Friendly Fire 10/07/23? No, Denialism

By Walter E. Block (December 2024)

There is a long history of “denialism” in which Jews are concerned. The latest version is to deny, or deprecate, or ignore, or underestimate, the guilt of Hamas in the despicable events of October 6, 2023. The view here is that most (all?) of the fatalities on that date were due not to this terrorist, genocidal organization but, rather—wait for it—the IDF.

Ron Unz is a voluminous writer. His words fairly leap off the page, or, nowadays, the screen, at you. I always learn by reading him.. He is a superb wordsmith. It is the rare occasion upon which I am not enlightened by him. He is often a careful scholar. I have published on his blog on more than a half dozen occasions. He is the only editor of a periodical to the best of my knowledge who will publish an essay from a regular writer such as myself which diametrically opposes his own views, without even a strong critique as a follow up (he favors the minimum wage law; one of my essays for him took the opposite point of view).

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is, in my view, not merely one of the foremost Austrian economists and libertarian theoreticians now practicing in these two fields; he is one of the best to have ever made contributions to these two disciplines. His argument from argument (argumentation ethics) has placed the entire corpus of libertarianism on the firmest foundation it ever had. His contributions to homesteading theory rival that of the greats in this field, John Locke and Murray Rothbard. I liken him to either a steam roller (I mean this as a compliment) or to one of my favorite composers: Johan Sebastian Bach. His arguments are almost always compelling. His middle name might as well be “praxeologist,” (the pure logic of economics) celebrating the scintillating contributions he has made to this field of study.

Yet on this occasion, my own perspective diverges radically from both of theirs. Each takes a similar position with regard to the disgraceful events of October 7, 2023. Of the roughly 1,200 civilians slaughtered on that day, some?, many?, most? of these fatalities originated not with Hamas terrorists, but rather on the basis of friendly fire from the IDF.

Let me allow each of these learned friends of mine to speak for themselves.

States Unz: “The gigantic military disaster that occurred on his [Netanyahu’s] watch immediately dropped his approval rating to single digits even before evidence appeared that most of the unarmed civilian dead had apparently been killed by the IDF due to his own government’s incompetent response.”

Response? Response to what? To the Hamas militia’s slaughter of innocent civilians at a music festival? But if the IDF was “responding” there must necessarily have been something to which a response was the reaction. Pray tell, what was that?

Here is the contribution of Hoppe to this matter:

“Subject here are the events of October 7th, 2023, its aftermath and consequences. On that day, members of the so-called Hamas, running the Gaza strip, attacked, maimed, killed and kidnapped a large number of Israeli soldiers and civilians. (As is to be expected in any type of war, both warring parties are presenting widely different stories concerning the actual events and numbers. What has become clear so far is only that the number of casualties runs in the several hundreds to low one thousands, and that a considerable portion of such casualties were actually the result of ‘friendly fire,’ per helicopter, by the Israeli Defense Forces.)”

There is not a single solitary bit of evidence, not a scintilla of it, attesting to the truth of this “friendly fire” claim. We have no better authority on this than members of Hamas themselves. They took copious films of their depredations on this day that will forever live in infamy, and in not a one of them were there any IDF soldiers spreading bullets amongst the concert-goers or any other Israeli civilians. Instead, the actors featured in these films, and celebrated all throughout Gaza and in many college campuses in the US such as Harvard and my alma mater, Columbia, were all members of Hamas. Where are the films of IDF soldiers in helicopters firing down on Israelis?

Ordinarily, I would not have been writing about this claim; it is so preposterous. One might as well contemplate witches flying around on brooms. I only do so because these two world famous scholars have immense influence on numerous people, and the sooner this outrageous claim is laid to rest, the better.

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Walter E. Block is Harold E. Wirth Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics, College of Business, Loyola University New Orleans, and senior fellow at the Mises Institute. He earned his PhD in economics at Columbia University in 1972. He has taught at Rutgers, SUNY Stony Brook, Baruch CUNY, Holy Cross and the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of more than 600 refereed articles in professional journals, three dozen books, and thousands of op eds (including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and numerous others). He lectures widely on college campuses, delivers seminars around the world and appears regularly on television and radio shows. He is the Schlarbaum Laureate, Mises Institute, 2011; and has won the Loyola University Research Award (2005, 2008) and the Mises Institute’s Rothbard Medal of Freedom, 2005; and the Dux Academicus award, Loyola University, 2007. Prof. Block counts among his friends Ron Paul and Murray Rothbard. He was converted to libertarianism by Ayn Rand. Block is old enough to have played chess with Friedrich Hayek and once met Ludwig von Mises, and shook his hand. Block has never washed that hand since. So, if you shake his hand (it’s pretty dirty, but what the heck) you channel Mises.

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