Steve Pinker has an op-ed in today’s Boston Globe (title below). It reflects his own ambivalent feelings—which many of us share—on the first anniversary of the October 7th massacre. As I argue below, the article’s title is a bit misleading (granted, he didn’t choose it), but he does defend Israel’s right to defend itself—though to an unknown extent. This is the first piece by Steve that I think could have been tweaked a bit to improve it.
If you subscribe to the Globe, you can click on the headline to read it, but you can also find it archived here. And I think I’ve reproduced the whole thing below.
Excerpts are indented, and my own comments are flush left:
My own biography has equipped me with this mindset. I grew up in a Zionist community, had a Jewish education which emphasized that Jews gave morality to the world, and taught Sunday school in the Reform Temple where I had been a student. Yet while I remain proudly Jewish, my adult convictions have pulled me in directions away from this background.
I’m an atheist and feel no need to praise God. I’m a humanist who argues that morality comes not from scripture but from treating people impartially and maximizing their well-being.
And I am not a Zionist in the sense of seeing a Jewish state as the natural aspiration of the Jews. I believe a state should be based on a social contract that secures its citizens the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not the embodiment of religious or ethnic yearnings. And I believe that if Jews are distinctive, it’s because we are a diaspora people, relying on norms and knowledge rather than ties to the soil, and drawing from the many civilizations in which we have lived.
In the past year, the universalism of my adulthood, layered atop the ethnocentrism of my upbringing, has left me in a state of agonized ambivalence. Like most American Jews, I oppose many of the actions taken by the current Israeli government and am heartsick over the death and destruction in Gaza. Yet as I struggle to apply objective yardsticks to Israel and its policies, I have been stunned by the simplistic hatred that has been hurled at it, not least by students at my own institution, Harvard University.
JAC: This is generally good, especially the ambivalence. I would, however, argue that Pinker’s definition of Zionism as “seeing a Jewish state as the natural aspiration of the Jews” is misleading. First, for most Jews living today, “Zionism” means “the idea that Israel is a sovereign nation created as a sanctuary for displaced Jews” (of course there are plenty of Arab Israelis as well). Israel is in fact IN EXISTENCE, so saying that seeing “a Jewish state as the natural aspiration of the Jews” is like saying that “seeing Saudi Arabia as a Muslim state is the natural aspiration of Muslims.” It can’t be an aspiration if it’s already accomplished. At one time, before the Balfour Declaration or even 1948, Zionism was an “aspiration to see a Jewish state.” But now the Jewish state is born, and Zionism is simply the desire to ensure that the baby isn’t killed (h/t Natasha Hausdorff, who has a better take on Zionism).
More from Steve:
. . . . In a statement issued three days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre on Israel, 34 student groups held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible’’ for the slaughter and rape of 1,200 of its citizens. Entirely! Our students exonerated the men who pulled the triggers, raped women, and set houses on fire with families in them. They took no note of the murderously antisemitic ideology of Hamas, nor of their strategy of killing noncombatants, a war crime. They seemed unaware that Egypt blockades Gaza, too, and that Hamas is armed and encouraged by a malevolent theocracy in Iran.
This is the species of facts that Harvard students really need to be taught. Not that it would budge the Hamas-lovers one whit, but it at least weakens their arguments, especially about genocide. (But there are other Big Lies that need to be dispelled, including the “Israel is an apartheid state” trope.)
Then, this spring, the students camping in Harvard Yard went far beyond protesting Israel’s attack of Gaza, an understandable impulse. They declared “From the river to the sea,’’ and displayed signs that wiped Israel off the map.
Calling for the annihilation of a state is extraordinary. None of the other 192 members of the United Nations has had its existence seriously questioned, and in 79 years none has gone out of existence through conquest. Many historians note that the grandfathering of states since 1945 is a major cause of the historical decline of war.
In the paragraph above, Pinker really does get at the heart of anti-Zionism: opposition to the existence of the Jewish state. If he believes that Israel is a legitimate state that has the right to defend it’s existence, then yes, Pinker is a Zionist. But I think he holds back on that under the impression that “Zionism” is the sentiment held by Jews in the early 20th century.
Below he shows that the Nakba was not simply the driving of Arabs out of Israel during the 1948 war—a gross distortion that could be corrected with a little education. The majority of Arabs who left Israel around the time of Independence (when five Arab states invaded Israel) did so either before the announcement of independence, because they wanted to flee the war and reside in countries ruled by Arabs, or because Arab armies, like those in Iraq, told the Arabs to leave Israel to avoid extermination during the coming war. The smaller number of Arabs who stayed to fight were expelled by the Israeli army, while Arabs who stayed in place peacefully became Israeli citizens.
This is not to deny the tragic displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s founding. Yet the turbulent post-World War II period was a time of population transfers all over the world, as new countries coalesced and people fled out of fear or duress. Refugees included massive numbers of ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe and Hindus and Muslims in partitioned India, long since resettled. Crimes against humanity took place in those years, and the victims deserve sympathy and compensation. Yet it would be grotesque to try to reverse this history three generations later, or to abolish countries like Poland or Pakistan that emerged from the chaos.
Again, in the first paragraph below, Pinker really does characterize how most Jews see “Zionism”—as “the claim that Israel’s has a right to exist as a sovereign nation”. And then he goes after the Big Lie that Israel is committing “genocide”, a really dumb criticism that has caught on among the ideologues who don’t even know what “genocide” is. If they did, they’d know that Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas are the genuinely genocidal groups or states. But have you ever heard that claim from pro-Palestinian groups? I didn’t think so, even though this aspiration is in Hamas’s initial charter and remains the goal of Hamas, Hezbollah, and their masters in Iran.
Even those who are skeptical of ethnic or religious states have no grounds for opposing the very existence of Israel. Many liberal democracies have state religions (including the United Kingdom with its antidisestablishmentarianism), and many more have a responsibility to preserve the cultural heritage of their ethnic majority. Israel can be a Jewish state in the same sense that Denmark is a Danish state, each granting full rights to its minority citizens.
Just as egregious as calls for the destruction of Israel is the blood libel that it is committing “genocide,’’ the worst of human evils. War and genocide are not the same. An armed force waging war targets enemy fighters for a military goal, harming noncombatants only as an unwanted side effect. An armed force committing genocide targets noncombatants with the goal of destroying a people.
Israel may deserve criticism for launching the Gaza war or for sacrificing too many civilians in fighting it (despite its stated efforts to spare them). Yet its military objective — eliminating a militia dedicated to Israel’s destruction — is crystal clear, as is the reason so many civilians have been harmed, namely that Hamas entrenched itself in tunnels beneath homes, schools, and hospitals.
“May” deserve criticism? Do they or don’t they? If they do, then I’d like to know how Pinker would suggest Israel go about eliminating Hamas given, as he admits, that the huge death toll is an unfortunate byproduct of Hamas deliberately embedding itself among civilians. One can, and should, mourn the death of civilians while at the same time recognizing the ultimate cause of those deaths.
And the ending:
I would desperately like to see a cease-fire in Gaza and a Palestinian state. Yet I know enough Israelis and American Zionists [JAC: note that Pinker doesn’t say “American Jews”, so here he is conflating “Jews” with “Zionists,” which is my point] to understand the counterarguments. No other country would tolerate a fortress on its border that regularly bombarded it with tens of thousands of rockets and sent out terrorists to kill and kidnap its citizens. A state in the West Bank, always vulnerable to Hamas takeover, would multiply the menace. I like to think that human ingenuity can find a way for Israel to attain the security of other democracies, with no force or repression. Yet its venomous critics have advanced no such plan.
When I was a Sunday school teacher, the curriculum was ethics, and I led pupils in deliberating moral dilemmas with no obvious right or wrong answer. During the past year I have found myself grappling with new ones and wishing that my august institution taught its students this skill.
The last paragraph shows why the title is misleading. When I read “I wish Harvard taught students to talk about Israel” (note, he doesn’t mention “Palestine,” so perhaps “the Gaza war” would have been more appropriate), I took it to mean that Harvard students need to be educated on Middle Eastern history so they could argue about the war knowing the facts. But, it seems, he means that Harvard students need to learn to discuss “moral dilemmas with no obvious right or wrong answer”. That means only that students need to learn how to debate. But to do that, they surely need to know the facts of history, not simply philosophical styles of argument.
Still, it takes some courage for a famous Harvard professor to risk his reputation by coming out in support of Israel, and defending its existence and right to defend itself.
Good piece.
As an aside – I thought “antidisestablishmentarianism” was just a funny word kids learn to say like “supercalifragilisticexpialadocious”,… or I think there’s another one….
floccinaucinihilipilification?
😃
“Israel may deserve criticism …” etc. My take on Pinker’s meaning here is: *even if* you believe Israel deserves criticism for etc., you would still have to concede that the IDF’s military objective, and the culpability of Hamas for the number of casualties, is clear.
I think that your interpretation is correct, especially with the later “Yet”.
Thanks. A very good discussion and commentary – very informative. Language and layout can be so tricky as our human responses to any statement on controversial social and political events involve our own experiences and relative ignorance of history and facts. Knowing this beforehand takes courage to make the attempt.
Thank you Professor Pinker for raising the issue for discussion. Facts do matter as do interpretations of historical events, even as the fodder of debate. I would like the Middle East history lessons to reach back beyond 1948, beyond Balfour, beyond Herzl, beyond the Arab national movement of 1847, the Ottoman Empire, the creation of Islam and its imperialistic conquering of the 700’s CE, even through and back beyond the destructions of the second temple (70 CE) and first temple (586 BCE) to the early occupants of the sand and rocks now in question. Natasha Haussdorf points to the global movement in the 20th century from empires to nations and states. Even to an engineer with zero formal background in world history, the question of oppressor vs oppressed and conqueror vs conquered is richer than the message carried on the placards seen on campuses and in the streets.
Exactly. Islam has an aggressive history. Plenty of colonialism and oppression going here: with the proviso that the conquered could escape dhimmitude by converting to Islam (which a great many did).
Does anyone have a good way to respond to the claim that, while Israel itself is not an apartheid state because all of its citizens have full rights, the way the IDF manages the Palestinian territories—with settlements for Jews that are segregated from Arabs—resembles apartheid?
My response is to point out that apartheid was the term coined specifically to describe a system of racially segregated social and political organization developed by and in South Africa. Since Israel is, by obvious definition, not South Africa, then the situation in Samaria and Judea is not, by definition, apartheid. Likening it to apartheid is just to employ a term that gained intense opprobrium to defame something else. So you should challenge your interlocutor to specify what, exactly he disapproves of in the disputed territories and then you can engage the pro and con of each point, including what he would have Israel do instead.* Don’t let him get away with “Israeli apartheid” as if that ends the argument.
—————————
* This is a useful exercise in discussing actual apartheid in South Africa, too.
I can try to respond:
Judea and Samaria (renamed the West Bank by Jordan in 1950) is divided into three areas A, B and C (according to the Oslo Accords). People living in Areas A and B are only Arabs (no Jews are allowed there by the Palestinian Authority). The majority of Palestinian Arabs live there and are Palestinian citizens. There are also a few Israeli citizens—Arabs who moved to territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority.
These two areas are solely under the administration and jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Area C is under Israeli administration. The few thousand Arabs living in that area are not Israeli citizens. But area C mainly contains both Jews and Israeli Arabs who are treated absolutely equally by law and by the Israeli state. Of course, non-citizens are treated differently because that’s the definition of citizenship: every state treats its own citizens differently than non-citizens. But it doesn’t depend on whether they are Arabs or Jews – it depends on citizenship. This is no way can be described as “apartheid”.
I’m sorry that it’s so complicated but everything about Israel and Palestinians is complicated. However when you trat people from different groups equally when they are your citizens and unequally only when they are citizens of a different entity, you can’t talk about apartheid.
That does not sound complicated to me, but I had assumed it was before I read your explanation. Thank you.
+1.
Yes. They’re worlds apart.
Keep up the truth telling Malgorzata. And Leslie.
Let’s not beat on Emily – she is only guilty of listening to what the media of the west bang on about every day for …well… all my adult life. It is frustrating to see such a large percentage of people misunderstand the problem.
To understand the Israel-Pal problem requires a deeper level of understanding, history particularly, one which even people of good conscience and morals have been robbed of.
best,
D.A.
NYC
It is normal to treat citizens and non-citizens unequally. The non-citizens in Area C, which happens to contain most of the West Bank’s agricultural lands and was projected to be transferred to the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo accords to make the Palestinian state viable, are, however, not simply treated as non-citizens. They live under military dictatorship and heavy restrictions of movement. Israel has designated most of area C either as settlement zones for Israeli settlers (many of them religious fanatics who believe they have a divine right to other people’s long term property), and most of the rest are closed military zones. This regime may be understandable, considering the degree of terrorism Israel has endured, and the lack of success that land for peace agreements have had, but it’s not the normal thing done by every state.
It’s much more complicated than you present. There is no military dictatorship. Arabs in Area C are under military jurisdiction but this jurisdiction consists of a mixture of Ottoman laws and Jordanian laws + (of course) military security precautions because so many Palestinian Arabs wholeheartedly support Hamas and Hezbollah’s goal to kill all the Jews. If Israel would implement Israeli jurisdiction on all inhabitants of Area C it would mean annexation of it.
Only a small portion of the Judea and Samaria is taken for Israeli towns and villages and those are not built on privately owned Arab land but on state land. And far from the majority of people living there are religious fanatics. Of course, religious fanatics exist there as well but if they try to take privately owned Arab land they are expelled by the IDF. If they attack Palestinian Arabs, they are arrested.
The whole Area C is a disputed land and the division of it between Israelis and Palestinians was supposed to be negotiated in further talks in the framework of Oslo Accords. As is well known, Palestinian Authority (first Arafat, then Abbas) refused any offers without presenting any contr-offer. They simply want the land “from the River to the Sea” free of Jews.
The territories are disputed and the final results to be negotiated. They never were sovereign Palestinian Territories. I remind you that Gazza was controlled by Egypt from 1948 to 67 and Judea and Samaria were controlled by Jordan during the same period —however neither country granted the citizens a state and there wasn’t even a push from the people to have their own independent state. Again it seems like it’s all about destroying Israel, not creating a peaceful coexistence.
What ‘genocide’ really means is ‘something I don’t like’. For a bad example, see “Emily Bridges accuses British Cycling bosses of ‘furthering a genocide’ after transgender riders banned from female category”. Quote
“Emily Bridges accuses British Cycling bosses of ‘furthering a genocide’ after transgender riders banned from female category”
Talk about word meaning creep. No bicyclists lost their lives or even came close but it’s “genocide.” Good grief!
Good on Pinker again for his editorial.
Your (and my, and his) views of Zionism are very very minor differences, mere trifles next to the high volume of “River to Sea” idiocy probably outside your window right now.
The full volume of welcome of tiktock-intersectional anti-semitism … amazes and horrifies me. I really, REALLY didn’t see that coming.
D.A.
NYC
Nice piece from Iona Italia on the strange non-response from the typically very chatty talking heads
https://quillette.com/2024/10/07/the-women-of-7-october-gaza-israel/
Isn’t it very sad that one has to have courage for writing a paper in defending the cause of Israel
Yes it makes me very sad
‘And then he goes after the Big Lie that Israel is committing “genocide”, a really dumb criticism that has caught on among the ideologues who don’t even know what “genocide” is.’
If this is such a dumb criticism, why did 15 Judges vote in favor of the provisional measures when the South African delegation brought the case to the World Court? I recall you referred to these proceedings as a “farce” at the time without having followed the proceedings closely yourself. But anyone who watched knows there was nothing farcical about what the South African delegates were presenting.
There is no question that Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah are not committing genocide at this moment, nor do they have the means to do so even if they acted on that intention. Recall that Israel has nuclear weapons, which effectively means that there is no existential threat to their survival as a state. Israel, on the other hand, has obliterated Gaza and if the past is any guide they will slow walk efforts by Palestinians to rebuild their infrastructure. No one knows how many civilians are actually dead due to the war, but some commentators (e.g. Ralph Nader) strongly suspect the number is in the hundreds of thousands, with many missing persons still buried under the rubble and many having succumbed to indirect effects of the conflict.
As for what should Israel have done differently? The answer is to comply with international law regarding the June 1967 borders and to stop blocking Palestinian self-determination. I recommend readers watch Professor John Mearsheimer and Professor Jeffrey Sachs recent podcast appearances (on ‘Judging Freedom’ with Judge Andrew Napolitano, as well as on the ‘Duran’ and ‘Daniel Davis – Deep Dive’, all on youtube) to get alternative perspectives on this issue.
They voted in favor of South Africa’s rights to seek measures.
“6 –
The Court considers that, by their very nature, at least some of the provisional measures sought by South Africa are aimed at preserving the plausible rights it asserts on the basis of the Genocide Convention in the present case, namely the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts mentioned in Article III, and the right of South Africa to seek Israel’s compliance with the latter’s obligations under the Convention. Therefore, a link exists between the rights claimed by South Africa that the Court has found to be plausible, and at least some of the provisional measures requested.”
https://x.com/habibi_uk/status/1843367439977136408
Yes, but in addition to the ruling on South Africa’s standing to bring the case, they ruled near-unanimously in favor of a number of provisional measures. They also did so around the time of the Rafah invasion. The rulings were meant to prevent genocidal acts, whose ongoing occurrence is plausible in the view of the court.
I saw a genocidal act on Oct. 7, 2023.
“As for what should Israel have done differently? The answer is to comply with international law regarding the June 1967 borders and to stop blocking Palestinian self-determination.”
There are no “June 1967 borders” under “International law”. In fact, the June 1967 Armistice Agreement is explicitly NOT a border. You seem to be mistaking UN Resolutions for actual International law. The UN, by its Charter, does not have the power to create “International law”.
And the Palestinians already have self-determination because they signed the Oslo Accords with Israel, which gave them self-determination. The Palestinians then almost immediately abrogated the Oslo Accords by starting another intifada. They no longer have a right to self-determination, even though Israel still grants it to them.
UNSC 242 is indisputably part of international law, as are the borders of Green Line Israel.
Your statements on Palestinians losing their rights is beyond the pale. Natural rights come from humanity, not by any accords written in the 1990’s. The history of the Oslo process is not as you describe. The negotiations were ended by Barak before a solution was reached in January 2001.
Left to themselves they begin importing weapons and starting an “intifada.” They do not want peaceful coexistence: they want Israel and the Jews (including descendants of some 900,000 Jews expelled from Arab lands and Iran) gone. If they won’t leave they want them dead.
Read Hamas’s charter. It’s popular amongst Palestinians who have been indoctrinated to reject peaceful coexistence in favour of jihad. Their leaders have done this indoctrination.
The right of self-determination is not absolute, except in the vague aspirational bafflegab of “natural rights” endowed by a Creator. A polity may not self-determine itself without any regard to the health and viability of another state, including the state it is presently part of. The more of a trouble-maker your polity is, the less other states will trust you with self-determination.
Did people in South Carolina have an inherent right to self-determine themselves out of the Union? Abraham Lincoln said No, because of the damage it and its fellow rebels would do the the More Perfect Union, and went to war to drag them all back in. Do French Québeckers have a God-given right to form their own country without negotiating how to service the national debt that Québec helped greatly to run up as the spoiled child of Confederation? No: Creditors won’t lend it money on its own signature if there is a whiff of a threat to default on its debt that it inherited from Canada.
The conditional nature of self-determination, as with all intercourse between sovereign states, means it is closer to GingerBaker’s concept — you forfeit the right if you behave badly — than to yours. Sure, an outsider sympathetic to the upstart statelet’s intifada ambitions might argue that the right of self-determination is free-standing and absolute. But the reality is that if the polity is already part of a larger sovereign entity, especially if the polity wants to destroy the larger state, that sovereign state gets a say in the question. And the “say” may be armed force saying No.
There is no notion of revoking the right to self determination under international law. You are confounding issues of implementation and applicability with a people having that right. There is no question that Palestinians are a people and have this right.
EB, nothing under international law is “without question.” International law is a series of conventions that states adopt to give some predictably and form about how a dispute may be addressed. There is no sense that a foreign Court can impose its decision on a sovereign state. A state must always act first in the interests of its own self (which may be styled as its citizens explicitly or as “the realm”), regardless of what the international community of hostile and envious players all trying advance their self-interest might say.
Rights are social constructs. You have rights only insofar as the people affected by your exercise of those rights agree that you do. To prevent mob rule, states buttress these rights within their own borders by codifying them as laws and having formulas and conventions about how laws can be made, changed, or struck down. One requisite of sovereignty is that the sovereign power can enforce its laws using its monopoly on violence. This process doesn’t exist between states. Rather, states enforce their own (we hope enlightened) self-interest. If this means using military force to squelch a polity’s claim to self-determination, squelch it will do.
There is no confounding of “implementing” and “having.” They are one and the same. If you can’t implement your claim (because of armed resistance you can’t overcome), you don’t, and can’t, have it.
“UNSC 242 is indisputably part of international law, as are the borders of Green Line Israel.”
UNSC 242 is a Chapter Six resolution, not a Chapter Seven resolution, so it is NOT even binding under the Charter of the UN and is most certainly not International law – it is merely a recommendation.
As for the Green Line, please read the actual Armistice Agreement. The ONLY thing agreed to by both sides during the negotiations was that the Green Line was *explicitly* NOT a border.
“There is no question that Palestinians are a people and have this right.”
That is disputable.
Zuheir Mohsen, PLO executive committee member, as quoted in 1977:
“The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.”
From 1949 – 1967, the Arabs in the West Bank were happily and officially Jordanian citizens. The PLO was formed in 1964, and its Charter Article 24 at that time specifically stated that:
“This Organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in the Gaza Strip or the Himmah area”. This article explicitly indicated that the PLO did not claim territorial control over the West Bank (then controlled by Jordan) or the Gaza Strip (then controlled by Egypt).
There was no talk of the Palestinians as a distinct people at that time, no movement for self-determination. Most of the Arabs who now call themselves “Palestinians” came to the area from other Arab nations in a diaspora which matched that of the Jews. Their roots are from other nations and their surnames bear witness to their origins.
The PLO excised Article 24 after the 1967 war, which confirms the quote by Mohsen that Palestinianism is a racist political strategy, not a legitimate cultural one. That the UN recognizes the Palestinians as a people says more about the nature of the UN than it does about the validity of their claim.
The problem is that politically active Palestinians apparently think that only they have rights, and these rights include annihilation of other people they do not like.
Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas are not committing genocide at this moment. Let’s ignore their declared genocidal aims, and note that all three have fired rockets at civilians in Israel. That is a war crime, and aimed at wiping out the Jews.
As for “blocking Palestinian self determination,” the Palestinians have blocked it themselves time after time by turning down two-state deals, some of them generous, from Israel. Since Gaza did have self determination before October 7, and now vows to repeat it again and again, it sounds as if you -want the state of Israel to be repeatedly subject to Palestinian terrorism, and to eventually disappear. There is no other conclusions I can draw from your distorted tirade.
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As for the judges, well, they hate Israel, just like the UN does. Most UN resolutions about misbehavior are concentrated on the Jewish states, which must make you think that the UN is “objective” in its damnation. That is a laugh!
Quoting Mearsheimer and Sachs is like reading a Goebels press release.
Absolutely. They’re extremely biased to say the least.
And Peter Beinart is the founder of ISIS? Give me a break.
Nobody said that Beinart founded ISIS. And yes, the people who were mentioned are explicitly biased against Israel.
Give me a break. I suggest you go haunt Pharyngula, where you will find plenty of liars and Israel-haters who won’t challenge your distortions.
That Hamas is financed and equipped by Iran is only part of the truth.
They are also financed by their fellow Muslim brothers of Qatar (30 Million per month as of November 2023, 1,8 billion in sum up to that date) and by its some actors in Sudan (Abdelbasit Hamza Elhassan Mohamed Khair, google him). They have some own income from foreign investments and donations. I am not counting the 50 million per year paid to UNWAR by the EU. There are also weapons that are leftovers from the Syrian civil war and the Libyan war smuggled via Egypt by non-state actors. The dismantled Libyan state is also the source of machinery for weapons production Hamas use to manufacture their own weapons (with Irani instructions), using the copious scrap metal left from previous Israeli bombardments. Some rockets were improvised from water pipes. They also reuse undetonated ordnance from the Israeli bombardments.
https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/what-s-arming-hamas-increasingly-stolen-weapons-from-israeli-military-124012800672_1.html
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/11/middleeast/hamas-weaponry-gaza-israel-palestine-unrest-intl-hnk-ml/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatari_support_for_Hamas
https://www.thecipherbrief.com/a-look-inside-hamass-weapons-arsenal
In 2003, Steven Pinker wrote ‘The Blank Slate’. One of the criticisms of his book amounted to ‘everyone knows this already’. In reality, his book was prophecy. Blank Slate thinking is considerably more prevalent now than when he wrote the book.
Like it or not, Blank-Slatism is a mandatory dogma for SJWs. Consider the ferocious reaction to Larry Summer’s very tame remarks on the subject. Of course, that controversy is from 2005. More recently, we have the rather unhinged reaction to James Damore’s quite scientific review (2017) of male/female differences (in relative interest in things vs. people, no less). We also have the Ted Hill affair (2018) where a very abstract mathematical paper suggesting that the might be an evolutionary reason for GMV (Greater Male Variability) was repeatedly censored. I would be remiss in not mentioning the Strumia kerfuffle from 2018.
https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1843299419195859213
https://archive.md/2024.10.07-105148/https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/10/07/opinion/steven-pinker-harvard-students-israel-protests-october-7/
I was impressed by Professor Steven Pinker’s writing. 🍀🍀🍀
“I was impressed by Professor Steven Pinker’s writing”. You should be. He was the author of “The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century”.