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.
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.
The
truth is, I have never known how Israel should have responded to the
events of October 7th. I only know that they, along with every other
free society, must ultimately defeat militant Islam. How
we should do this is genuinely debatable. But that’s not the point of
contention among Israel’s critics, especially on the left. To them,
worrying about militant Islam—even in Israel, even in the aftermath of
the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust—is just more
“Islamophobia.” It’s just more “colonialism” and “racism” (as though
that last charge made any sense in the Middle East).
If you want to understand my view of this conflict, simply ask the one question that clarifies everything in the present:
What would each side do if it had the power to do whatever it wanted?
Though many pretend otherwise, everyone knows the answer to this question to a moral certainty.
If Hamas had the power, it would perpetrate a real
genocide in Israel. The group has affirmed its commitment to this
project on countless occasions, both before and after October 7th. And
while it is true that Jew-hatred throughout the Muslim world has been
made immensely worse by a century-long fascination with Nazi propaganda
and conspiracy theories, this animus isn’t merely a modern phenomenon.
For instance, there is a famous hadith which
predicts that the End Times will not come until the very stones and
trees cry out “Oh Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come kill him.”
Unsurprisingly, Hamas cited this hadith in its founding charter.
Most
Palestinians know this, and yet Hamas remains popular. For over a
decade, Hamas diverted foreign aid that was meant to improve life in
Gaza and used it to build the largest bomb shelter our species has ever
constructed—hundreds of miles of tunnels—and yet no Palestinian
civilians were allowed to shelter there during the war. Why not? Because
Hamas was using these men, women, and children as human shields. And
when Israel made phone calls and sent millions of text messages urging
civilians to evacuate, the loudspeakers in the nearest mosques warned
them to stay in place. And Hamas snipers murdered many who tried to move
to safety. The Palestinians know all this, and yet Hamas remains
popular. Even after all the devastation that Hamas has brought down on
its own people, it remains the most popular Palestinian faction, well
ahead of its rival, Fatah. This is why there is no peace in the Middle
East.
The suffering in Gaza is terrible, and I’ve never pretended otherwise. But the suffering elsewhere—suffering you aren’t
thinking about—is just as real. You should ask yourself why you don’t
care more about it. This difference, emotionally and politically, is
what it looks like to lose an information war.
We
haven’t seen all the dead children in Yemen, Syria, or Sudan, where the
numbers are far worse than in Gaza, but everyone has witnessed the
pornography of misery and death that has been steadily manufactured by
supporters of Hamas. You might think that your special concern over
Israel is due to the fact that we (Americans) supply many of the weapons
the IDF uses to kill Palestinians. But we supplied arms to Saudi Arabia
and the UAE for a war in Yemen that has killed an estimated 377,000
people. Where were those protests? Where was the celebrity sanctimony
over Yemeni dead? Why didn’t Zohran Mamdani trumpet his opposition to
this evil while campaigning to become Mayor of New York? Yemen was the
world’s worst humanitarian crisis for years, with American weaponry and
logistical support fully implicated, and yet it never became the
organizing moral obsession of universities, media institutions, activist
networks, or leftwing politics the way Gaza has.
To
point this out isn’t to commit the rhetorical sin of “whataboutism.”
Rather, it exposes a glaring moral disparity: The world simply does not
care when Muslims kill other Muslims—amazingly, it doesn’t much care
when they kill Christians either—but it does care, enormously, when Jews
do it. The General Assembly of the UN and its Human Rights Council have
passed more resolutions against Israel than against all other nations
combined, including North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, Syria, Sudan, and
Yemen. A few of these countries have committed actual genocides. None of this makes sense. But this is the world we are living in.
Of
the world’s 193 nations, two-thirds were created by map makers who
merely imagined their frontiers into being, without much regard for the
tribal interests of the people living within them. In fact, more than
half were created since 1948, the year that Israel was founded. And yet
there is only one whose legitimacy is still debated everywhere. There is
only one nation on Earth that must continually argue for its right to
exist, even when the very survival of its people is threatened by
avowedly genocidal enemies.
This
obsession with Israel, and the double standards to which its people are
held, now forms the center of mass of that shapeshifting moral
affliction widely known as “antisemitism.”
I’ve
lived most of my life believing that dangerous antisemitism was behind
us, at least in the West. Unfortunately, the response to October 7th has
put that assumption very much in doubt. The atrocities committed by
Hamas revealed a level of Jew hatred, globally, that shocked even those
of us who have been students of antisemitism for much of our lives.
Crucially, this hatred showed itself before Israel
invaded Gaza. When the corpses of the young people mutilated and
murdered at the Nova Music Festival were still being identified, we had
students at Harvard and professors at Columbia—and demonstrators in New
York, London, Sydney, and Toronto—celebrating their killers.
Why
does antisemitism matter? Well, for the Jews, it’s obvious why it
matters, but why should it matter to everyone else? It matters because
when you look at what antisemites also hate, you find they hate
everything that makes culturally rich, diverse, open societies possible.
Real antisemites bring with them more than just their hatred of Jews:
they bring censorship, political repression, conspiracy thinking, and
the politics of dehumanization and scapegoating. So decrying
antisemitism is not an act of special pleading. It is a defense of the
moral and institutional architecture that makes free societies possible.
Let
me close with another general point to members of the Making Sense
Community: Many of you have written to tell me that you’ve lost respect
for me over this issue (or that you still value my work and are giving
me “a pass” on Israel). I reject this framing, and you should too. No
one should be a part of Community just because they agree with me. I’m
not running a political party, and there is no line for me, or for
anyone else, to toe. If I’ve fallen off a pedestal because I said
something you don’t agree with, the pedestal was the problem, not the
disagreement. Of course, if you think I am lying
to you, or that I otherwise lack integrity, you should leave and never
look back. But if you just think I happen to be wrong, even about
something important—especially about something
important—I encourage you to keep showing up with better evidence and
arguments. This, after all, is what a real intellectual and moral
community is for.
