". . . is Israel the side you defend or the side you condemn?" Doesn't the answer depend on what Israel DOES? There are defensible actions and objectionable ones. There is no contradiction in defending Israel's existence as a Jewish state and opposing her actions to acquire and control remaining Palestinian territory. The former would be far easier to accept if the latter were not extending the conflict.
I loved this piece, and think it nails what so much of the conflict is about these days: people defending partial truths, talking past one another, not attempting to reconcile nuances and complexities. There are, there have to be, ways out of this conflict that will take boldness, imagination, will, and building trust from both sides. But it will never happen if we don't see the complexity of the whole picture. I so often find myself in the same place, arguing with half of Beinart and half of Harris. May these one day come together to form a whole.
Welp, I've always despised Sam Harris. He's a professional atheist and all professional activist somethings are profoundly boring to me. Especially atheism - the ultimate unknowable.
But I loved this article for exactly the reasons you hated it: it was a clear boundary. He won't debate people who don't recognize Israel's right to exist. Because you cannot debate them. Because it's degrading to do so.
Another thing I liked about it was the humility - he admitted he didn't know what Israel should have done after October 7. That impressed me.
Harris isn't interested in the details, because the details don't change the overall picture. You can make a million arguments about mistakes the US has made and all the country's shortcomings. In a war against Iran, it is ridiculous to take Iran's side because the US had slaves or was involved in Vietnam. Harris isn't really that involved and maybe not that interested in discussing Israel's shortcomings, after all he doesn't have much stake in it. It shouldn't be hard who the bad guys are and who the good guys are in this conflict and that's how I interpret Harris's statement. As for Beinart, he is despicable. It seems that he has made a career of fame and fortune off the tragedy of this conflict and also has become an enemy of the Jewish people. He makes me sick.
I appreciate your attempt to bring some nuance to the debate and I agree with much of it but Harris is right that there is no point arguing history. That’s only leads to endless distraction and interpretation while the real questions go unaddressed, let alone answered.
The fact is that there were multiple partition offers presented and the Arabs rejected them all. At first they did so because they believed that they could achieve a better solution through war but then they lost those wars. After that they refused perfectly good deals due to incompetent leadership or religious extremism - take your pick.
You seem to suggest that Israel could not be trusted to honor those borders but that’s not an excuse. When you lose multiple wars and are the weaker side in the negotiation by far you don’t get to dictate terms.
The Palestinians don’t understand that or they don’t care. Which is why most Gazans now live in tents.
It's truly astonishing that people like Harris and yourself can ask to be taken seriously as commentators on this issue and yet completely ignore the consensus of the scholarly community on Israel being guilty of genocide. Anyone who thinks there is any serious debate to be had over this fact is delusional and not worthy of being debated. It would literally be as pointless as a physicist sitting down to debate a young-earth creationist. A pointless exercise because only one side has a reasonable epistemology.
There was a consensus of the scholarly community in the middle ages on the question of deicide and blood libel, in the 1800s a consensus of the scholarly community of Jews and revolution, this is just the newest guise for an ancient hatred. If the Gaza war was genocide what was Hiroshima?
It's truly astonishing you completely ignore the consensus of the scholarly community that the sun revolves around the Earth.
It's truly astonishing you completely ignore the consensus of the scholarly community that hand washing is a dangerous superstition and "the miasma" is responsible for communicable disease.
.Physician, human rights activist Dr. Qanta Ahmed: “What happened on Oct. 7 meets the internationally recognized definition of genocide as acts committed with the intention to destroy, ‘in whole or in part,’ a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. That Hamas
succeeded only partially in exterminating members of the Jewish state in no way reduces its genocidal culpability.”
Physician, Human rights activist Dr. Qanta Ahmed: “Hamas is truly genocidal. It has unwavering genocidal animus toward the Jewish people and the Jewish state, and it is willing to expend every last Palestinian life in an effort to achieve that genocide”
That's why (below) I have provided links to loads of genocide and legal scholars explaining why they have concluded it's a genocide. I suggest you get researching.
What does it matter in reality? So someone admits they think it was genocide. Countries who commit genocide still exist. Germany still exists. Rwanda, Cambodia, Turkey - they all still exist. The question is “what next?” We can fight over semantics for years and years and it won’t solve anything.
Are you just as apathetic when it comes to the semantic framing of the Holocaust?
By the way the entire justice system is built on semantic labelling. Whether one committed 'murder' or 'manslaughter' matter hugely and so it will matter in the Hague too. By the way there currently is no such fight among the experts. They are in agreement that it is genocide.
I heartily agree with David Sher. Kowaz states: "Neither of them will write the one sentence this whole thing demands. Two peoples with real and opposing claims to the same land have to be pulled apart . . . " No. First, stop talking about "two peoples." The Palestinian people have no voice in this. Second, this fight has never been about "real and opposing claims to the same land." It is and has always been about keeping the Jews out. Always that. One can criticize Harris, but he's focused on the daily reality. Israelis are not safe from the people who purport to speak about Palestinians. Israelis have to attend to security 24/7. October 7 is the failure to do that. The forever reality is that Iran, Hamas, et al. have no need to solve the dispute, only to win it. The Israelis need to be safe. There's no room for negotiation. Absence of war is the best it can be.
Historian Bernard Lewis, “Semites And Anti-Semites”: “The term anti-Semitism was first used in 1879 and seems to have been invented by one Wilhelm Marr, a minor Jew-baiting journalist with no other claim to memory. Significantly, it first appeared as a political program in Vienna, the capital of the sprawling and variegated Hapsburg monarchy, which was also the birthplace of Zionism and of many other nationalist movements, and the meeting place of traditional Eastern and secular Western Jews.
Though the name anti-Semitism was new, the special hatred of the Jews which it designated was very old, going back to the rise of Christianity. From the time when the Roman Emperor Constantine embraced the new faith and Christians obtained control of the apparatus of the state there were few periods during which some Jews were not being persecuted in one or other part of the Christian world. Hostility to Jews was sometimes restrained, sometimes violent, sometimes epidemic, always endemic. But, though hatred of the Jew was old, the term anti-Semitism did indeed denote a significant change—not the initiation but rather the culmination of a major shift in the way this hatred was felt, perceived, and expressed. In medieval times hostility to the Jew, whatever its underlying social or psychological motivations, was defined primarily in religious terms. From the fifteenth century onward this was no longer true, and Jew hatred was redefined, becoming at first partly, and then, at least in theory, wholly racial.”
Before the ‘67 War, nobody heard of “Palestinians.” They didn’t exist. After the humiliating Arab defeat, it was hellooo “Palestinians”—yearning for their homeland of “Palestine” that was British Mandate Palestine, a Roman name for Jews’ homeland.
Okay that wasn't clear. I'll let you off that comment then.
But if you think Harris is "focused on the daily reality" then I still think you need a reality check yourself. He didn't interact with a single genocide scholar who disagrees with him in his piece (not even the Jewish ones). Now of course Sam sees himself as quite the polymath so it's curious he hasn't been published in an academic journal demonstrating the faulty epistemology of the entire community of genocide experts on this matter. Or perhaps he's just smart enough to know his limits after all?
Thanks for letting me off, Michael. Harris is not someone who stays with this 24/7, as many of us do. But he's well-informed and thoughtful and tends not to overlook big facts and ideas. I don't think he, or the rest of us, need to canvas all scholarly opinion on these issues. It's not hard to understand the issues or what's at stake for all involved and to come to honest conclusions. He has simply staked out his position and wants to think about other things. That's up to him. I don't expect everyone to be as preoccupied as many of us are with this issue. I don't believe one has to be an expert to have an opinion about genocide. I've heard and read most of what folks have to say, which is why I posted my grim assessment. I will keep reading, but after all this time, I'm not expecting to hear new insights. What I'm looking for is new behavior.
I never insisted one needs to "...canvas all scholarly opinion on these issues." Neither did I say that to have an opinion one must be an expert either. But to take a position which is contrary to the vast consensus of genocide scholars and not admit that and ignore all of them entirely without any engagement whatsoever is, frankly, laughable. That's on a par with a young-earth creationist taking a position that the entire universe is 10,000 years old and failing to interact with any science or scientist at all. Any reasonable person would mock such a methodology and yet this is exactly what Harris is doing. But, even worse, whereas most young-earth creationists seem willing to dialogue Harris has so written off that possibility that he's now walked away. There's very little evidence Harris is "thoughtful" and "well informed" on this issue. His piece reads very much like that of a low-grade Zionist apologist who seems quite happy to ignore the suffering of Palestinians on a daily basis in Gaza and the West Bank.
"Interrogating exactly that kind of certainty is the thing he has spent a career teaching the rest of us to do."
That's his biggest mistake. One should remain humble in a sort of cosmic way; we're all wrong about something. But otherwise, life is not never-ending debate. We hear out the arguments, make our decisions, and barring a massive trove of new and distinctly different evidence, we move on with an opinion that satisfices our need for truth.
I think there are people out there who take their ability to "win" a debate as evidence they are correct. That’s why it’s so infuriating to them to have someone disagree and refuse to debate—if there are reasonable beliefs that they can’t see the reasons for, and others won’t tell them, their entire intellectual ediface crumbles.
But nobody owes you their reasons, and just because they can’t or won’t express those reasons doesn’t mean they’re not there. It’s up to you to steelman every possibility and decide for yourself. Other people taking the time to tell you why they think you're wrong is a gift to help you in that endeavor. People shaking their head in pity and disappointment at how wrong you are, but leaving you to stew in it rather than arguing about it, is baseline behavior among people who think for themselves in a peacefully pluralistic society. This seems to be a blind spot of Sam's, certainly common among his followers. But he's probably learning the hard way right now.
I agree with what you have written here about Harris and Beinart, but I want to nitpick about one thing, which is how the United States treated the American Indians. We did indeed offer them their own states. In the original conception, the tribes on Indian reservations and the lands that White settlers had not reached were seen as semi-sovereign nations. Not one state, but many, and with delineated borders where they met White settlement.
As the USA grew in population and as Whites realized the incredible value of those lands for agriculture, timber, minerals, etc., the government abrogated its treaties, left the Indians the least valuable lands, and reduced their sovereign powers to almost nothing. As recently as 1978, the Supreme Court stripped Tribal police of the power to arrest non-Indians, even if caught in flagrante delicto committing a crime on a reservation.
Given the way that the Israeli government covets the lands still owned by Palestinians, this history seems familiar in an unpleasant way.
Only fifteen (?) states have names entirely derived from English. I take it you believe the land in the other thirty-five belongs to the Spanish, the Native Americans, or, in the case of Louisiana, the French?
The names Judea and Samaria, associated with Jews, date back thousands of years. Jews have historical continuity. Fauxlestinians didn’t exist until an Egyptian, Arafat, invented them 60 years ago.
Arafat's father was from Gaza and his mother from Jerusalem.
Honestly, it doesn't matter if you want to call them Martians, you should recognize their property rights. Your argument is like saying it was fine to take all the American Indians' land, even in violation of our own treaties, because they weren't really from India.
No, bro. You don’t get property rights today on the basis of 2000 year ago land deeds. You want to reallocate land ownership anywhere else in the world on the basis of their status in 70 CE? You have any family still living in the USA?—better give their homes back to the Iroquois.
DNA tests show Mizrachi and Sephardic Jews are very close to Palestinians genetically. This cuts both ways, that Jews are descended for former Judeans. But also that Palestinians are descended from former Judeans. What do you suppose happened to the residents of Roman-era Judea who decided to convert to that new-fangled Christianity? Or Islam when it came in. Or both successively.
The settlement project is engaged in land theft. We could do that to the American Indians. Standards have risen.
Thank you for your moral clarity. I always appreciate your nuanced arguments. A world without nuance is so much easier to swallow! People love being right. I hope and pray that people who can see past the absolutes can find a solution.
The utterance "I support Israel's right to exist" should immediately end the conversation. Israel exists. Period. It was created and given sovereign rights over 100 years ago by the international community through the League of Nations Mandate, the implementation of which was delayed by over 20 years until, in 1948, the UN decided to recognize it. That mandate extended from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. The "West Bank" was illegally occupied by Jordan for 19 years until that territory - legally part of the State of Israel - was liberated in 1967. Those are the facts. Israel has at least as much "right to exist" as Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan - much more so when you take into account the historical and moral connection and rights of the Jewish people in that land. So Harris is 100% correct, even if he doesn't accurately describe the basis for ending the "should Israel exist" discussion.
This is incorrect. See in particular Article 25 of the Mandate about territory between the eastern border (which the Mandate left up to the British to define) and the Jordan River.
The Mandate occurred during a time of European colonialism. Its reference to a Jewish National Home is quote distinct from creation of a Jewish state. At the time, they probably envisioned the type of permanent protectorate status they also intended for Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, and Morocco (etc.), except that WW2 left the entire framework of colonialism unsustainable.
See Professor Kontorovich’s 2016 law review article on uri possidetis juris. If the mandate was ineffectual in creating the state of Israel then none of Iraq, Jordan, Syria or Lebanon should exist.
You can also find numerous responses. You won't be surprised that I find them far more persuasive than the original article, which suffers from motivated reasoning. Both the authors (one Israeli) are active on the pro-Bibi Israeli right-wing. But I don't want to commit the genetic fallacy.
Here are some of the points of the responses:
(1) They render moot the Partition Plan, which clearly anticipated two states. Their argument is that the failure of a second state to emerge in the Mandatory territory makes it Israel's by default. They refer to "While there had been proposals to divide the territory of Palestine…". I do not think the Partition Plan was a "proposal", and I do not think that the failure to establish a state of Palestine means the territory is Israeli.
(2) Previous uses of the doctrine involved preserving a state governed by the majority. In this case, in 1947, the Jews were a minority, and even today it is about 50/50.
(3) The Israeli government's statements from Independence through the 1950s made clear they did not see the state borders as coextensive with the Mandate. That is, they rejected Kantorovich's argument.
To these I would add another I think is even more important. The territories are extremely similar to Israel for the Jewish settlers. But, as defenders of Israel like to point out, the Arabs who remained in areas under Israeli control in 1949 became citizens—yet the Arabs living in the West Bank are not. That’s completely opposite to every one of the decolonization examples Kantorovich gives. All residents of the formerly-colonized regions could become citizens of the new state. Israel itself doesn’t treat the West Bank as its own territory when convenient.
Indeed, not only are West Bank Palestinians not citizens, they are subject to military law, often brutal, at the same time their Jewish neighbors are (nominally) policed by officers drawn from their own settlements and led by the bigot Ben Gvir. And in Area C, their rights to real property are being completely disregarded, which you can see other pro-Likud commenters on this thread feel is perfectly justified. They are being reduced to landless helots. (The story of real property owned by those Arabs who remained in Israel is not a happy one, either.)
The problem with all of these arguments (“disputed” territories is another) is that they attempt to justify something that the democratic world no longer permits: grossly unequal treatment of residents based on religion and ethnicity. It’s not the American Indians in 1870, or the Irish in 1910. Of course, there are governments that are even worse, but they lack Israel’s pretensions to liberal democracy.
My experience is that behind these arguments there are two others. One is that the Arabs lost the wars, and deserve whatever they get. The other is that in this region of the world only, property should be reallocated according to its status in 70 CE according to the directions that a Big Guy with a Beard gave centuries before that. The rest is pretext.
I agree with you. However, so much of the debate is characterized by bad faith arguments. And “the Debate” itself often merely an exercise in point scoring and trolling. Moreover, and this something Non-Jews likely would deny, the World can hold up Dead Jews as evidence of a moral abomination, but when Living Jews wield power, often in destructive ways just like others who hold power, they can then be branded as more loathsome than other countries and societies in the midst of conflict. This, of course, should not immunize Israel from critique, but this underlying fact which is too diffuse to label as antisemitism in every critique, is still present. It is exhausting.
“Salam Fayyad might as well never have governed.” Correct. Until Hamas is gone there is no point in debating any of these people on any of these points. “What are you personally willing to do to help remove Hamas from power and existence so we can begin the process of reengaging and rebuilding towards an eventual peaceful resolution?” If the response is “nothing I am going to scream at you and try to have you driven out of public and social life unless you work to eliminate Israel from existence” well, there is your answer.
Given that Gaza is not contiguous with the West Bank, spurning Fayyad and continuing to build in the West Bank does not seem related to Hamas. Indeed, don't you think the failure to reward a moderate Palestinian (but instead to humiliate his government with more settlements) is a recruitment tool FOR Hamas?
Until Hamas is gone there is no point in debating any of these people on any of these points. “What are you personally willing to do to help remove Hamas from power and existence so we can begin the process of reengaging and rebuilding towards an eventual peaceful resolution?”
If it weren’t for yetzer hara there’d be no Israel. Come to think of it there’d be no America, no Great Britain, no China, no Russia really pretty much every country’s early history is written in blood and violence. Then when the fighting is over they clean it up for Hollywood.
When it comes to victimhood there is only one rule. Don’t become one. There is no people in history that knows that better than the Jews
I refer you to MY previous answer, and I will add that it's well-known that Bibi PROPPED UP Hamas as a violent alternative to the Palestinian Authority, partly to give cover to people like you who want to postpone indefinitely the reckoning about the West Bank.
The Gaza Peace Plan is one of the few worthwhile accomplishments to bear Trump's name. It envisions replacement of Hamas by a technocratic regime supported by the other Arab countries. It also states, as its second point, that Gaza is to be developed for Gazans, which is very much at odds with the proclaimed policy of the Israeli government, which is already talking about "voluntary" emigration of the people who live there. In other words, Israel is repudiating the agreement it signed. Cynics would suggest that it never had the slightest intention of abiding by it, and has been planning to blame Hamas for its own violations.
Yes everyone knows that. It was a terrible policy, I was against it at the time, and now it’s blown up in everyone’s face just like we all knew it would. I’m not defending or condemning Israeli policy over the last 20 years, I’m arguing that to do so is pointless because we are in the middle of a war and people’s lives are on the line.
“Technocratic admin backed by other Arab states” great I’m in. How do we get Hamas to disarm? What tangible steps can ordinary people take to hasten and support this process?
The reason Hamas has made good most of its personnel losses, according to the IDF's own estimates, is that, cruel and self-destructive as they are, they look better to Gazans than being forced across the border into Egypt at gunpoint or starving to death in situ, which appear to be the alternatives on offer from the Israeli government.
There will always be enough of a war for Israel not to leave the West Bank. The Israeli right-wing will always foment enough violence to guarantee that, whenever Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are not up to the task. We don't negotiate when the Palestinians are quiet, because that shows they are accepting the status quo, and we don't negotiate when they are violent, because that would reward their bad behavior.
You want to make support for Hamas collapse? Isn't it clear by now that bombing and shooting children is not accomplishing the goal? How about a clear declaration that Gaza will be rebuilt for the Gazans as soon as Hamas is demobilized, and this time MEAN IT and act accordingly, instead of joking, as Bibi did, about the upcoming re-occupation of the entire Strip.
Since we agree that Bibi's previous policy was terrible, why do you think his current policy is less bad?
Look man I don’t work for Likud. I’m not interested in rehashing the past anymore about what should or shouldn’t have been done differently.
All I’m interested in is eradicating Hamas permanently. If we agree on that goal there is a strategic discussion about how. If we don’t, there is nothing left to discuss.
The argument laid out in this article is foolish in the extreme because it misses out on the main point that Harris is trying to say; which is namely that the specifics don’t matter when the opponent is Fideistic in their approach. Palestinianism is the ultimate fideistic movement. That’s not to say that there is no truth or point to their claims. Rather it is to say that the major proponents of Palestinianism have no interest in evidence, except as it supports their worldview. That is why Peter Beinart can make his “factual” claims while at the same time calling for a one state solution that literally 90 percent or more of both Israelis and Palestinians oppose.
That's hilarious since many Zionists love to base their justifications in a piece of Bronze Age Hebrew propaganda mythology claiming it to be the utterances of a real divine being acting as their personal estate agent. Any reasonable person knows who the real fideists are here.
Beinart is not merely someone who shouldn’t be debated, he isn’t worth debating. He is a profoundly disturbed person who would cast his own people back to 1939, stateless and defenseless. This is not someone who deserves to be taken seriously. For reasons that are known only to himself, he has decided that trading the safety, security and sovereignty of his own people is somehow worth it if his far left pals approve. He should not be given any sort of platform from which to advocate such nonsense and, frankly, the rest of us should resolve to never tolerate him in any forum.
". . . is Israel the side you defend or the side you condemn?" Doesn't the answer depend on what Israel DOES? There are defensible actions and objectionable ones. There is no contradiction in defending Israel's existence as a Jewish state and opposing her actions to acquire and control remaining Palestinian territory. The former would be far easier to accept if the latter were not extending the conflict.
Excellent piece Eli. Bravo! Sam Harris's piece has received a reception totally unwarranted by how two dimensional and incurious it really was.
I loved this piece, and think it nails what so much of the conflict is about these days: people defending partial truths, talking past one another, not attempting to reconcile nuances and complexities. There are, there have to be, ways out of this conflict that will take boldness, imagination, will, and building trust from both sides. But it will never happen if we don't see the complexity of the whole picture. I so often find myself in the same place, arguing with half of Beinart and half of Harris. May these one day come together to form a whole.
Welp, I've always despised Sam Harris. He's a professional atheist and all professional activist somethings are profoundly boring to me. Especially atheism - the ultimate unknowable.
But I loved this article for exactly the reasons you hated it: it was a clear boundary. He won't debate people who don't recognize Israel's right to exist. Because you cannot debate them. Because it's degrading to do so.
Another thing I liked about it was the humility - he admitted he didn't know what Israel should have done after October 7. That impressed me.
Harris isn't interested in the details, because the details don't change the overall picture. You can make a million arguments about mistakes the US has made and all the country's shortcomings. In a war against Iran, it is ridiculous to take Iran's side because the US had slaves or was involved in Vietnam. Harris isn't really that involved and maybe not that interested in discussing Israel's shortcomings, after all he doesn't have much stake in it. It shouldn't be hard who the bad guys are and who the good guys are in this conflict and that's how I interpret Harris's statement. As for Beinart, he is despicable. It seems that he has made a career of fame and fortune off the tragedy of this conflict and also has become an enemy of the Jewish people. He makes me sick.
I appreciate your attempt to bring some nuance to the debate and I agree with much of it but Harris is right that there is no point arguing history. That’s only leads to endless distraction and interpretation while the real questions go unaddressed, let alone answered.
The fact is that there were multiple partition offers presented and the Arabs rejected them all. At first they did so because they believed that they could achieve a better solution through war but then they lost those wars. After that they refused perfectly good deals due to incompetent leadership or religious extremism - take your pick.
You seem to suggest that Israel could not be trusted to honor those borders but that’s not an excuse. When you lose multiple wars and are the weaker side in the negotiation by far you don’t get to dictate terms.
The Palestinians don’t understand that or they don’t care. Which is why most Gazans now live in tents.
It's truly astonishing that people like Harris and yourself can ask to be taken seriously as commentators on this issue and yet completely ignore the consensus of the scholarly community on Israel being guilty of genocide. Anyone who thinks there is any serious debate to be had over this fact is delusional and not worthy of being debated. It would literally be as pointless as a physicist sitting down to debate a young-earth creationist. A pointless exercise because only one side has a reasonable epistemology.
There was a consensus of the scholarly community in the middle ages on the question of deicide and blood libel, in the 1800s a consensus of the scholarly community of Jews and revolution, this is just the newest guise for an ancient hatred. If the Gaza war was genocide what was Hiroshima?
It's truly astonishing you completely ignore the consensus of the scholarly community that the sun revolves around the Earth.
It's truly astonishing you completely ignore the consensus of the scholarly community that hand washing is a dangerous superstition and "the miasma" is responsible for communicable disease.
I could go on and on....
The genocide was perpetrated in Israel on Oct. 7 by Gazans. Forget so soon?
No it wasn't. Sorry. Your assertions aren't evidence.
.Physician, human rights activist Dr. Qanta Ahmed: “What happened on Oct. 7 meets the internationally recognized definition of genocide as acts committed with the intention to destroy, ‘in whole or in part,’ a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. That Hamas
succeeded only partially in exterminating members of the Jewish state in no way reduces its genocidal culpability.”
A physician. Not a Dr of genocide studies.
Physician, Human rights activist Dr. Qanta Ahmed: “Hamas is truly genocidal. It has unwavering genocidal animus toward the Jewish people and the Jewish state, and it is willing to expend every last Palestinian life in an effort to achieve that genocide”
https://www.instagram.com/qantaahmed/reel/C3icD13gYB0/
Physician is what I said - not a genocide scholar. Thank you.
Neither are yours.
That's why (below) I have provided links to loads of genocide and legal scholars explaining why they have concluded it's a genocide. I suggest you get researching.
What does it matter in reality? So someone admits they think it was genocide. Countries who commit genocide still exist. Germany still exists. Rwanda, Cambodia, Turkey - they all still exist. The question is “what next?” We can fight over semantics for years and years and it won’t solve anything.
Are you just as apathetic when it comes to the semantic framing of the Holocaust?
By the way the entire justice system is built on semantic labelling. Whether one committed 'murder' or 'manslaughter' matter hugely and so it will matter in the Hague too. By the way there currently is no such fight among the experts. They are in agreement that it is genocide.
I heartily agree with David Sher. Kowaz states: "Neither of them will write the one sentence this whole thing demands. Two peoples with real and opposing claims to the same land have to be pulled apart . . . " No. First, stop talking about "two peoples." The Palestinian people have no voice in this. Second, this fight has never been about "real and opposing claims to the same land." It is and has always been about keeping the Jews out. Always that. One can criticize Harris, but he's focused on the daily reality. Israelis are not safe from the people who purport to speak about Palestinians. Israelis have to attend to security 24/7. October 7 is the failure to do that. The forever reality is that Iran, Hamas, et al. have no need to solve the dispute, only to win it. The Israelis need to be safe. There's no room for negotiation. Absence of war is the best it can be.
Discredited.
“The accusation of genocide is wrong on the facts and objectively serves to support the intent of Hamas to murder Jews with impunity.”
https://quillette.com/2023/11/23/holocaust-historians-the-genocide-charge-and-gaza/
Notice the date. IDF behavior worsened as the war continued.
.What about the behavior of Muslims, killing 500,000+ in Syria and 300,000+ in Yemen, for example?
Why don’t you focus on the genocide in Syria? 500,000+ killed. Because Israel isn’t involved?
"The Palestinian people have no voice in this."
Perhaps the most obvious display of antisemitism I've read this month. We know how seriously to take you.
Muslims are Jews?
I guess you don't know the meaning of Semite. Oh dear me.
I guess you don't know the meaning of the word antisemitism.
.You didn’t know that “semitic” applies to languages, and “antisemitism” applies solely to Jews. Now you know.
I guess you don't know the English language too well then.
.You don’t know what you don’t know.
Historian Bernard Lewis, “Semites And Anti-Semites”: “The term anti-Semitism was first used in 1879 and seems to have been invented by one Wilhelm Marr, a minor Jew-baiting journalist with no other claim to memory. Significantly, it first appeared as a political program in Vienna, the capital of the sprawling and variegated Hapsburg monarchy, which was also the birthplace of Zionism and of many other nationalist movements, and the meeting place of traditional Eastern and secular Western Jews.
Though the name anti-Semitism was new, the special hatred of the Jews which it designated was very old, going back to the rise of Christianity. From the time when the Roman Emperor Constantine embraced the new faith and Christians obtained control of the apparatus of the state there were few periods during which some Jews were not being persecuted in one or other part of the Christian world. Hostility to Jews was sometimes restrained, sometimes violent, sometimes epidemic, always endemic. But, though hatred of the Jew was old, the term anti-Semitism did indeed denote a significant change—not the initiation but rather the culmination of a major shift in the way this hatred was felt, perceived, and expressed. In medieval times hostility to the Jew, whatever its underlying social or psychological motivations, was defined primarily in religious terms. From the fifteenth century onward this was no longer true, and Jew hatred was redefined, becoming at first partly, and then, at least in theory, wholly racial.”
You did not get my meaning. When I say that they have no voice, I mean that they are permitted no voice by the people who govern them.
Before the ‘67 War, nobody heard of “Palestinians.” They didn’t exist. After the humiliating Arab defeat, it was hellooo “Palestinians”—yearning for their homeland of “Palestine” that was British Mandate Palestine, a Roman name for Jews’ homeland.
The first known use of Palestine is in Herodotus - 5th century BC. You're only 2,500 years out mate! Haha!!
You never read Herodotus’s books. You read TikTok.
Actually read it in the original Greek during uni kid. Don't be salty Mr Middle-East 'historian'!
Okay that wasn't clear. I'll let you off that comment then.
But if you think Harris is "focused on the daily reality" then I still think you need a reality check yourself. He didn't interact with a single genocide scholar who disagrees with him in his piece (not even the Jewish ones). Now of course Sam sees himself as quite the polymath so it's curious he hasn't been published in an academic journal demonstrating the faulty epistemology of the entire community of genocide experts on this matter. Or perhaps he's just smart enough to know his limits after all?
Thanks for letting me off, Michael. Harris is not someone who stays with this 24/7, as many of us do. But he's well-informed and thoughtful and tends not to overlook big facts and ideas. I don't think he, or the rest of us, need to canvas all scholarly opinion on these issues. It's not hard to understand the issues or what's at stake for all involved and to come to honest conclusions. He has simply staked out his position and wants to think about other things. That's up to him. I don't expect everyone to be as preoccupied as many of us are with this issue. I don't believe one has to be an expert to have an opinion about genocide. I've heard and read most of what folks have to say, which is why I posted my grim assessment. I will keep reading, but after all this time, I'm not expecting to hear new insights. What I'm looking for is new behavior.
I never insisted one needs to "...canvas all scholarly opinion on these issues." Neither did I say that to have an opinion one must be an expert either. But to take a position which is contrary to the vast consensus of genocide scholars and not admit that and ignore all of them entirely without any engagement whatsoever is, frankly, laughable. That's on a par with a young-earth creationist taking a position that the entire universe is 10,000 years old and failing to interact with any science or scientist at all. Any reasonable person would mock such a methodology and yet this is exactly what Harris is doing. But, even worse, whereas most young-earth creationists seem willing to dialogue Harris has so written off that possibility that he's now walked away. There's very little evidence Harris is "thoughtful" and "well informed" on this issue. His piece reads very much like that of a low-grade Zionist apologist who seems quite happy to ignore the suffering of Palestinians on a daily basis in Gaza and the West Bank.
Consensus of objective experts is no genocide occurred in Gaza. Not even close. The genocide occurred in Israel on Oct. 7 perpetrated by Gazans.
"Interrogating exactly that kind of certainty is the thing he has spent a career teaching the rest of us to do."
That's his biggest mistake. One should remain humble in a sort of cosmic way; we're all wrong about something. But otherwise, life is not never-ending debate. We hear out the arguments, make our decisions, and barring a massive trove of new and distinctly different evidence, we move on with an opinion that satisfices our need for truth.
I think there are people out there who take their ability to "win" a debate as evidence they are correct. That’s why it’s so infuriating to them to have someone disagree and refuse to debate—if there are reasonable beliefs that they can’t see the reasons for, and others won’t tell them, their entire intellectual ediface crumbles.
But nobody owes you their reasons, and just because they can’t or won’t express those reasons doesn’t mean they’re not there. It’s up to you to steelman every possibility and decide for yourself. Other people taking the time to tell you why they think you're wrong is a gift to help you in that endeavor. People shaking their head in pity and disappointment at how wrong you are, but leaving you to stew in it rather than arguing about it, is baseline behavior among people who think for themselves in a peacefully pluralistic society. This seems to be a blind spot of Sam's, certainly common among his followers. But he's probably learning the hard way right now.
I agree with what you have written here about Harris and Beinart, but I want to nitpick about one thing, which is how the United States treated the American Indians. We did indeed offer them their own states. In the original conception, the tribes on Indian reservations and the lands that White settlers had not reached were seen as semi-sovereign nations. Not one state, but many, and with delineated borders where they met White settlement.
As the USA grew in population and as Whites realized the incredible value of those lands for agriculture, timber, minerals, etc., the government abrogated its treaties, left the Indians the least valuable lands, and reduced their sovereign powers to almost nothing. As recently as 1978, the Supreme Court stripped Tribal police of the power to arrest non-Indians, even if caught in flagrante delicto committing a crime on a reservation.
Given the way that the Israeli government covets the lands still owned by Palestinians, this history seems familiar in an unpleasant way.
Judea and Samaria are “Palestinian” names?
Only fifteen (?) states have names entirely derived from English. I take it you believe the land in the other thirty-five belongs to the Spanish, the Native Americans, or, in the case of Louisiana, the French?
The names Judea and Samaria, associated with Jews, date back thousands of years. Jews have historical continuity. Fauxlestinians didn’t exist until an Egyptian, Arafat, invented them 60 years ago.
Arafat's father was from Gaza and his mother from Jerusalem.
Honestly, it doesn't matter if you want to call them Martians, you should recognize their property rights. Your argument is like saying it was fine to take all the American Indians' land, even in violation of our own treaties, because they weren't really from India.
.Jews have ancient property rights in Jerusalem. Romans pillaged the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. Where were “Palestinians”? Hiding?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POCW8QVjA28
No, bro. You don’t get property rights today on the basis of 2000 year ago land deeds. You want to reallocate land ownership anywhere else in the world on the basis of their status in 70 CE? You have any family still living in the USA?—better give their homes back to the Iroquois.
DNA tests show Mizrachi and Sephardic Jews are very close to Palestinians genetically. This cuts both ways, that Jews are descended for former Judeans. But also that Palestinians are descended from former Judeans. What do you suppose happened to the residents of Roman-era Judea who decided to convert to that new-fangled Christianity? Or Islam when it came in. Or both successively.
The settlement project is engaged in land theft. We could do that to the American Indians. Standards have risen.
Thank you for your moral clarity. I always appreciate your nuanced arguments. A world without nuance is so much easier to swallow! People love being right. I hope and pray that people who can see past the absolutes can find a solution.
The utterance "I support Israel's right to exist" should immediately end the conversation. Israel exists. Period. It was created and given sovereign rights over 100 years ago by the international community through the League of Nations Mandate, the implementation of which was delayed by over 20 years until, in 1948, the UN decided to recognize it. That mandate extended from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. The "West Bank" was illegally occupied by Jordan for 19 years until that territory - legally part of the State of Israel - was liberated in 1967. Those are the facts. Israel has at least as much "right to exist" as Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan - much more so when you take into account the historical and moral connection and rights of the Jewish people in that land. So Harris is 100% correct, even if he doesn't accurately describe the basis for ending the "should Israel exist" discussion.
"legally part of the State of Israel"
This is incorrect. See in particular Article 25 of the Mandate about territory between the eastern border (which the Mandate left up to the British to define) and the Jordan River.
The Mandate occurred during a time of European colonialism. Its reference to a Jewish National Home is quote distinct from creation of a Jewish state. At the time, they probably envisioned the type of permanent protectorate status they also intended for Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, and Morocco (etc.), except that WW2 left the entire framework of colonialism unsustainable.
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/palmanda.asp
See Professor Kontorovich’s 2016 law review article on uri possidetis juris. If the mandate was ineffectual in creating the state of Israel then none of Iraq, Jordan, Syria or Lebanon should exist.
Thank you for a response that isn't an evasion.
You can also find numerous responses. You won't be surprised that I find them far more persuasive than the original article, which suffers from motivated reasoning. Both the authors (one Israeli) are active on the pro-Bibi Israeli right-wing. But I don't want to commit the genetic fallacy.
Here are some of the points of the responses:
(1) They render moot the Partition Plan, which clearly anticipated two states. Their argument is that the failure of a second state to emerge in the Mandatory territory makes it Israel's by default. They refer to "While there had been proposals to divide the territory of Palestine…". I do not think the Partition Plan was a "proposal", and I do not think that the failure to establish a state of Palestine means the territory is Israeli.
(2) Previous uses of the doctrine involved preserving a state governed by the majority. In this case, in 1947, the Jews were a minority, and even today it is about 50/50.
(3) The Israeli government's statements from Independence through the 1950s made clear they did not see the state borders as coextensive with the Mandate. That is, they rejected Kantorovich's argument.
To these I would add another I think is even more important. The territories are extremely similar to Israel for the Jewish settlers. But, as defenders of Israel like to point out, the Arabs who remained in areas under Israeli control in 1949 became citizens—yet the Arabs living in the West Bank are not. That’s completely opposite to every one of the decolonization examples Kantorovich gives. All residents of the formerly-colonized regions could become citizens of the new state. Israel itself doesn’t treat the West Bank as its own territory when convenient.
Indeed, not only are West Bank Palestinians not citizens, they are subject to military law, often brutal, at the same time their Jewish neighbors are (nominally) policed by officers drawn from their own settlements and led by the bigot Ben Gvir. And in Area C, their rights to real property are being completely disregarded, which you can see other pro-Likud commenters on this thread feel is perfectly justified. They are being reduced to landless helots. (The story of real property owned by those Arabs who remained in Israel is not a happy one, either.)
The problem with all of these arguments (“disputed” territories is another) is that they attempt to justify something that the democratic world no longer permits: grossly unequal treatment of residents based on religion and ethnicity. It’s not the American Indians in 1870, or the Irish in 1910. Of course, there are governments that are even worse, but they lack Israel’s pretensions to liberal democracy.
My experience is that behind these arguments there are two others. One is that the Arabs lost the wars, and deserve whatever they get. The other is that in this region of the world only, property should be reallocated according to its status in 70 CE according to the directions that a Big Guy with a Beard gave centuries before that. The rest is pretext.
Facts.
The phrase shouldn’t be the end of the conversation, but the beginning. “Ok, you say it has the right to exist. But it does already. So now what?”
I agree with you. However, so much of the debate is characterized by bad faith arguments. And “the Debate” itself often merely an exercise in point scoring and trolling. Moreover, and this something Non-Jews likely would deny, the World can hold up Dead Jews as evidence of a moral abomination, but when Living Jews wield power, often in destructive ways just like others who hold power, they can then be branded as more loathsome than other countries and societies in the midst of conflict. This, of course, should not immunize Israel from critique, but this underlying fact which is too diffuse to label as antisemitism in every critique, is still present. It is exhausting.
Well put. People love dead Jews, Dara Horn dixit.
“Salam Fayyad might as well never have governed.” Correct. Until Hamas is gone there is no point in debating any of these people on any of these points. “What are you personally willing to do to help remove Hamas from power and existence so we can begin the process of reengaging and rebuilding towards an eventual peaceful resolution?” If the response is “nothing I am going to scream at you and try to have you driven out of public and social life unless you work to eliminate Israel from existence” well, there is your answer.
Given that Gaza is not contiguous with the West Bank, spurning Fayyad and continuing to build in the West Bank does not seem related to Hamas. Indeed, don't you think the failure to reward a moderate Palestinian (but instead to humiliate his government with more settlements) is a recruitment tool FOR Hamas?
I refer you to my previous answer:
Until Hamas is gone there is no point in debating any of these people on any of these points. “What are you personally willing to do to help remove Hamas from power and existence so we can begin the process of reengaging and rebuilding towards an eventual peaceful resolution?”
If it weren’t for yetzer hara there’d be no Israel. Come to think of it there’d be no America, no Great Britain, no China, no Russia really pretty much every country’s early history is written in blood and violence. Then when the fighting is over they clean it up for Hollywood.
When it comes to victimhood there is only one rule. Don’t become one. There is no people in history that knows that better than the Jews
I refer you to MY previous answer, and I will add that it's well-known that Bibi PROPPED UP Hamas as a violent alternative to the Palestinian Authority, partly to give cover to people like you who want to postpone indefinitely the reckoning about the West Bank.
The Gaza Peace Plan is one of the few worthwhile accomplishments to bear Trump's name. It envisions replacement of Hamas by a technocratic regime supported by the other Arab countries. It also states, as its second point, that Gaza is to be developed for Gazans, which is very much at odds with the proclaimed policy of the Israeli government, which is already talking about "voluntary" emigration of the people who live there. In other words, Israel is repudiating the agreement it signed. Cynics would suggest that it never had the slightest intention of abiding by it, and has been planning to blame Hamas for its own violations.
Yes everyone knows that. It was a terrible policy, I was against it at the time, and now it’s blown up in everyone’s face just like we all knew it would. I’m not defending or condemning Israeli policy over the last 20 years, I’m arguing that to do so is pointless because we are in the middle of a war and people’s lives are on the line.
“Technocratic admin backed by other Arab states” great I’m in. How do we get Hamas to disarm? What tangible steps can ordinary people take to hasten and support this process?
The reason Hamas has made good most of its personnel losses, according to the IDF's own estimates, is that, cruel and self-destructive as they are, they look better to Gazans than being forced across the border into Egypt at gunpoint or starving to death in situ, which appear to be the alternatives on offer from the Israeli government.
There will always be enough of a war for Israel not to leave the West Bank. The Israeli right-wing will always foment enough violence to guarantee that, whenever Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are not up to the task. We don't negotiate when the Palestinians are quiet, because that shows they are accepting the status quo, and we don't negotiate when they are violent, because that would reward their bad behavior.
You want to make support for Hamas collapse? Isn't it clear by now that bombing and shooting children is not accomplishing the goal? How about a clear declaration that Gaza will be rebuilt for the Gazans as soon as Hamas is demobilized, and this time MEAN IT and act accordingly, instead of joking, as Bibi did, about the upcoming re-occupation of the entire Strip.
Since we agree that Bibi's previous policy was terrible, why do you think his current policy is less bad?
Look man I don’t work for Likud. I’m not interested in rehashing the past anymore about what should or shouldn’t have been done differently.
All I’m interested in is eradicating Hamas permanently. If we agree on that goal there is a strategic discussion about how. If we don’t, there is nothing left to discuss.
The argument laid out in this article is foolish in the extreme because it misses out on the main point that Harris is trying to say; which is namely that the specifics don’t matter when the opponent is Fideistic in their approach. Palestinianism is the ultimate fideistic movement. That’s not to say that there is no truth or point to their claims. Rather it is to say that the major proponents of Palestinianism have no interest in evidence, except as it supports their worldview. That is why Peter Beinart can make his “factual” claims while at the same time calling for a one state solution that literally 90 percent or more of both Israelis and Palestinians oppose.
That's hilarious since many Zionists love to base their justifications in a piece of Bronze Age Hebrew propaganda mythology claiming it to be the utterances of a real divine being acting as their personal estate agent. Any reasonable person knows who the real fideists are here.
Beinart is not merely someone who shouldn’t be debated, he isn’t worth debating. He is a profoundly disturbed person who would cast his own people back to 1939, stateless and defenseless. This is not someone who deserves to be taken seriously. For reasons that are known only to himself, he has decided that trading the safety, security and sovereignty of his own people is somehow worth it if his far left pals approve. He should not be given any sort of platform from which to advocate such nonsense and, frankly, the rest of us should resolve to never tolerate him in any forum.