Earlier this year, I was privileged to receive an invitation from the great Scott Horton to join his Libertarian Institute as a research fellow, which I humbly accepted, hardly feeling worthy of the honor. Scott, as I’m sure most of my readers already know, is the host of Antiwar Radio and The Scott Horton Show, author of several books on US foreign policy, and director of The Libertarian Institute.
You can find my articles for the Libertarian Institute here. The institute is currently fundraising, so if you’d like to support the effort, you can do so here.
Scott recently appeared on the shows of three prominent libertarian thinkers and explained to their audiences what the institute is and praised all the great people he has on board. Along with other members of the institute, he mentioned my name on each show, praising my work on the Israel-Palestine conflict and my book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
Receiving such high praise from Scott is humbling because he has such an encyclopedic knowledge of foreign affairs, including the Israel-Palestine conflict. He’s someone whose knowledge I feel matches or exceeds my own!
On Dave Smith’s show Part of the Problem, in an episode published on July 16, Scott and Dave both praised my work:
Scott: We just added, you know, only recently we’ve added new fellows. . . . And then there’s Jeremy R Hammond, who . . .
Dave: I love Jeremy, he’s great!
Scott: This guy is the libertarian movement’s foremost expert on Israel-Palestine, bar none. He wrote the book Obstacle to Peace. He’s our very best guy that we got on that.
Then on economist Robert P. Murphy’s The Bob Murphy Show, in an episode published on July 23, Scott again mentioned my work, this time also referencing my book Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics in the Financial Crisis:
Scott: Oh, and then recently, see, we added a bunch of new guys . . . . And then we have Jeremy R. Hammond, who everybody knows from the Walter Block debates and so forth. He is, bar none, the libertarian movement’s foremost expert on the Israel-Palestine conflict and published a book called Obstacle to Peace, which is absolutely fantastic. He also—more up your alley, Bob, you might know him from this—he wrote a book called Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman . . .
Bob: Yep!
Scott: . . . all about economics. Yeah, Great guy.
And on an episode of The Tom Woods Show published yesterday, July 24, Scott had the following to say:
Tom: But I want you to tell us about the Libertarian Institute.
Scott: Yeah! . . . Yeah, I almost don’t know what to say. I’m so proud of the thing. . . . I’ve just been able to really, you know, pick and poach from the best of the libertarian movement and put everybody together in one big group here. . . . And we just added . . . we just added Jeremy R. Hammond, who, as you know, is the libertarian movement’s foremost expert on the Israel-Palestine conflict and author of the book Obstacle to Peace.
When Scott mentioned “the Walter Block debates” on Bob Murphy’s show, he was referring to two debates I’ve done on Tom Woods’ show.
Back in 2016, Walter Block wrote a paper with coauthors Alan Futerman and Rafi Farber titled “The Legal Status of the State of Israel: A Libertarian Approach”, in which they actually rejected libertarian principles in an attempt to defend Israel’s establishment through the ethnic cleansing of most of the land’s indigenous Arab inhabitants from their homes in Palestine.
In September 2016, I debated Rafi Farber on Tom’s show about the illegitimacy of the means by which Israel was created.
Then in October 2023, Walter Block and Alan Futerman wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal to defend Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, and I was on Tom’s show to debate Futerman, with me taking the negative position on the debate resolution that “Israel is justified in doing ‘whatever it takes’ to ‘completely destroy’ Hamas in Gaza.”
The conclusion of my counterargument was that, no, Israel does not have a “right”, much less a “moral duty” to commit war crimes in Gaza. I used the term “war crimes” at the time, but by mid-November, it had become apparent that Israel was perpetrating the crime of genocide.
In February of this year, Scott Horton and I wrote an article published at the Mises Institute denouncing the position of Block and Futerman as being totally incompatible with the libertarian principle of non-aggression. Walter Block was formerly a fellow at the Mises Institute, a position from which he was appropriately expelled due to his support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Relatedly, on February 26, I was in New York for a Soho Forum debate with journalist Eli Lake, where I took the negative position on the debate resolution “The root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Palestinians’ rejection of Israel’s right to exist.”
I joined the Libertarian Institute as a research fellow in March, and I was on Scott’s show in May to discuss how Israel initially supported Hamas as a counterforce to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu maintained a policy of utilizing Hamas as a strategic ally to block any movement toward peace negotiations.
Here is my May 6 article on that topic:
And here is where you can order a signed hardcover or paperback copy of my book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which Scott has also recently described as “the definitive scholarly account of the American role in the entire disaster”:
