How Rabid Zionism Split the Libertarian World

The quiet corridors of libertarian academia echoed with a familiar tension. Beneath the polished language of universal principles, old loyalties and invisible borders stirred once more. What seemed like an argument over ideas was, at its core, a reckoning of identities no theory could contain.

The recent falling out between economist Walter Block and the Ludwig von Mises Institute was not a routine dispute over doctrine. It revealed something far deeper, a reminder that even among those who preach the supremacy of logic and liberty, human nature resists the purity of abstraction. Intellectual movements, however rational they may appear, remain vulnerable to the same ethnic and cultural divisions that have divided men for centuries.

Walter Edward Block embodied this paradox. He emerged from the intellectual heart of Brooklyn’s Jewish community, a world where fierce debate was a form of devotion. Born in 1941 to Abraham and Ruth Block, he began as a socialist idealist and evolved into one of the most uncompromising defenders of anarcho-capitalism.

Block’s conversion began with an encounter that would shape the trajectory of libertarian thought. Attending an Ayn Rand lecture as an undergraduate, followed by meetings with Nathaniel Branden and Leonard Peikoff, he eventually found his intellectual home under Murray Rothbard’s mentorship. This progression from Objectivism to Austrian economics positioned Block as one of the rising Jewish voices in the Austrian school.

His 1976 masterwork Defending the Undefendable established Block as libertarianism’s most provocative voice, willing to defend society’s most marginal figures—prostitutes, blackmailers, and drug dealers— through the rigorous application of property rights theory. The book’s central thesis separated economic analysis from moral judgment, creating a framework that embodied Block’s Jewish character of challenging gentile norms wherever possible.

With over two dozen books and more than 700 scholarly articles, Block constructed an intellectual empire spanning road privatization, water capitalism, and space economics. His positions at institutions such as Baruch College, Holy Cross, and Loyola University New Orleans provided platforms for developing anarcho-capitalism while maintaining respectability within academic circles. Yet beneath this impressive scholarly output lay dormant ethnic loyalties that would eventually surface with explosive consequences.

The October Revelation: Block’s Zionist Awakening

The October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks triggered an ethnic awakening within Block that betrayed his libertarian commitment to non-aggression and a non-interventionist foreign policy. In his Wall Street Journal op-ed he penned with Argentine economist Alan Futerman “The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas,” Block revealed convictions that had apparently been gestating beneath his libertarian exterior for years.

His call for “total, unrestrictive support” for Israel represented a complete abandonment of libertarian non-interventionism. Block argued that “Hamas needs to be destroyed for the same reason and by the same method that the Nazis were,” explicitly comparing the conflict to World War II’s total war paradigm. This was not merely policy disagreement but a fundamental rejection of the non-aggression principle that forms libertarianism’s cornerstone.

More dramatically, Block’s “Open Letter to the Children of Gaza” revealed depths of ethnic passion that stunned even his closest associates. Addressing Palestinian children directly, he declared that “your parents launched a despicable, unwarranted attack on October 7” while conveniently overlooking the long history of Jewish expropriation of Palestinian lands dating back to the 1880s—a campaign of extermination that the United States government has fully endorsed through its ongoing flow of military aid, economic support, and diplomatic cover. And of course, he didn’t mention Israel’s oppressive control over Gaza—making Gaza into an open-air prison. Who could live like that?

These positions revealed Block not as a consistent libertarian applying universal principles, but as a Jewish intellectual whose ethnic solidarity ultimately trumped philosophical commitments when forced to choose between abstract theory and tribal loyalty.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe: The Libertarian Contrarian Who Stood Up to Block

Standing in stark opposition to Block’s ethnic particularism was Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a German-born philosopher whose contrarian positions place him at odds with virtually every aspect of 20th-century political consensus. Hoppe’s intellectual journey from German academia to American libertarianism produced the most radical critique of democratic governance within the movement, making him perhaps libertarianism’s most polemical voice.

Block’s Wall Street Journal essay, coupled with his longer-running claim that Jewish homesteading and inheritance justify Israel’s territorial rights, put him sharply at odds with libertarians who ground foreign-policy ethics in the non-aggression principle (NAP).

Hoppe answered with a public severing of ties. In his “Open Letter to Walter E. Block,” he charged that Block had revealed himself as “an unhinged, bloodthirsty monster” and that the stance amounted to “a complete and uninhibited rejection and renunciation of the non-aggression principle.” Hoppe’s critique went beyond rhetoric. He proclaimed that Block’s position endorsed collective guilt and “indiscriminate slaughter of innocents,” abandoning methodological individualism.

Institutionally, the fallout was swift and decisive. By 2024, Block was no longer listed as a senior fellow at the Mises Institute, and access to much of his archival writing on affiliated platforms was curtailed. Although not fired in a formal employment sense, his long association with the Institute had effectively ended. Block, for his part, framed his stance as consistent with libertarian property theory and Jewish tradition.

Rather than a purely ideological statement, Block’s pro-Zionist outburst appears to mark an ethnic awakening akin to the one Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg described, wherein the Six-Day War “united American Jews with deep Jewish commitments as they have never been united before, and … evoked such commitments in many Jews who previously seemed untouched by them.”

Hoppe’s sharp rebuke of Block forms only a single episode in a longer saga of intellectual defiance that has rendered him a lightning rod even within libertarian ranks. His 2001 work Democracy: The God That Failed articulates a systematic challenge to democratic legitimacy that extends far beyond typical libertarian anti-statism. Rather than viewing democracy as the least objectionable form of government, Hoppe argues that democratic institutions actively accelerate civilizational decline. His preference for monarchy over democracy places him in direct opposition to fundamental assumptions underlying both liberal and conservative political thought.

Some of Hoppe’s most controversial contributions to libertarian thought also concern his idea of “covenant communities” structured around the notion of “physical removal.” These entities, as he conceives them, would claim an absolute prerogative to exclude those considered misaligned with their norms, effectively transforming property rights into instruments of communal self-definition.

Writing in Democracy: The God That Failed, Hoppe argues that maintaining libertarian social order requires active exclusion of ideological opponents. “There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society,” he declares, extending this principle to “advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism.”

Similarly, Hoppe has stirred the pot on the immigration question in contrast to Jewish libertarians like Block who are notorious open borders boosters. Despite describing himself as an anarcho-capitalist who favors abolishing the nation-state, Hoppe supports immigration restrictions, arguing that unlimited immigration constitutes forced integration that violates native peoples’ rights.

The Jewish Intellectual Foundation of Libertarianism

Hoppe’s divergence on immigration highlights how libertarianism’s internal debates often mirror the worldviews of its founding intellectuals, many of whom were Jewish and profoundly shaped the movement’s philosophical trajectory.

It’s no secret that libertarian movement’s development has been profoundly shaped by Jewish intellectual leadership. This pattern extends from the movement’s Austrian School foundations through its contemporary institutional structure.

Ludwig von Mises, whose Austrian School economics provided libertarianism’s theoretical foundation, was born to a Jewish family in what is now Ukraine. His development of praxeology and systematic critique of socialist economics established the intellectual framework that would influence generations of libertarian scholars. Murray Rothbard, perhaps the most influential libertarian theorist of the 20th century, was born to Jewish parents and founded anarcho-capitalism while establishing the Mises Institute. Curiously, Rothbard had more of a populist turn toward the end of his life, where he advocated for a strategy of “right-wing populism” that endorsed the presidential campaigns of David Duke and Pat Buchanan.

Milton Friedman’s Nobel Prize-winning advocacy for free markets brought libertarian ideas to mainstream public attention through works like “Free to Choose,” while his policy proposals for school vouchers and a negative income tax brought libertarian policies into DC think tank circles. Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum to Jewish parents in Russia, developed the philosophy of Objectivism and wrote novels that profoundly shaped libertarian culture despite her rejection of the libertarian label.

In addition to promoting capitalism, Rand and Friedman expressed strong support for Israel, revealing how ethnic identity influences supposedly universal philosophical positions.  Rand’s support for Israel proved particularly significant given her influence on free-market thought in the United States. In her 1974 address to West Point cadets, Rand declared her support for “Israel against the Arabs for the very same reason” that she supported American settlers against Native Americans. She argued that “Israel is being attacked for being civilized, and being specifically a technological society” while describing Arabs as representing “centuries of brute stagnation and superstition.”

Rand’s position that America should “give all the help possible to Israel” including “technology and military weapons” represented a clear departure from libertarian non-interventionism that often rejects both direct military intervention and the provision of military aid to belligerents in foreign conflicts. Her justification that Israel represented “the progress of Man’s mind” against “primitive” Arab culture revealed how ethnic solidarity could override Rand’s purported commitment to individual liberties and anti-collectivist thought.

Unsurprisingly, Friedman was also an admirer of the Jewish state. When Friedman visited Israel in 1977, shortly after Menachem Begin’s election, he was invited to advise the new Likud government as it sought to move away from more dirigiste economic policies. His admiration for Israel’s early economic management predated this visit. And like most American Jews, Friedman would look the other way at the plight of the Palestinians facing constant Jewish aggression. Writing in his 1969 Newsweek column, “Invisible Occupation,” Friedman observed during a trip to the West Bank, “Much to my surprise, there was almost no sign of a military presence. … I had no feeling whatsoever of being in occupied territory.” He commended Israel’s “wise policy that involved almost literal laissez-faire in the economic sphere,” concluding that “to a casual observer, the area appears to be prospering.”

With regards to the viability of the Israeli state, Friedman also maintained that “Israel would hardly have been viable without the massive contributions that it received from world Jewry… primarily from the U.S.,” arguing that democratic capitalism, not socialism, made such aid possible: “If these donor countries had been socialist, such support would not have been possible.” Decades later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would adopt Friedman’s free-market ideas as the intellectual blueprint for his own reforms. Netanyahu frequently invoked Friedman, saying: “I am very appreciative of the fact that someone I have the utmost respect for, Milton Friedman, said that, when I was finance minister, that finally Israel has a finance minister that believes in and promotes free market ideas.” In 2005, Friedman reciprocated the admiration, praising Netanyahu for recognizing that Israel had long been held back by “rigid government intervention… socialist policies… and unnecessary state ownership of critical means of production.”

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The libertarian movement’s significant Jewish intellectual leadership, combined with theoretical commitment to universalist principles, creates vulnerabilities to ethnic tensions when specific policy questions force choices between abstract philosophy and ethnic solidarity. Regardless of what one thinks about libertarianism, the case of Walter Block’s removal from the Mises Institute highlights the inherently adversarial nature of Jews and non-Jews in political movements. The Block-Hoppe conflict reveals challenges facing intellectual movements with significant Jewish participation. While such movements have witnessed Jewish intellectual contributions, they also become vulnerable to inevitable tensions that arise when Jewish ethnic interests conflict with movement ideology. Block’s passionate Zionism ultimately proved incompatible with libertarian anti-interventionism, leading him to walk away from the intellectual community he had contributed to for over four decades.

Like archaeologists uncovering layers of forgotten civilizations, the Block-Hoppe schism reveals that beneath every high-minded intellectual movement lies the bedrock of tribal identity, waiting to reassert itself when abstract principles collide with the eternal reality of us versus them.