I’m curious as to what are Rothbard’s, Von Mises’, or Block’s view on Israel? Do they give a straight
answer or do they tiptoe around the subject?
Walter Block, Murray Rothbard, tiptoe around a subject? When have you ever known them to do that?
In fact the same goes for Mises, he certainly doesn’t tiptoe anywhere. But Block and Rothbard are not just to the point, they are outrageous and flamboyant. Rothbard in particular is a showman!
I think one can reasonably infer what a market-anarchist’s position is regarding any state. They don’t discriminate.
What I’m getting at, is that those three prominent Misians are of Jewish backgrounds. What are their views on the state of Israel?
You do realize there are many Jews who oppose the Israeli state, just like their are many people living in the U.S who oppose U.S foreign policy. Just saying.
What is Jewish about the State of Israel?
Clayton -
You could email Walter Block.
I know there are a few articles on Lew Rockwell by Rothbard about Israel. He gives it pretty straight. Also I’m pretty sure on a religious point, Rothbard and Block are atheists, Mises was not religious.
Look up Rothbard’s War Guilt in the Middle East, it is some hardcore stuff.
Block, I don’t know if he wrote on the subject, but his Jewishness didn’t preclude him from stating that US should have stayed out of WWII (a much more maverick view than being critical of Israel) so he certainly isn’t someone who lets his heritage get in the way of his analysis.
Mises didn’t write anything on the subject (that I know of). As Rothbard stated, Mises specialised in what he knew best and stuck to writing about that.
Probably Jewish intellectuals made the largest contribution to the critique of Israel.
Clayton-
The Bibile says that Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people…And if God said it, well then it must be.
Its funny, I met an Israeli who was arguing the subject with another person. They said “Have you even looked at a map? Palestine doesnt even exist!”
Man in his 30’s…
Ludwig von Mises gave his views on early Israeli nationalism in Omnipotent Government, written during wartime.
von Mises believed that there was no such thing as a single Jewish nation or a Jewish people. There were only Hungarians, Germans, Russians, Poles, Americans, French, Italians, or other such people, among whom the various Jewish communities were dispersed.
How can a man who lived his entire life, say, speaking French, living among French people, absorbing French culture, and benefitting from protection and help of other French, decide that he was no longer a French person, and then go to live in a foreign country among various groups of other foreigners, and find any common grounds with them?
Why are they going to stop speaking French or whatever they grew up speaking, and all together adopt Hebrew, even though Hebrew was spoken only by priests for religious scriptorial purposes and even though the early Jewish people spoke Koine or Aramaic?
And why are they even going to bother with Hebrew itself, when Hebrew is not spoken properly in its original form any more, and spinoff languages such as Yiddish involved a combination of German, Hungarian, and Hebrew?
In short, he thought of it as an unfeasible experiment. It was about rejecting the identity of one’s parents, grandparents, and great grandparents, and trying to create a new identity for oneself in a new culture to be created in a newly settled land.
It is pretty clear von Mises was an Austrian patriot and that was that. Israel probably wasn’t something that was ever on his mind much, one way or the other. I don’t know why he would tiptoe around a state that didn’t seem to mean much of anything to him.
Well, Israel proved Mises wrong on that account. It artificially resurrected Hebrew from a few thousand words and thus created a Jewish nation overnight. A typical Eastern European feat, I must add.
Ha ha ha.
I don’t think so. An “unfeasible experiment” I belive is Sanjay’s very creative interpretation of what is a very short remark on Zionism by Mises.
I don’t know about Mises, since he wasn’t an anarchist, but Block and Rothbard are ancaps, so I don’t know why their opinions regarding Israel would be different than their opinions regarding any other state.
What Mises said was:
The Zionists want to create an independent state composed of
those professing the]ewish religion. For them the]ews are a people
and a nation. We are not concerned here with whether the historical
arguments brought forward for the justification of these
claims are correct or not, or whether the plan is politically sound
or unsound. But it is a fact that the Jews speak many different
languages; from the viewpoint of the principle of nationality the
aspirations of Zionism are no less irregular than those of the Irish.
Therefore the Zionists try to induce the Jews to speak and write
Hebrew. These plans are paradoxical in the face of the fact that in
the days of Christ the inhabitants of Palestine did not speak He-
• Act IV, scene in the lunatic asylum.
86 Omnipotent Government
brew; their native tongue was Aramaic. Hebrew was the language
of the religious literature only. It was not understood by the people.
The second language generally known was Greek.:
• Kenyon, “The Bible as Christ Knew It,” The History of Christianity in the Light
of Modern Knowledge (London, 1929), p. 172. Some Zionists advocated Yiddish as the
national language; but they did not succeed in establishing it. Yiddish is a German
dialect with some words borrowed from Hebrew and more from the Slavonic languages.
It is the dialect spoken by the Jews of German origin in northeastern Europe.
The newspapers in Hebrew type printed and distributed in America are not written
in Hebrew but in Yiddish.
He does say some of the Zionist attempts in language were paradoxical and the context of this passage was in a section that dealt with nationalist myths and legends used to create a false chauvinist history of one’s own nation. Later he speaks of how much of Germany is Slavonic, and how few Germans have ever been “pure Germans”. Earlier in the book, he had also spoken of Czech fabrications of manuscripts to show that Czechs had an advanced civilization in antiquity.
All in all, he speaks of the arbitrary nature of well meaning nationalist movements.
Yes, Rothbard, Mises, and Block are notorious such tip-toers, aren’t they! On Rothbard’s view on Israel, see the following 1982 issue of The Libertarian Forum:
Thanks for that PDF. Rothbard certainly was no fan of Israel’s actions. Funny that he speculated that Israel would eventually take both Beirut and Damascus. That was 29 years ago. Time will tell.
I don’t know about Beirut and Damascus, but I have reason to believe that the Israeli leaders are seeking Baalbek (Lebanon) and the Sinai.