I (I am Hamas) am going to kill you (you are Israel).  I have a knife.  I going to murder not only you, but also your wife, kids, parents, siblings.  I have strapped to the front of me my two young children, aged three.  You have a gun.  The only way you can stop me from killing you and your loved ones is to shoot me.  However, if you do so, we posit that you will necessarily kill my completely innocent children.

This is precisely the position Israel faces with Hamas and its practice of using Gazan civilians as shields: placing rocket and drone launchers in hospitals, mosques, schools, playgrounds, residential areas, and of late in safe zones Israel has set up to protect innocent Gazans.  (Do you doubt that there are innocent Gazans in view of their celebration of October 7 and their overwhelming democratic vote for Hamas?  Think again: at the very least, each and every last Palestinian child under the age of 10 years old is innocent.)  We award Hamas with only a knife and the IDF with a gun to reflect the fact that, all other things being equal, the latter is far more powerful than the former.

So do you, you member of the IDF, discharge your gun at me, or don’t you?  If you do, you shed innocent blood.  If you do not, you commit suicide for yourself and place a death penalty on your entire Israeli family.

In the view of Rothbard, you do not plug me, for under no conditions is it ever justified to kill innocent people — certainly not children.  He avers:

Let us ... consider simply relations between “private” individuals. Jones finds that he or his property is being invaded, aggressed against, by Smith. It is legitimate for Jones ... to repel this invasion by defensive violence of his own. But now we come to a more knotty question: is it within the right of Jones to commit violence against innocent third parties as a corollary to his legitimate defense against Smith? To the libertarian, the answer must be clearly, no. Remember that the rule prohibiting violence against the persons or property of innocent men is absolute: it holds regardless of the subjective motives for the aggression. It is wrong and criminal to violate the property or person of another, even if one is a Robin Hood, or starving, or is doing it to save one’s relatives, or is defending oneself against a third man’s attack. We may understand and sympathize with the motives in many of these cases and extreme situations. We may later mitigate the guilt if the criminal comes to trial for punishment, but we cannot evade the judgment that this aggression is still a criminal act, and one which the victim has every right to repel, by violence if necessary. In short, A aggresses against B because C is threatening, or aggressing against, A. We may understand C’s “higher” culpability in this whole procedure; but we must still label this aggression as a criminal act which B has the right to repel by violence.

To be more concrete, if Jones finds that his property is being stolen by Smith, he has the right to repel him and try to catch him; but he has no right to repel him by bombing a building and murdering innocent people or to catch him by spraying machine gun fire into an innocent crowd. If he does this, he is as much (or more of) a criminal aggressor as Smith is.

Rothbard has made more, and crucially important, contributions to libertarianism than anyone else on the planet.  He is in effect the founder of this entire perspective and properly referred to as Mr. Libertarian.  However, libertarianism is not a suicide pact, and in this instance, he is condemning the Israeli victim to acquiesce in his own death and the deaths of his family.  So much for deontology.

As a matter of pragmatism, if this analysis of Rothbard’s were followed, there would be massive criminality.  All the perpetrator need do is surround himself with his innocent children, perhaps placing dynamite or some other substance around them such that if he were killed in the perpetuation of his crime, they would also perish.  Rothbard is wrong on both counts.

A murderer runs into his home.  He is now surrounded by his family members, a dozen of them, if you count parents, siblings, cousins, etc.  Is it compatible with libertarianism to bomb the entire building, killing all within it?  No, of course not, at least not upon first consideration.  However, suppose he uses his home as a launching pad for shooting rockets into another country.  Posit that the only way you can stop this attack is by doing just that: bombing this edifice, and killing all who are located there: the guilty murderer along with his innocent family members, some of whom are young children and, obviously, guilty of nothing at all.  Then, in all reasonable philosophies, matters are entirely different.

A murderer retreats into a crowded shopping mall.  Ideally, the police should surround it and use nerve gas to put everyone, temporarily, to sleep.  Then deal with the situation in a manner that endangers no innocents.  However, suppose this barbaric criminal is just about to launch an atom bomb that will kill millions.  Then all bets are off.  Then it is entirely justified to be “spraying machine gun fire into an innocent crowd,” given that this is the only way to stop this maniac in his tracks.

My guess is that under the baleful influence of Rothbard on this matter, the majority of members of the libertarian movement in the U.S. (it contains over 20% of the electorate) have cast their lot not with Israel, but with Hamas.

Image: CristianIS via Pixabay, Pixabay License.