I always find Sam Harris’s writings absorbing, but in today’s piece he’s really hit his stride, telling us why, despite his own criticisms of Israel, he won’t debate those people—he calls them “scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics”—who demonize Israel as not only morally worse than its enemies, but the worst country in the world.
In a way, the piece below is a bookend to the superb piece he posted on November 7, 2023: “The bright line between good and evil.” In between then and now, Hamas has lost the war, Gaza has been largely wrecked because of Hamas’s tactics, and yet the terrorists are still in power. What has changed is that despite the efforts of Israel to limit civilian casualties in Gaza and Lebanon, antisemitism and hatred of Israel have ballooned. To Sam, and to me, this spate of criticism of Jews and Israel, parading under the flag of “anti-Zionism”. shows that the “river-to-the-sea” gang has lost its moral compass. And the encampers and drum-bangers have dragged a lot of academics and journalists along with them.
What is missing in all the debate is what Sam has bookended: the moral compass that points clearly to which side in the conflict is on the side of morality and justice. It might be salutary for you to read his 2023 piece first (I posted about it here), but it’s imperative to read the piece he just put on his Substack. You can it for free by clicking on the screenshot below.
What shines in Sam’s analysis is his laserlike focus on the most important question—right versus wrong—and his refusal to be distracted from that focus. This is truly a superb piece, and I recommend it highly. Today you should be reading Sam Harris, not me. I’ll put a few quotes in indents below, but you really need to click above and spend a while pondering Sam’s views.
Excerpts:
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. 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 (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.
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). 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.
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. 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.
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.
He then explains his unwillingness to engage in debate about the war. I’ve put a critical bit in bold:
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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
Those who demonize Israel and lionize terrorists, or those Palestinians who lionize terrorism—and there are many of them—must deal with this point, which seems palpably true. But requiring Hamas to lay down its arms, as well as demanding that Palestinian society lay aside Jew hatred and then aspire to peace and prosperity, is a tough ask, and we won’t see it in our lifetimes. For even the younger generation of Palestinians have been brainwashed into Jew hatred, and they aren’t even teenagers yet.
There’s more, but Sam ends this way:
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 free societies require.
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 argu
The first paragraph makes the point that antisemitism (aka “anti-Zionism”) is a hatred not just of Jews, but of the liberal, democratic societies built by the West. The grifters and maniacs will never admit that, but look at what is happening to liberal European democracies like Belgium and the Netherlands—countries that have admitted floods of Muslims who have imported hatred of the very societies to which they’ve fled.
I have not lost respect for Sam: I admire him all the more, and have told him so. Of course this piece, one of the best on the current Middle East situation, will itself be demonized and ignored, probably by invoking things Sam has said in the past. We will hear, “But he favors torture!” Or “He’s a neuroscientist, and not qualified to pronounce on politics.” Or, “Sam has been too hard on religious people.” Those are all distractions. Yes, I’ve had my differences with Sam—I think his view that there is an objective morality is misguided—but that is irrelevant. Regardless of whether Israel’s morality is objectively better than that of the morality of its critics, it’s true that those of us who are rational want to live in a society based on liberal democracy than in a dysfunctional one based on jihadism and Jew hatred. Jihad is more than a struggle to live a holy life by the lights of Islam: it’s also a struggle to destroy Western values.
Great piece, thank you for sharing it.