same treatment to the West Bank, all point in the direction of the Walter Block Plan.
I wish that support for that government was so marginal that simply shunning its apologists was an effective strategy, but that’s not reality. Both of the viable candidates for president support unlimited U.S. aid to the Israeli military, and it’s extremely unlikely that any of the protest candidates who disagree will get a noticeable share of the final vote. In a poll conducted around the same time as that UN report, 58% of the public buys into the basic premise of a justifiable war “against Hamas.” Many think Israel’s tactics have gone too far, but even there, a plurality (38% yes, 34% no, 26% unsure) think “Israel’s conduct of the war has been acceptable.” And if you really want to depress yourself, check out the polls from the spring about public perception of the college protests. The sad reality is that, while the Palestine solidarity movement enjoys more support now than it ever has in my lifetime, it’s still very far from winning the war for hearts and minds. I’m under no illusions that podcasters or magazine columnists are primary actors in that war, but to whatever extent we can make any sort of tiny contribution—and if we can’t, really, it’s time to give all this up—I think there’s value in engaging with someone willing to spell out the part that you usually goes unspoken and hence unrefuted.
The second is that the conflict between Walter’s embrace of ultra-nationalism and his overall libertarian position in normative political philosophy is extremely strange. And, God help me, I’m too much of a philosophy nerd to leave it alone.
Socialists and libertarians disagree on property rights to the means of production. We typically agree, at least up to a point, about personal property. I don’t necessarily think that one person should be allowed to accumulate 52 mansions so they can sleep in one for exactly one week per year, for example, but I do think that people have a basic right to their homes and possessions. It’s the coldest of takes.
This is, of course, precisely the right that’s been taken from millions of innocent Gazans since last October. Those lingerie-drawer-and-children’s-toys videos, some of which end with the homes being blown up, make the obscenity vivid, but surely from a libertarian perspective that’s the more basic issue. In fact, deontic libertarians like Walter typically argue that even your rights against death and dismemberment are ultimately "property rights.” That’s the “self-ownership” thesis.
Gaza right now is full of civilians who have lost both their homes and their limbs. Walter buys into the usual “human shields” defense of the death and dismemberment, which I wrote about at length here. When it comes to the homes, he’s reduced to simply making things up, speculating that (to lightly rephrase his suggestion in our debate) the 30,000 members of Hamas have been as busy as Santa Claus must be delivering gifts to every home in the Christmas-celebrating parts of the world in the span of one night. Hamas, you see, has placed rocket launchers or “booby traps” in so many Palestinian homes that millions of people could be dispossessed as a matter of Israeli “self-defense.”
The same tendency to deny inconvenient realities was on full display in his last entry in our initial exchange of articles. I’d argued that Israel’s atrocities in Gaza are downstream of its system of apartheid, and cited the views of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem to justify my use of that term. Millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have been denied citizenship even as Israel incorporates these territories into its state for every other legal purpose simply because granting them equality would change the “ethnic character” of the state. (Zionist commentators and politicans are rarely shy about spelling that part out.) And even for those Palestinians who ended up on the Israeli side of the line after the initial ethnic cleansing in 1947-8 and were thus eventually granted citizenship, their status is extremely far from equal.
B’Tselem explains:
Efforts to de-legitimize Palestinian political participation…[show] that some of Israel’s leaders and the public at large see such participation as undesirable. This sentiment was perfectly captured in various slogans used during election campaigns, such as ‘Netanyahu is good for the Jews’ (1996), ‘No loyalty, no citizenship’ by right-wing party Yisrael Beitenu (2009), or a clip released on election day (2015) in which then-Prime Minister Netanyahu warned that ‘the right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.’
The underlying message is clear: the political participation of Palestinian citizens is not, and must not be, equal to that of Jewish citizens…That is also why Knesset resolutions that rely on votes by Palestinian members, without obtaining a Jewish majority, are widely considered illegitimate.
This is more than longstanding practice and rhetoric. The political participation of Palestinian citizens is also limited by Basic Law: The Knesset. Section 7a, legislated in 2002, stipulates that a candidate or a list of candidates can be barred from running for Knesset if their actions or goals explicitly or implicitly include ‘negation of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.’ The Central Elections Committee—a body comprised of representatives of various political parties—has repeatedly relied on this clause to disqualify Palestinian candidates and lists, arguing that their civil struggle for full equality violates the clause as it denies Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.
In response, Walter makes a truly astonishing claim:
There probably is not a nation on the entire planet that would not prohibit “the political participation of” a party which aimed at the very destruction of the government.
Could as ardent an anti-communist as Walter Block be aware that the Communist Party USA legally operated during the Cold War and indeed often got its candidates on the ballot? There were various attempts to legally restrict them on the grounds that they not only “aimed at the very destruction” of the existing system but that the theory of Marxism-Leninism encompassed the use of “force and violence” as a means of bringing about that destruction, but the Supreme Court held the line against all of that, ruling that even advocacy of violent revolution is legally protected as long as there’s no “imminent” danger of violence occurring. So, one obvious counter-example to the “probably not a nation on the entire planet” claim is the country Walter himself lives in, but it’s far from the only one. Multiple Western European nations had Communist politicians serving in their parliaments while Soviet ICBMs were aimed at the West.
The factual contortions themselves, though, are less interesting to me than why he feels the need to resort to them. And that takes us to the central contradiction in his position.
Theoretically, Walter subscribes to the most demanding form of libertarianism. He doesn’t even think there should be public sidewalks. If the Israeli state were evaluated from this perspective, he acknowledges, it would fail the test simply because it is a state. So, he claims that his normal anarcho-capitalist perspective has to give way to a more moderate kind of “classical liberalism” for the purposes of navigating day-to-day politics.
The basic move here isn’t as unreasonable as it might sound. In the abstract, it’s not that different from a right-wing mirror version of the politics of a Marxist who supports workers’ control of the means of production cheering on social democratic politicians with vastly more limited political horizons, on the grounds that some sort of limited social democracy is the best we’re likely to get in the short term. But it’s far from clear how he thinks it’s going to help make sense of the basic contradiction between his libertarianism and his embrace of an extreme and brutal form of ethnonationalism.
First, his frequent insistence that Israel needs to be compared not “to perfection” but to Hamas only makes sense if “approving of Israel” and “approving of Hamas” are the only options. As Americans, the choice we’re faced with is about actually existing American support for Israel. If my government were sending Hamas 2,000 pound bombs to drop on Israeli children, I’d be against that too, but it isn’t. I have no sympathy for the ideology of Hamas, but I can’t for the life of me see how this is supposed to be relevant. If the ANC had been defeated or coopted and the main armed force fighting against the apartheid government of South Africa in the 1980s were some hideously reactionary group of Christian fundamentalist black nationalists, that would be a moral and political tragedy, but it wouldn’t make me support apartheid. And it sure as hell wouldn’t make me want my country to start supplying bombs and tanks to Johannesburg.
Walter himself seems to be capable of understanding the point in other contexts. He opposed the war in Iraq, for example. Surely, if we compare the administration of George W. Bush not “to perfection” but to the government of Saddam Hussein, the former comes gets more points on the “classical liberal” scorecard, but I think Block would (rightly) dismiss that as an irrelevant question. Cluster-bombing, invading and occupying Iraq against the will of the Iraqi people was indefensible regardless.
And in any case, “classical liberalism” presumably refers to a set of views at least loosely inspired by various Enlightenment-era thinkers who were to one extent or another proto-libertarian about economics but who didn’t see government per se as inherently legitimate. Since I’m robustly non-libertarian about economics, this is a package of views I dislike in many ways, but none of those are relevant here. The whole point of “classical liberalism” is surely that every human being is born with the same “liberal rights” as every other. That may include some ideas about “economic rights” that relate to larger disagreements between Walter and myself, but it surely also includes the rights to life, liberty, and even democratic self-government (think “no taxation without representation”) that Israel has run roughshod over, in general throughout the many decades of its dispossession and subjugation of the Palestinian people, and at a particularly furious rate since last October.
Walter sometimes suggests that just as individual “criminals” can lose rights, so can a whole population. But the idea of such a collective loss of rights is profoundly at odds with any sort of liberalism, in the whole range from “classical liberalism” to McManusite “liberal socialism.” Someone like Aleksandr Dugin might casually say (as he did in his debate with Bernard-Henri Lévy) that citizens can no more have rights against the state than the parts of your body can have rights against you, but the whole point of liberalism, never mind libertarianism, is to reject that kind of thinking. Individual human beings have individual human rights because they’re, well, individuals.
And this is really where the question I ask in the title of this essay comes into play. I may be a “collectivist” in the sense of supporting collective ownership of the means of production. (I’d argue that this is the best way to provide as many individuals as possible the capacity to live individually flourishing lives, and of course Walter would disagree, but that’s an argument for another time.) But, at least when he starts talking about Palestine, Walter becomes a “collectivist” in an altogether less defensible sense. He becomes pretty much what Ayn Rand had in mind when she railed against “collectivism.” In Rand’s hands, it was often an absurd strawman of her ideological enemies, many of whom do of course believe in individual rights. But it fits Walter.
He often justifies the original dispossession of Palestinians in the 1940s on the grounds that “the Jews” were there before “the Muslims,” frequently illustrating this by pointing out that the ruins of the Second Temple are underneath the Dome of the Rock. (“So it came first!”) And as insane as I find the notion of enforcing property rights from thousands of years ago, let’s put that aside and notice a more basic problem:
It would be a minor statistical miracle for any Palestinian family not to be descended in at least some tiny part from descendants of Second Temple-era Jews who converted to Christianity or Islam. I have no idea what the procedures would look like in anarcho-capitalist courts to decide which of the innumerable descendants of an ancient property-owner gets the 21st century deed, but I see no reason to think Palestinians would always or even usually lose those cases, unless Walter thinks you lose your property rights when you change religions. And this isn’t even to mention that anyone who's ever skimmed the Torah knows that the Biblical story, at least, is that ancient Israelites themselves dispossessed earlier inhabitants. In the Biblical worldview, that’s justified because God prefers the Israelites. (Not exactly a libertarian theory of homesteading.)
Walter often approvingly quotes Golda Meir’s blood-chilling genocidal rhetoric about how the Palestinian children would have to continue being killed until Palestinian parents, in her judgment, “love their children” more than they “hate us.” (A Hamasnik could, of course, simply reverse this to justify killing random Jewish children until his demands were met.) And in his debate with Dave Smith, Walter makes a telling mistake. He says that Meir said this about “the Hamasians.”
In reality, she said it in 1957. Hamas wasn’t even formed until 1987—four decades after the original ethnic cleansing and two decades after the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza were turned into permanently rightless non-citizen subjects of Israel. But, to Walter, it’s all the same thing. There aren’t individual Palestinians, or even different Palestinian parties, factions, interest groups, and so on. There’s only “the Palestinians” (or sometimes even “the Arabs”) and “the Jews,” conceptualized as something like immortal ethnic hive minds.
Whatever you want to call that worldview, please don’t insult my intelligence by claiming that it has anything whatsoever to do with libertarianism, “classical liberalism,” or anything of the kind.
Ten years ago, I thought Ben Burgis was an annoying, lightweight leftist. But's it's amazing how much he has wised up recently.
(Apologies to Mark Twain).
Not sure I have the patience to watch this. How did he deal with the prospect of someone with an Ancestry result showing they were 1% Jebusite evicting all the current residents of Jerusalem at gunpoint? If the Beaker people show up, where do all the Angles, Saxons and Jutes go?