Responding to Sam Harris's Israel/Palestine Blog Post

The following is a blog post by Sam Harris, annotated with my notes rebutting it in the style of a Reddit pedant. Who doesn't love some good old fashioned pedantry? Before starting, I would like to note that it is immediately very obvious that Sam is not arguing from fact here, because he does not cite a single source. He makes many authoritative claims, but no sources. I brought some sources to ground the conversation. Not all of the sources are perfect. Anyway, here we go.

The Post

Many readers and podcast listeners have been dismayed by my enduring support for Israel and now urge me to debate someone—really anyone—drawn from a growing cast of scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics who have made that beleaguered country their professional or psychiatric obsession.

What a way to characterize your opponents (and now, ~60% of Americans)

The Making Sense Community seems to have inherited this infatuation, leading to some heated exchanges in recent days. I’ve explained my position on Israel across several podcasts and in my public talks, but it might help to summarize it here.

First, my general attitude: I’m not interested in exploring all the ways that Israel has missed the mark—from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corrupt alliance with the far right, to the many crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank, to the deaths of innocent noncombatants in several wars—because none of these failings, however grave, will alter my sense that

(1) the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast, and

At this point I need evidence for the ethical failings of "her enemies." Israel's "ethical failings" are clear as day. Hamas's are October 7th and...?

(2) the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions.

In order not to be seen as villainous, it helps not to commit villainous acts.

Next, a simple heuristic: As I suggested in at least one Community thread already, if my intransigence on these matters mystifies you, it might help to understand that, for whatever reason, I think militant Islam is ten times worse than you think it is. When I talk about “jihadists” and their various groups—Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the IRGC, etc.—I’m talking about people who I consider to be worse than Nazis (jihadists being, essentially, Nazis who are certain of Paradise).

It's hard to see the violence being committed by the US and it's allies (highlighted later on to distract from the conflict at hand!) as lesser than violence by all of those groups if one were to be objective.

My views about the conflict in the Middle East will not fundamentally change unless my critics produce evidence that Israel has become as evil as her enemies.

He later dismisses this evidence as being manufactured by Hamas.

However, you can rest assured that if the IDF morphs into a death cult that uses its own civilian population as human shields (and yet somehow remains widely popular), if ordinary Israelis begin to celebrate martyrdom above every earthly priority, producing generations of bright-eyed, suicidal fanatics, if the residents of Tel Aviv condone the taking of Palestinian infants, old women, and other noncombatants as hostages and then gather in crowds of thousands, baying for their blood—if, in other words, the Israelis begin to resemble the Palestinians, then I won’t care who wins this war.

If he's looking for support for the atrocities, he's got it! There were right wing protests against a ceasefire. The majority of Israelis support the expulsion of Palestinians. Nearly half support killing all Palestinians in Gaza. We can compare that to the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, of whom the majority support a two state solution. The Israeli populous is quite extreme on this issue.

"Bright eyed suicidal fanatics" - Who, specifically, is he talking about? Conflating all Palestinians with "suicidal fanatics" is a rhetorical slight of hand here.

On the hostage point, Israel does imprison thousands of Palestinians. That fact, tied with facts about the Apartheid prison system can be used to make an argument that Israel is and has been taking hostages for years.

Palestinian children get tried as an adult at age 16 in military courts. Israeli children are not subject to this.

Military courts are held in Hebrew only, and legal council is not provided unless the sentence for the charges exceed 10 years.

"Administrative detainees" can be held for 6 months with no charge. As you can see from the first link, the number of administrative detainees has skyrocketed in the past few years.

Given their large prison population, Israel has recently legalized the death penalty, effectively only for Palestinians. This came with celebrations (biased Bluesky link, but you can see in the video a golden noose pin on Ben Gvir's lapel.) from the national security minister and other government officials, including a golden noose birthday cake being delivered to Ben Gvir.

Short of this, there remains a world of difference between the two sides, and I believe that we should focus on how brutalizing it is for any free society to confront enemies that can sincerely claim to “love death” more than everyone else loves life—for this has been Israel’s predicament for the better part of a century.

Citation needed on loving death more than everyone else loves life.

The problem in the Middle East is not, and has never been, the existence of the state of Israel. The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism, militant Islam—or whatever words you want to use to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.

I won’t debate the history of the Middle East because it is irrelevant to resolving the conflict there. Of course, many people insist that we must disentangle and reconsider every strand of this history, going back at least a century. The reason I’m convinced that this is a fool’s errand is simple: Palestinians and Israelis have discrepant accounts of the past, and no amount of study or debate will reconcile them.

Sam could use fact finding results from third parties to determine what the truth is. It is an odd choice not to do this. Ceding the truth to controversy only serves to empower the party that is acting in bad faith, because they, of course, will muddle the truth to the best of their ability.

What’s far more important to understand—and I think it really is the only thing worth considering—is what the current inhabitants of Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the surrounding Arab states want out of life now. (Not what they pretend to want or what a handful of royal families want, while their populations want something quite different.) What do the Jews and Muslims in the region really yearn to accomplish? What are they willing to sacrifice for? What are they willing to die for? And what are they willing to let their children die for?

When we focus on the present this way, if we’re being honest, we must concede that there are two very different realities on either side of this conflict: culturally, psychologically, ethically, spiritually—in every way that matters. Yes, Israel has its religious fanatics too. But they aren’t the same sort of fanatics we find in Hamas or Hezbollah, and they’re far less representative of the surrounding culture.

Earlier, I linked to a poll showing the extreme views of the Israeli population, here's another one published by a Jewish outlet. The article is paywalled, but the findings have been reported in secondary articles. Their fanaticism is not any less extreme than that of a Muslim fanatic's. 47% of those surveyed believed that the Israeli military should act like the Israeli's did during the Biblical conquest of Jericho.

Joshua 6:17 states: "The city and all that is in it are to be devoted to the Lord. Only Rahab the prostitute and all who are with her in her house shall be spared, because she hid the spies we sent."

Jericho represents total annihilation of the enemies of Israel.

Notwithstanding everything that can be said against Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Israeli far right, and the settlers in the West Bank—and there is much to condemn—I believe the following remains true:

If the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace.

This is laughable if you know the history. The first intifada (which began peacefully) and the 2018 Great March of Return are proof positive that this strategy did not work. The UN Human Rights Council compiled some information on the Great March of Return. Among that information is stated: "Israeli snipers deployed near the separation fence to police the protests referred to as 'the Great March of Return', shot over 6106 demonstrators, killing 183, between 30 March 2018 and 31 December 2018."

There could be a two-state solution; there could even be a one-state solution; it wouldn’t matter. If the Palestinians simply stopped killing Jews and stopped building a culture that celebrates pointless murder and martyrdom as its highest values, there could be a diverse, tolerant, and prosperous society between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Sam needs to back up his claim that they "celebrate pointless murder and martyrdom as [their] highest values"

There could have been one eighty years ago. But if the Israelis laid down their weapons, there would be a genocide. This was obviously true on October 7th, 2023. And for anyone who has been paying attention, it has been true on every other day since the founding of the state of Israel.

At what point in history has Israel laid down its arms? October 7th took place during an (at the time) 18 year blockade of Gaza.

The truth is, I have never known how Israel should have responded to the events of October 7th. I only know that they, along with every other free society, must ultimately defeat militant Islam. How we should do this is genuinely debatable. But that’s not the point of contention among Israel’s critics, especially on the left. To them, worrying about militant Islam—even in Israel, even in the aftermath of the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust—is just more “Islamophobia.” It’s just more “colonialism” and “racism” (as though that last charge made any sense in the Middle East).

Yes, the nation founded by the Jewish Colonization Association is colonialist. Disputing that is... odd.

If you want to understand my view of this conflict, simply ask the one question that clarifies everything in the present:

What would each side do if it had the power to do whatever it wanted?

Yes, it is very clarifying. As one party has had the continued support (40+ years) of the most powerful military on earth, and the other cannot acquire food without permission of Israel because of the blockade emplaced upon it for 20 years. One is committing a genocide, and the other is being snuffed out.

Though many pretend otherwise, everyone knows the answer to this question to a moral certainty.

If Hamas had the power, it would perpetrate a real genocide in Israel. The group has affirmed its commitment to this project on countless occasions, both before and after October 7th.

Citation needed, although the counterfactual is not useful, because that is not, and never will be the world we live in.

And while it is true that Jew-hatred throughout the Muslim world has been made immensely worse by a century-long fascination with Nazi propaganda and conspiracy theories, this animus isn’t merely a modern phenomenon. For instance, there is a famous hadith which predicts that the End Times will not come until the very stones and trees cry out “Oh Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come kill him.” Unsurprisingly, Hamas cited this hadith in its founding charter.

Hamas is an imperfect organization that has committed atrocities. I should note that their current charter has been revised to say "Zionist" rather than "Jew." If you conflate the two, there is no difference, but for those of us who do not, there is a big difference.

Most Palestinians know this, and yet Hamas remains popular. For over a decade, Hamas diverted foreign aid that was meant to improve life in Gaza and used it to build the largest bomb shelter our species has ever constructed—hundreds of miles of tunnels—and yet no Palestinian civilians were allowed to shelter there during the war. Why not? Because Hamas was using these men, women, and children as human shields.

Not really sure what to say here. A militant group that has no air force can't use the above ground space, so they don't really have a choice. Whether they're using "human shields" is a debated topic, and is often repeated by pro-Israeli propaganda.

And when Israel made phone calls and sent millions of text messages urging civilians to evacuate, the loudspeakers in the nearest mosques warned them to stay in place. And Hamas snipers murdered many who tried to move to safety.

This is simply not the case. Safe zones were bombed by the IDF as reported by Doctors Without Borders and others on numerous occasions.

About the snipers: Palestinian citizens interviewed said it was Israeli snipers. IDF sources say it was Hamas. For the sake of argument, this point is moot at best, because it is not well sourced.

The Palestinians know all this, and yet Hamas remains popular.

The Palestinians do not "know all this", because neither claim is verifiably true.

Even after all the devastation that Hamas has brought down on its own people, it remains the most popular Palestinian faction, well ahead of its rival, Fatah. This is why there is no peace in the Middle East.

Pause for a moment to decide who you would support in the face of your people's eradication. Consider whether you even would have the bandwidth to support one party over another, or if you would just want to live?

The suffering in Gaza is terrible, and I’ve never pretended otherwise. But the suffering elsewhere—suffering you aren’t thinking about—is just as real. You should ask yourself why you don’t care more about it. This difference, emotionally and politically, is what it looks like to lose an information war.

It is true that Israel is beginning to lose the information war. However, it is losing the information war that it started. Israel spends vast amount of money on propaganda.

There are also many reasons to be uniquely concerned about Israel. I will get into those in the next section.

We haven’t seen all the dead children in Yemen, Syria, or Sudan, where the numbers are far worse than in Gaza, but everyone has witnessed the pornography of misery and death that has been steadily manufactured by supporters of Hamas. You might think that your special concern over Israel is due to the fact that we (Americans) supply many of the weapons the IDF uses to kill Palestinians. But we supplied arms to Saudi Arabia and the UAE for a war in Yemen that has killed an estimated 377,000 people. Where were those protests? Where was the celebrity sanctimony over Yemeni dead? Why didn’t Zohran Mamdani trumpet his opposition to this evil while campaigning to become Mayor of New York? Yemen was the world’s worst humanitarian crisis for years, with American weaponry and logistical support fully implicated, and yet it never became the organizing moral obsession of universities, media institutions, activist networks, or leftwing politics the way Gaza has.

Let me first say this: The American Imperialism supplying the weapons for the war in Yemen is bad. It should stop, and it has been protested in the United States (The Wikipedia page has a picture of a protest taking place in the US for goodness sake). Also, part of the reason Syria is unstable is due to Israeli and US policy . I, of course, would like an end to suffering in Sudan as well. However, rejecting the momentum to one of these atrocities because all three of them are not getting the same attention is counter to progress toward peace.

That being said, here are a few reasons an American might pay special attention to Israel:

The US sends more aid to Israel than any other country. If we are using counting metrics, this is a good one to place it in top priority.

The IDF works with US police and the military to train. This means that the atrocities that are being committed there have a great chance of coming back home. (This was coined the Imperial boomerang)

Israel, and Israel lobbies have spent massive amounts of money to meddle in US politics to ensure the checks from Congress keep coming. Checks that could be spent on the betterment of Americans.

Our relationship with Israel has led to a hot war with Iran that has damaged the global supply of oil and is causing suffering worldwide and within the Middle East. The Yemeni civil war has not.

If you are anti-imperialist: Israel is the linchpin for American foreign policy globally. Israel's (and by extension, the US's) power in the region is what allows(ed) the US to maintain its global reserve currency status via the petrodollar.

Israel's expansionist tendencies must be stopped in the same way that Hitler must have been stopped in Germany. As we speak Israel is attempting to (and in some cases, succeeding) annex the West Bank, Gaza, and Southern Lebanon, and the Golan Heights. Some of their more right wing leaders (and IDF soldiers) seek more than that.

To point this out isn’t to commit the rhetorical sin of “whataboutism.” Rather, it exposes a glaring moral disparity: The world simply does not care when Muslims kill other Muslims—amazingly, it doesn’t much care when they kill Christians either—but it does care, enormously, when Jews do it.

When it comes to public opinion, you don't get to choose what has salience. You can try, but sometimes unexpected things resonate. Sam should be celebrating the fact that the world has turned its eyes to an atrocity with the yearn to make it stop. Instead, in clouded judgement, Sam laments the attention this atrocity has gotten, and bitterly invokes others to stop action.

The General Assembly of the UN and its Human Rights Council have passed more resolutions against Israel than against all other nations combined, including North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen. A few of these countries have committed actual genocides. None of this makes sense.

Israel has been in active conflict during its entire existence, and those resolutions are consistently voted down by the US, which means the measures must be retried. This is elementary. Also, "actual genocide?" I'll leave a definition of genocide here.

But this is the world we are living in.

Of the world’s 193 nations, two-thirds were created by map makers who merely imagined their frontiers into being, without much regard for the tribal interests of the people living within them. In fact, more than half were created since 1948, the year that Israel was founded. And yet there is only one whose legitimacy is still debated everywhere. There is only one nation on Earth that must continually argue for its right to exist, even when the very survival of its people is threatened by avowedly genocidal enemies.

The only response I have to the "right to exist" argument is that I believe that Israel/Palestine should exist as a state with equal rights for all of it's inhabitants, regardless of ethnicity.

This obsession with Israel, and the double standards to which its people are held, now forms the center of mass of that shapeshifting moral affliction widely known as “antisemitism.”

Conflating Zionism or Israel with Judaism or Jews is one of the factors that leads to antisemitism globally. Israeli propaganda deliberately conflates both in an order to hide behind antisemitism when it is facing consequences. Actual antisemitism, as in, discrimination or hatred of Jews (not just Jews in Israel) is bad, and should be rooted out wherever it is.

I’ve lived most of my life believing that dangerous antisemitism was behind us, at least in the West. Unfortunately, the response to October 7th has put that assumption very much in doubt. The atrocities committed by Hamas revealed a level of Jew hatred, globally, that shocked even those of us who have been students of antisemitism for much of our lives. Crucially, this hatred showed itself before Israel invaded Gaza. When the corpses of the young people mutilated and murdered at the Nova Music Festival were still being identified, we had students at Harvard and professors at Columbia—and demonstrators in New York, London, Sydney, and Toronto—celebrating their killers.

Once again, Sam is not dealing in fact. Israeli bombs dropped the same day.

Electricity was immediately cut off, and water was cut off on the 9th. Yoav Gallant said "[t]here will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed." on the 9th as well.

Collective punishment is a war crime. Protesting collective punishment is not hatred.

Why does antisemitism matter? Well, for the Jews, it’s obvious why it matters, but why should it matter to everyone else? It matters because when you look at what antisemites also hate, you find they hate everything that makes culturally rich, diverse, open societies possible. Real antisemites bring with them more than just their hatred of Jews: they bring censorship, political repression, conspiracy thinking, and the politics of dehumanization and scapegoating. So decrying antisemitism is not an act of special pleading. It is a defense of the moral and institutional architecture that makes free societies possible.

No argument here.

Let me close with another general point to members of the Making Sense Community: Many of you have written to tell me that you’ve lost respect for me over this issue (or that you still value my work and are giving me “a pass” on Israel). I reject this framing, and you should too. No one should be a part of Community just because they agree with me. I’m not running a political party, and there is no line for me, or for anyone else, to toe. If I’ve fallen off a pedestal because I said something you don’t agree with, the pedestal was the problem, not the disagreement. Of course, if you think I am lying to you, or that I otherwise lack integrity, you should leave and never look back. But if you just think I happen to be wrong, even about something important—especially about something important—I encourage you to keep showing up with better evidence and arguments. This, after all, is what a real intellectual and moral community is for.

Thanks

If you have made it to the end of this post, I thank you. I hope that you can use this as a launching point toward further reading. I am by no means an expert; however, I am happy to defer to experts in this topic. I hope that is clear from my citations. I found this piece to be lacking in argumentative substance, and ultimately a rhetorical cloak around a preference for one form of fundamentalism over another.