Coleman Hughes on Gaza

The heterodox Coleman Hughes, now writing for The Free Press, tenders 17 minutes of discussion about the Hamas/Israeli war on “Conversations with Coleman.”  The reader who sent me this link said, “He gets it spot on!”, and was so impressed with this video that he/she immediately subscribed to Highes’s Substack, which you can find here.

You may remember that Hughes got into trouble with TED for giving a preapproved talk about how people should be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character (see my posts on this here and here, and you can read about it on Wikipedia here).

Although Hughes thinks that Israel are the “good guys” and Hamas the “bad guys,” he avers that both sides have committed war crimes and that the IDF has done unjustifiable things, including cutting off aid to Gaza for two months, which he sees as close to a war crime. But, as he says in his summary below, he maintains that the sides are not morally equivalent: as he says, “Israel’s goals as a country are far more benign and ethical than Hamas’s goals.”  In short, Hamas is genocidal and Israel is not (Israel could easily have wiped out all of Gaza any time in the last two decades, but they withdrew and gave Gaza autonomy).

And of course anyone with more than a handful of neurons realizes that he’s right:

In this special episode, I take on probably the most controversial and emotionally fraught topic of the moment: the Israel-Hamas conflict. I think war crimes have been committed on both sides. But that doesn’t mean I think the two sides are morally equivalent. Today, I argue that there’s a fundamental asymmetry between Israel and Hamas, one that’s too often blurred or ignored by the mainstream media. Israel’s actions, while sometimes flawed or tragic in consequence, are ultimately rooted in a defensive logic. Hamas, on the other hand, has explicitly genocidal goals. But where does that leave us when we see images of children starving and hear reports that Israel is responsible?

Hughes notes that war crimes have been committed by both sides in most wars, including by the U.S. in WWII and the Union Army during the Civil War. What matters to him in the main are the goals for which each side is fighting.  Again, though, he says that Hamas has committed far more war crimes, like fighting without wearing uniforms; and that Hamas’s war crimes fall largely not on Israelis, but on Gazan civilians.  He goes on to list a number of further war crimes committed by Hamas. Nevertheless, as he says, when we hold Israel alone responsible for the civilian death toll in Gaza, “We are implicitly holding Israel responsible for Hamas’s war crimes against the Palestinians.” He goes on to indict the mainstream media, like the New York Times, for distorting the news by relying on Gazan sources (the misleading photo of an emaciated child on the NYT front page is one example).  He’s not denying that there is hunger of food insecurity in Gaza, but adds that “the pipeline that’s feeding you information about the humanitarian disaster in Gaza is fundamentally broken, biased, untrustworthy, and weaponized against Israel.” In the end, we simply don’t know how to trust the reports of the Gazan Health Ministry, who can’t be “trusted blindly.”

And the end he discusses the accusation of genocide committed by Israel, which he considers “absurd.” He is, of course, right, because any fool can see that the goal of Israel is not to destroy the Palestinian people in Gaza. And that’s in contrast with Hamas, whose goals are explicitly genocidal. “If the IDF chose to destroy Gazans as a people, they could kill almost everyone in Gaza in a matter of weeks. So ask yourself, ‘Why haven’t they?'” (The answer “because of international pressure” won’t wash, because that concedes that Israel is not in fact committing a genocide.)

Finally, he says that if you want to argue that Israeli actions reflect the angry statements of a few Israeli officials soon after October 7, 2023, he recommends that you read the following Atlantic article (the link goes to an archived version):

In the end, Hughes’ take seems both objective and correct.  I hope he has a bright future ahead of him (he’s only 29), but of course his heterodox views, and probably now his association with The Free Press, will hamper the approbation he deserves. (I was on his show two years ago, and found the guy was highly informed about evolutionary biology, even though that’s not his field.)