Harris is tribal and a race supremacist and I for one don’t give any credence to his proclamation of being an atheist/agnostic.
This is a dispute over occupation and land theft. The party with power in this conflict is Israel and the fact that the current government of Israel calls the Palestinian occupied lands Judea and Samaria tells us who in this conflict is hell bent on bringing religion into this conflict.
Harris is not tribal or a race supremacist. He is a modern Liberal. The fact the author liked this is disturbing. I don’t give any credence to the piece now.
Jamal Husseini informed the Security Council on April 16, 1948: "The representatives of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not deny this. We told the whole world that we were going to fight."
This comment is an embarrassment, and that the author liked it should be an embarrassment to him.
There are two reasons (at least) that the author didn’t make the claim that Harris’ support for Israel is tribal:
One is that it’s not necessary for his point. And another is that it’s clearly false given Harris’ past statements, including the statement quoted here.
You should give credence to Harris’ claim of being an atheist/agnostic, if only because he has literally written a book on the topic.
The name Judea and Samaria is not more or less credible than the West Bank (of the Jordan). In this region the borders were decided by war and treaties. Israel has controlled the region since 1967, not Jordan.
The occupation exists only because the US government allows it to be. The effect of the brutal occupation is an apartheid state (de facto) which has no exit strategy.
there is no doubt the US and Israel are strong allies. The occupation started off as land captured from Jordan in 67. Jordan had captured the land in the 48 war. Arguably neither side had definitive claim but the Israelis make a good point on the principle that emergent states follow previous administrative borders. Although I haven’t heard them make the claim openly they did forcefully restore the right of Jews to return to the West Bank following expulsion in 1948
You may then argue but why no right of return of West Bank residents to Israel borders?
That’s where the lack of a peace treaty factors in. Unlike Jordan and Egypt, the Palestinians never completed a peace-for-land treaty. Both sides are to blame but now it’s hard to revive that environment. Will take a few generations for the air to cool down
True that both sides are to be blamed. The difference is that one side has nuclear weapons and a blank check from the US government to do as it pleases, while the other, until social media came around, didn’t even get the chance to appeal to the arbiter, the US voters, of its case.
The move to ban TikTok, suppress college protests and deport people averse to the occupation and/or those that highlight the injustices of the occupation signals to me that the ultimate power and enforcer in this equation remains the American people.
When the American people decide that they will no longer be involved politically and militarily in the occupation, the solution will materialize.
We can litigate the semantics but the fact remains that the terrorist Baruch Goldstein (hailed by far too many Israelis as a hero) torpedoed Oslo and Yigal Amir put to rest all pretense about ‘granting’ independence to the Palestinians. My view remains of apartheid in effect remains.
As an Irish man, his arguments read almost verbatim like the ones Britain used to justify their policy toward us over the centuries. "Backward catholics, incapable of modernity, hate us because we're protestant, can't be reasoned with" yada yada yada. You would think the 21st century would require better propaganda than this.
While Harris is wrong on some details and some of your criticism is spot on, his grasp of the essence of the conflict is far closer to the truth than yours.
You are allowing your criticism of Israel’s retaliation to the atrocities of October 7th to cloud your view of the root cause of the conflict. It is possible that Israel’s response is overly harsh, but you should not let that lead you to wrong inferences about the motives of the two parties.
You appear to believe the fundamental issue causing all the violence in this conflict is that Palestinians want human rights, whereas Israel does not want to give them that, because Zionism is evil, or because Zionists are unreasonably paranoid. I can’t blame you for thinking this. It is easy to be led astray by the fact that in this century old tit for tat conflict the Palestinians, being the far weaker party, have suffered far more.
But then, how can you explain that in the Palestinians own narrative, all their struggles and sacrifices are centered around some imagined threat to the Al Aqsa mosque, when there are all these very real human rights and apartheid issues? More to the point, how do you explain the fact that any attempt by Israel to alleviate the occupation and search for a peaceful resolution to the conflict has been met with the Palestinians outdoing themselves and inventing new methods each time of inflicting horrific senseless violence directed exclusively at civilians: the suicide bombings as a response to Oslo, the second Intifada as the response to the attempt at a two state solution, the turning of all of Gaza (where more than fifty percent of the population are children!)into a a giant launchpad for attacks on Israel in response to the disengagement?
Nobody, not even the Palestinians, who actually follows and lives the conflict actually believes this. It is a propaganda narrative which is only sold by pro Palestinians to the West. The root cause of the conflict is that Palestinians believe not just that the existence of Israel in *any* borders is a historic injustice and an affront to Islam, but that it is their sacred duty to sacrifice everything for the cause of righting this wrong. Human rights are worth less than nothing to them without righting this wrong. You cannot understand anything about this conflict without acknowledging this basic truth.
I think this response is more revealing about your own sentiments than what you’re ascribing to other people. Palestinians (including secular Palestinians and atheists) care about Al Aqsa Mosque, why shouldn’t they? The entire symbolic basis of the Israeli state is built around sites and images of Jewish religion and history. I actually used to have significant sympathy for the Israeli narrative of their own historic struggle and hoped for some kind of mutual reconciliation and synthesis that went well beyond the Palestinians to include the rest of the region which has been trying to make peace with Israel since Camp David. At this point I’m thoroughly convinced of the expansionist (after 80 years can anyone actually define the borders of Israel? It’s recently grown into Syria) and genocidal nature of the state ideology so all these attempted apologetics and deflections are not really convincing anyone.
I understand they care about the al Aqsa mosque. But what exactly are they fighting us over in this regard? Why is it even considered a provocation if Jews whisper a prayer at their holiest site. Don’t you see it’s about denying the Jews their religious rights rather than promoting those of the Palestinians? Why do the Palestinians need to invent an imaginary danger to the mosque as the cause for the conflict when they have all the real issue of human rights and apartheid? The very start of the conflict, the Hebron massacre of 1929 started with the absurd claim that Jews bringing chairs to the Western Wall(the remaining relic of Judaisms holies site!) is such a grave danger to the mosque that it calls for the indiscriminate massacre of Jews everywhere (not even Zionists!). Gaza is claimed to have been a concentration camp, yet the one thing Sinwar was concerned about was what he saw as the erosion of the discriminatory status quo in the Temple Mount. He gave this as his official reason for October 7th! You are not really addressing this seriously.
I’m a little offended that you call what I wrote apologetics when I didn’t even write one word in defense of Israel. All I did was present a different view of what drives the Palestinian side of the conflict.
Two reasons: Bombing unarmed families in tents is not a conflict, it’s mass murder.
Secondly, when inexcusable, indefensible crimes are being committed, no history, no background, no “understanding” is needed. There are no “two sides” to this. Stop the killing, feed the babies, restore food and water. Then we can discuss background.
Gaza invaded Israel on October 7rh with an army carrying sophisticated weapons. They are not unarmed. They have fortifications, command and control centers, and weapons. It is sad that civilians are caught up in the middle. They should have been allowed to vacate to neighboring countries, as happens in literally every conflict in the world. Yet the heartlessness of the Arab world towards the poor people of Gaza is not a sufficient reason to let Hamas get with it and go on to plot and carry out further attacks.
I never said I was a moral person; I don’t know if I’m rational; I was stating a position concerning crime which I think is universal and which I believe in.
Please don’t take offense at this, but I also know that there’s no point in debating with Nazis, KKK, Zionists, or serial killers, so I don’t do it.
If all the wars throughout history were conducted as you propose- where the minute one army begins to prevail over their adversary, they become responsible for feeding and caring for their adversary's population, and also are forced to declare a ceasefire to avoid gaining any further dominance... then literally every one of those wars would still be going, and the entire world would be consumed with never ending civil wars. Pro Palestinian sentimentalists mostly had no real issue with Hamas when they started a war two years ago by invading and taking civilian hostages. But those very same people are horrified that Israel dares to finish a war the beginning of which, like it or not, the Gazan population almost universally celebrated. War is hell. That's why it's an especially terrible idea to start one that you can't hope to finish, with an adversary that you know perfectly well will absolutely drag your whole country across the finish line chained to the bumpers of their tanks. The idea that Israel is who made the lives of ordinary Gazans miserable is so ludicrous. Gaza is a beautiful location, with everything it needs to thrive. Instead of building a successful society, the Gazans have chosen to focus all their energy on fighting against Israel.
Whatever you wish to believe is not my concern. The world, however, is reacting to this genocide in the only moral way possible. The survival of the aggressors is in grave doubt. It’s tragic, but the time is short, and the only important question is whether Israel will be able to incinerate the rest of the world as it goes. (See: The Sampson option).
I have not closely followed him for years (the race & iq stuff was the final straw for me) but actually read his piece on Israel-Palestine the other day too and was stunned by how (openly and admittedly) out of touch with and disinterested in reality it was. Quite something given how much the new atheist crowd used to pride itself on rational argument and evidence.
After a brief phase of moderating his views in the mid-2010’s, being very anti-Trump and (unlike many of his buddies) not insane on COVID, this feels like he regressed to the bizarre GWOT Islamophobia of his early work.
It seems so, which makes your idea that he is fear-driven very plausible. He has this image of fanatical jihadists with no political grievances or historical context that cannot and should not be reasoned with, and everything flows from there.
How come you do not believe it is a genocide, and how would you describe it?
Israeli leaders have demonstrated intent by using genocidal language and advocated for ethnic cleansing (very openly from Trump announcing his Gaza plan onward, but before that too), withheld essential supplies without any military necessity unless heavily pressured to temporarily cease their blockade, have destroyed or damaged over 90 percent of residential buildings as well as almost all cultural infrastructure.
It’s hard to interpret it as anything but an attempt to destroy Gazans as a group. Very few reputable scholars of genocide seem to have doubts anymore this is one.
Very few propagandists, you mean. In any other age the population of Gaza would have been genocided or sold into slavery, but not in the modern age. Instead, they have become the world’s most celebrated charity case. Their government still refuses to release their hostages and Israel has accommodated them by relieving them of literally all responsibility of feeding or protecting their people. Israel is fighting war and it’s been awful for the population of Gaza. But anyone claiming that this is a genocide is full of shit. These people are not approaching the issue objectively, rather they just can’t stomach the notion of a Jewish state actually prevailing in the Middle East. They prefer one more crappy theocratic Arab state.
Would you call Isaac Saul a 'propagandist'? He examined this issue in detail in late May of this year. I'm pulling a quote from a long essay.
"Perhaps you are totally unconvinced by any of the arguments [for this being a genocide] above. I understand that — I was on the complete opposite side of this issue in January of 2024. But this is where I am after honestly reckoning with 20 months of what Israel has done. This is where I am after taking in the reality of what Netanyahu and Trump are proposing for Gaza. This is where I am after looking at the images and reading the stories.
At the very least, it’s impossible to refute that Benjamin Netanyahu, with the backing of the Israeli government, is now proposing an ethnic cleansing of Gaza."
I do suspect that many of the stories Saul has read are lying by omission and/or hyper-biased in their portrayal. I also think he's erring on the side of sticking it to Netanyahu, because Netanyahu sucks. I'm also sure that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, but I also think that that is exacerbated because they're fighting a war in a very densely populated place with no discernible front line against an enemy who happily operates underneath hospitals/mosques and has zero regard from the Geneva Convention. Israel could have starved Gaza into oblivion a couple of months into the war. Again, that is what would have happened in any other historical era.
It does seem that Israel is considering ethnically cleansing Gaza. I hope that that does not happen, but that is not the same thing as genocide. Ethnic cleansing has happened before in the aftermath of many conflicts:
-Germans post WWII
-Muslims and Hindus during the partition of India
-Palestinians from Kuwait after Saddam's invasion
-Jews from many Muslim nations post-1948
Isn't it weird how those last two get <1% of the attention/blame that is directed at Israel everyday? Anyway, I'm not trying to understate the horror of ethnic cleansing. That would be awful. But they haven't enacted any of that yet, and my hope is that Israel is using the threat of that to coerce some nascent gov't in Gaza to accept terms of peace that recognizes Israel. Trump says a lot of shit. He said we the US might invade Greenland. But he's not going to do that. Here's to hoping Hamas actually cries uncle and frees the hostages.
Harris loves his “self-constructed thought experiments”. There’s nothing wrong with this, thought experiments can be fascinating and enlightening, but Harris is often too busy with the world in his head to focus adequately on the real world the rest of us live in.
See also this thought experiment from Harris’s conversation with Noam Chomsky
“Consider the recent conflict in Iraq: If the situation had been reversed, what are the chances that the Iraqi Republican Guard, attempting to execute a regime change on the Potomac, would have taken the same degree of care to minimize civilian casualties? What are the chances that Iraqi forces would have been deterred by our use of human shields? (What are the chances we would have used human shields?) What are the chances that a routed American government would have called for its citizens to volunteer to be suicide bombers? What are the chances that Iraqi soldiers would have wept upon killing a carload of American civilians at a checkpoint unnecessarily? You should have, in the ledger of your imagination, a mounting column of zeros.”
In the hands of an adequately skilled writer, this hypothetical Iraqi invasion of the US could make for an interesting novel or TV series. But, being purely hypothetical, this imagined Iraqi invasion of the US had zero real-world casualties, so it makes more sense to focus on the real US invasion of Iraq that killed at least hundreds of thousands, likely a million, people. It would be one thing if after spending a paragraph on this thought experiment, Harris went on to reckon with the reality of US policy towards the Middle East (at least acknowledging the bereaved parents and orphaned children and millions of people driven from their homes), but he rarely does that.
Another thing I noticed in both the conversation between Harris and Chomsky and the Harris article on Gaza that you linked to is that Harris loves to just take the most noble-sounding statements of intent from Western and Israeli leaders (without noticing that Israeli leaders tend to express good intentions only when speaking to foreign audiences) and say that Western and Israeli leaders have the moral high ground because they mean well. Leaving aside the naïveté of Harris’s assessments of the intentions of everyone from Bill Clinton to Bibi Netanyahu, this suggests that Harris would be happy to go to hell since the road there is so often paved with good intentions.
Fantastic Eliana.. I dint think it’s the naïveté, it’s the sheer disregard to non-white lives… he’s not concerned with Arabs or Muslims dying to the extent that he’s willing to vilify them to the extreme extent of creating fictional scenarios where he vilifies them even more, just to justify his manufactured and vile “racism posing as thought experiment” worldview.. He has no legitimacy, given that he’s beloved by another illegitimate pseudo intellectual Bill Maher, and their echo chamber of new atheists…
Good point. Fundamentally the reason he’s more worried about made up scenarios than about real people being killed is because most of the people being killed are Arabs and Muslims and to him they don’t matter as much as other people do. A lot of the new atheists are personally doing their best to disprove their claims that atheism produces better morality and better politics than religion does.
I think SH and others (Bill Maher) are responsible for a more sophisticated version of 'radio mille collines' style dehumanization. Their rhetoric has enabled liberal America to continue to give their indispensable support for the international crimes perpetrated against Palestinians. They should be recognized and treated as such.
I like the balance of your approach to someone I am allergic to. I couldn’t be so open minded.
His bigotry is undeniable, but that could be the basis for interesting debate if he himself were more interesting.
For example, his lauded confrontation with Noam Chomsky was embarrassingly lopsided, yet he seemed to think it was the Foreman /Ali fight transposed to two intellectual heavyweights. No one seems to have told him that he’s not all that bright.
People like him get away with so much, I don’t know where to start. If i ever did thought experiments at my work, i would be fired. He is everything he says he is not. He is a tribal, non technical ‘intellectual’ and a bigot.
Where are these ‘open societies’ Harris refers to? Surely not the UK, where you can now be arrested for having the wrong opinion, such as being opposed to your government being complicit in genocide.
A trenchant critique. I remember the spat between you and Harris in the early days. I was a teenager, and I had just rejected any shred of religiosity for an atheism that still, in large part, resembles Harris's even today. There is much to dislike about Islam, about all religion really. Not much has changed for me on that front.
But one thing absolutely has changed. It has become almost impossible for me to regard Harris's obstinance on this subject as anything but very thinly veiled racism. I mostly stopped listening to him in 2020 when his response to the George Floyd riots was, for the 1,000th time, to rail against woke excess. His analysis was shallow, trite, and staggeringly incurious.
I almost want to apologize to you for the opinions I am sure I held at the time of your spat with Harris. You have been vindicated. His disinterest in the history of the conflict, the explicit motivations of Netanyahu and the Israeli far-right, his unforgivably credulous belief in the claim that the war would be over if Hamas released the hostages, his inability to examine anything in which religion can be said to play a role without using thought experiments that tendentiously essentialize the conflict to the enlightened West vs the barbarian horses... again, it is staggering.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment, and I agree his sheer incuriosity is disappointing. There has to be an element of hubris there. Ironically there was a very good Turkish Muslim/atheist writer named Taner Edis who had been complaining about this for many years maybe even before me.
I met Sam what seems a million years ago before he became the Dark Web-ish persona he currently occupies. I claim no personal relationship with him, it was just a conference meet and greet with brief conversation.
He’s genuinely a smart and insightful guy. Very personable, bordering on charming.
Reading his stuff regarding Islam and geopolitical analysis over the past few decades leaves me with the flavor of vacuous opportunism. It’s as if he and his minions spot a cultural opening and rush to wedge themselves into it in an attempt to remain relevant and profitable. I have no confidence that the arguments follow genuine convictions and analyses, but more that they are crafted to shove any bit of half fact into a propaganda point that US media will lap up.
The first time I saw him railing about how Islam was supposedly such a violent and subversive outlier among belief systems was on some cable news outlet while I was in an airport. I just glanced up and thought… “is that the same guy I met at a conference ? How TF is he now an expert on culture and belief systems ? “
Similar to the rest of the professional provocateurs out there, relevance, power, influence, and primarily profit… seem the primary drivers in when and where they suddenly appear.
How many media and political figures do you witness which, while you’re being exposed to their spiel, you’re thinking “this is a genuinely held belief that this individual has developed based on rational analysis and ethical debate”…
… or more “how much is this bullshitter going to profit off this performative garbage?”
Well, I for one am glad I met you all those years ago at a church at Durham, NC. Harris is propped up by state. He is far from a public intellectual and really needs to address his anti-Muslim racism along with his "friends" in the industry. I for one will not be listening to his podcast because it was too overwhelming seeing him on Bill Maher's show.
Great commentary. It is sad that America is getting brainwashed by figures like this, who in spite of having little experience in the region, feel empowered to brainwash their considerable platforms with much ignorance
I am truly disappointed with Sam Harris’s views on “just war” and his support to war and violence in the Middle East. I got to know of him through his meditation App. I used to read and listen to him on the App. But on this platform I see a different Sam - one who is intolerant, anti Muslim, justifying violence and war. I have stopped reading him and will also quit his App. I feel every human life is valuable and precious and cannot accept that any war is “just”.
Harris is tribal and a race supremacist and I for one don’t give any credence to his proclamation of being an atheist/agnostic.
This is a dispute over occupation and land theft. The party with power in this conflict is Israel and the fact that the current government of Israel calls the Palestinian occupied lands Judea and Samaria tells us who in this conflict is hell bent on bringing religion into this conflict.
Harris is not tribal or a race supremacist. He is a modern Liberal. The fact the author liked this is disturbing. I don’t give any credence to the piece now.
It was liked as an acknowledgement not endorsement, as one does on Twitter. I will unlike to remove confusion.
It's not a dispute about occupation. Ever heard of the 1929 Hebron Massacre?
Also:
https://www.alamy.com/ancient-palestine-samaria-galilee-pera-judaea-ancient-jerusalem-letts-1884-map-image349795850.html
Ever heard of the 77 years Nakbah and the Gaza holocaust?
The Nakba was the result of Palestinian aggression, warmongering and massacres. There is no "holocaust" in Gaza, tryin to steal that too?
Everywhere I look online, at least, defines the Nakba as the polar opposite of what you claim. Please provide sources to back up your claims.
Shame on you liar.
The naqba is a failed conquest of Israel. They wanted all Jews dead and they failed utterly. That's why they call it the naqba.
I see your single anecdotal evidence, and raise you, Illan Pappe 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.'
Jamal Husseini informed the Security Council on April 16, 1948: "The representatives of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not deny this. We told the whole world that we were going to fight."
Is he a liar too?
Just fuck off.
This comment is an embarrassment, and that the author liked it should be an embarrassment to him.
There are two reasons (at least) that the author didn’t make the claim that Harris’ support for Israel is tribal:
One is that it’s not necessary for his point. And another is that it’s clearly false given Harris’ past statements, including the statement quoted here.
You should give credence to Harris’ claim of being an atheist/agnostic, if only because he has literally written a book on the topic.
I didn’t like it as an endorsement it’s just an acknowledgment that I saw it even I didn’t write a reply.
It’s called a LIKE for a reason.
the lady doth protest too much, methinks.
The name Judea and Samaria is not more or less credible than the West Bank (of the Jordan). In this region the borders were decided by war and treaties. Israel has controlled the region since 1967, not Jordan.
In effect apartheid
The occupation exists only because the US government allows it to be. The effect of the brutal occupation is an apartheid state (de facto) which has no exit strategy.
there is no doubt the US and Israel are strong allies. The occupation started off as land captured from Jordan in 67. Jordan had captured the land in the 48 war. Arguably neither side had definitive claim but the Israelis make a good point on the principle that emergent states follow previous administrative borders. Although I haven’t heard them make the claim openly they did forcefully restore the right of Jews to return to the West Bank following expulsion in 1948
You may then argue but why no right of return of West Bank residents to Israel borders?
That’s where the lack of a peace treaty factors in. Unlike Jordan and Egypt, the Palestinians never completed a peace-for-land treaty. Both sides are to blame but now it’s hard to revive that environment. Will take a few generations for the air to cool down
True that both sides are to be blamed. The difference is that one side has nuclear weapons and a blank check from the US government to do as it pleases, while the other, until social media came around, didn’t even get the chance to appeal to the arbiter, the US voters, of its case.
The move to ban TikTok, suppress college protests and deport people averse to the occupation and/or those that highlight the injustices of the occupation signals to me that the ultimate power and enforcer in this equation remains the American people.
When the American people decide that they will no longer be involved politically and militarily in the occupation, the solution will materialize.
the two sides agreed to award autonomy to the PA. Debating occupation is valid but rebranding Oslo as apartheid is not
We can litigate the semantics but the fact remains that the terrorist Baruch Goldstein (hailed by far too many Israelis as a hero) torpedoed Oslo and Yigal Amir put to rest all pretense about ‘granting’ independence to the Palestinians. My view remains of apartheid in effect remains.
Oslo II took place in 1995 was after the Goldstein incident of 1994. The Second Intifada terminated the peace process for good
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/20/magazine/israel-gaza-oslo-accords.html
Yeah because no atheist has ever been a tribalist.
/s
As an Irish man, his arguments read almost verbatim like the ones Britain used to justify their policy toward us over the centuries. "Backward catholics, incapable of modernity, hate us because we're protestant, can't be reasoned with" yada yada yada. You would think the 21st century would require better propaganda than this.
Need to read more on some of the specific things said about the Irish during this time
And you showed them by offering condolences on the death of Hitler, didn’t you? And making an actual nazi propagandist your national poet.
Are you a real pastor?
While Harris is wrong on some details and some of your criticism is spot on, his grasp of the essence of the conflict is far closer to the truth than yours.
You are allowing your criticism of Israel’s retaliation to the atrocities of October 7th to cloud your view of the root cause of the conflict. It is possible that Israel’s response is overly harsh, but you should not let that lead you to wrong inferences about the motives of the two parties.
You appear to believe the fundamental issue causing all the violence in this conflict is that Palestinians want human rights, whereas Israel does not want to give them that, because Zionism is evil, or because Zionists are unreasonably paranoid. I can’t blame you for thinking this. It is easy to be led astray by the fact that in this century old tit for tat conflict the Palestinians, being the far weaker party, have suffered far more.
But then, how can you explain that in the Palestinians own narrative, all their struggles and sacrifices are centered around some imagined threat to the Al Aqsa mosque, when there are all these very real human rights and apartheid issues? More to the point, how do you explain the fact that any attempt by Israel to alleviate the occupation and search for a peaceful resolution to the conflict has been met with the Palestinians outdoing themselves and inventing new methods each time of inflicting horrific senseless violence directed exclusively at civilians: the suicide bombings as a response to Oslo, the second Intifada as the response to the attempt at a two state solution, the turning of all of Gaza (where more than fifty percent of the population are children!)into a a giant launchpad for attacks on Israel in response to the disengagement?
Nobody, not even the Palestinians, who actually follows and lives the conflict actually believes this. It is a propaganda narrative which is only sold by pro Palestinians to the West. The root cause of the conflict is that Palestinians believe not just that the existence of Israel in *any* borders is a historic injustice and an affront to Islam, but that it is their sacred duty to sacrifice everything for the cause of righting this wrong. Human rights are worth less than nothing to them without righting this wrong. You cannot understand anything about this conflict without acknowledging this basic truth.
I think this response is more revealing about your own sentiments than what you’re ascribing to other people. Palestinians (including secular Palestinians and atheists) care about Al Aqsa Mosque, why shouldn’t they? The entire symbolic basis of the Israeli state is built around sites and images of Jewish religion and history. I actually used to have significant sympathy for the Israeli narrative of their own historic struggle and hoped for some kind of mutual reconciliation and synthesis that went well beyond the Palestinians to include the rest of the region which has been trying to make peace with Israel since Camp David. At this point I’m thoroughly convinced of the expansionist (after 80 years can anyone actually define the borders of Israel? It’s recently grown into Syria) and genocidal nature of the state ideology so all these attempted apologetics and deflections are not really convincing anyone.
I understand they care about the al Aqsa mosque. But what exactly are they fighting us over in this regard? Why is it even considered a provocation if Jews whisper a prayer at their holiest site. Don’t you see it’s about denying the Jews their religious rights rather than promoting those of the Palestinians? Why do the Palestinians need to invent an imaginary danger to the mosque as the cause for the conflict when they have all the real issue of human rights and apartheid? The very start of the conflict, the Hebron massacre of 1929 started with the absurd claim that Jews bringing chairs to the Western Wall(the remaining relic of Judaisms holies site!) is such a grave danger to the mosque that it calls for the indiscriminate massacre of Jews everywhere (not even Zionists!). Gaza is claimed to have been a concentration camp, yet the one thing Sinwar was concerned about was what he saw as the erosion of the discriminatory status quo in the Temple Mount. He gave this as his official reason for October 7th! You are not really addressing this seriously.
I’m a little offended that you call what I wrote apologetics when I didn’t even write one word in defense of Israel. All I did was present a different view of what drives the Palestinian side of the conflict.
There’s no reason to “understand this conflict”.
Two reasons: Bombing unarmed families in tents is not a conflict, it’s mass murder.
Secondly, when inexcusable, indefensible crimes are being committed, no history, no background, no “understanding” is needed. There are no “two sides” to this. Stop the killing, feed the babies, restore food and water. Then we can discuss background.
Gaza invaded Israel on October 7rh with an army carrying sophisticated weapons. They are not unarmed. They have fortifications, command and control centers, and weapons. It is sad that civilians are caught up in the middle. They should have been allowed to vacate to neighboring countries, as happens in literally every conflict in the world. Yet the heartlessness of the Arab world towards the poor people of Gaza is not a sufficient reason to let Hamas get with it and go on to plot and carry out further attacks.
Re: There is no reason to “understand this conflict”
As a matter of fact there is. That is what rational people do when they have a debate. Preaching your emotions doesn’t make you a moral person.
I never said I was a moral person; I don’t know if I’m rational; I was stating a position concerning crime which I think is universal and which I believe in.
Please don’t take offense at this, but I also know that there’s no point in debating with Nazis, KKK, Zionists, or serial killers, so I don’t do it.
Thanks for letting me know your opinions.
If all the wars throughout history were conducted as you propose- where the minute one army begins to prevail over their adversary, they become responsible for feeding and caring for their adversary's population, and also are forced to declare a ceasefire to avoid gaining any further dominance... then literally every one of those wars would still be going, and the entire world would be consumed with never ending civil wars. Pro Palestinian sentimentalists mostly had no real issue with Hamas when they started a war two years ago by invading and taking civilian hostages. But those very same people are horrified that Israel dares to finish a war the beginning of which, like it or not, the Gazan population almost universally celebrated. War is hell. That's why it's an especially terrible idea to start one that you can't hope to finish, with an adversary that you know perfectly well will absolutely drag your whole country across the finish line chained to the bumpers of their tanks. The idea that Israel is who made the lives of ordinary Gazans miserable is so ludicrous. Gaza is a beautiful location, with everything it needs to thrive. Instead of building a successful society, the Gazans have chosen to focus all their energy on fighting against Israel.
Whatever you wish to believe is not my concern. The world, however, is reacting to this genocide in the only moral way possible. The survival of the aggressors is in grave doubt. It’s tragic, but the time is short, and the only important question is whether Israel will be able to incinerate the rest of the world as it goes. (See: The Sampson option).
I have not closely followed him for years (the race & iq stuff was the final straw for me) but actually read his piece on Israel-Palestine the other day too and was stunned by how (openly and admittedly) out of touch with and disinterested in reality it was. Quite something given how much the new atheist crowd used to pride itself on rational argument and evidence.
After a brief phase of moderating his views in the mid-2010’s, being very anti-Trump and (unlike many of his buddies) not insane on COVID, this feels like he regressed to the bizarre GWOT Islamophobia of his early work.
I noticed that regression too, after having appreciated his levelheadedness about COVID. I think this subject is just too much for him to handle.
It seems so, which makes your idea that he is fear-driven very plausible. He has this image of fanatical jihadists with no political grievances or historical context that cannot and should not be reasoned with, and everything flows from there.
The fact that Israel is not committing genocide is too much for some people to handle, you mean.
How come you do not believe it is a genocide, and how would you describe it?
Israeli leaders have demonstrated intent by using genocidal language and advocated for ethnic cleansing (very openly from Trump announcing his Gaza plan onward, but before that too), withheld essential supplies without any military necessity unless heavily pressured to temporarily cease their blockade, have destroyed or damaged over 90 percent of residential buildings as well as almost all cultural infrastructure.
It’s hard to interpret it as anything but an attempt to destroy Gazans as a group. Very few reputable scholars of genocide seem to have doubts anymore this is one.
Very few propagandists, you mean. In any other age the population of Gaza would have been genocided or sold into slavery, but not in the modern age. Instead, they have become the world’s most celebrated charity case. Their government still refuses to release their hostages and Israel has accommodated them by relieving them of literally all responsibility of feeding or protecting their people. Israel is fighting war and it’s been awful for the population of Gaza. But anyone claiming that this is a genocide is full of shit. These people are not approaching the issue objectively, rather they just can’t stomach the notion of a Jewish state actually prevailing in the Middle East. They prefer one more crappy theocratic Arab state.
Would you call Isaac Saul a 'propagandist'? He examined this issue in detail in late May of this year. I'm pulling a quote from a long essay.
"Perhaps you are totally unconvinced by any of the arguments [for this being a genocide] above. I understand that — I was on the complete opposite side of this issue in January of 2024. But this is where I am after honestly reckoning with 20 months of what Israel has done. This is where I am after taking in the reality of what Netanyahu and Trump are proposing for Gaza. This is where I am after looking at the images and reading the stories.
At the very least, it’s impossible to refute that Benjamin Netanyahu, with the backing of the Israeli government, is now proposing an ethnic cleansing of Gaza."
https://www.readtangle.com/leaving-zionism-israel-gaza-hamas-isaac-saul/
I do suspect that many of the stories Saul has read are lying by omission and/or hyper-biased in their portrayal. I also think he's erring on the side of sticking it to Netanyahu, because Netanyahu sucks. I'm also sure that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, but I also think that that is exacerbated because they're fighting a war in a very densely populated place with no discernible front line against an enemy who happily operates underneath hospitals/mosques and has zero regard from the Geneva Convention. Israel could have starved Gaza into oblivion a couple of months into the war. Again, that is what would have happened in any other historical era.
It does seem that Israel is considering ethnically cleansing Gaza. I hope that that does not happen, but that is not the same thing as genocide. Ethnic cleansing has happened before in the aftermath of many conflicts:
-Germans post WWII
-Muslims and Hindus during the partition of India
-Palestinians from Kuwait after Saddam's invasion
-Jews from many Muslim nations post-1948
Isn't it weird how those last two get <1% of the attention/blame that is directed at Israel everyday? Anyway, I'm not trying to understate the horror of ethnic cleansing. That would be awful. But they haven't enacted any of that yet, and my hope is that Israel is using the threat of that to coerce some nascent gov't in Gaza to accept terms of peace that recognizes Israel. Trump says a lot of shit. He said we the US might invade Greenland. But he's not going to do that. Here's to hoping Hamas actually cries uncle and frees the hostages.
Great analysis.
Harris loves his “self-constructed thought experiments”. There’s nothing wrong with this, thought experiments can be fascinating and enlightening, but Harris is often too busy with the world in his head to focus adequately on the real world the rest of us live in.
See also this thought experiment from Harris’s conversation with Noam Chomsky
https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-limits-of-discourse
“Consider the recent conflict in Iraq: If the situation had been reversed, what are the chances that the Iraqi Republican Guard, attempting to execute a regime change on the Potomac, would have taken the same degree of care to minimize civilian casualties? What are the chances that Iraqi forces would have been deterred by our use of human shields? (What are the chances we would have used human shields?) What are the chances that a routed American government would have called for its citizens to volunteer to be suicide bombers? What are the chances that Iraqi soldiers would have wept upon killing a carload of American civilians at a checkpoint unnecessarily? You should have, in the ledger of your imagination, a mounting column of zeros.”
In the hands of an adequately skilled writer, this hypothetical Iraqi invasion of the US could make for an interesting novel or TV series. But, being purely hypothetical, this imagined Iraqi invasion of the US had zero real-world casualties, so it makes more sense to focus on the real US invasion of Iraq that killed at least hundreds of thousands, likely a million, people. It would be one thing if after spending a paragraph on this thought experiment, Harris went on to reckon with the reality of US policy towards the Middle East (at least acknowledging the bereaved parents and orphaned children and millions of people driven from their homes), but he rarely does that.
Another thing I noticed in both the conversation between Harris and Chomsky and the Harris article on Gaza that you linked to is that Harris loves to just take the most noble-sounding statements of intent from Western and Israeli leaders (without noticing that Israeli leaders tend to express good intentions only when speaking to foreign audiences) and say that Western and Israeli leaders have the moral high ground because they mean well. Leaving aside the naïveté of Harris’s assessments of the intentions of everyone from Bill Clinton to Bibi Netanyahu, this suggests that Harris would be happy to go to hell since the road there is so often paved with good intentions.
Fantastic Eliana.. I dint think it’s the naïveté, it’s the sheer disregard to non-white lives… he’s not concerned with Arabs or Muslims dying to the extent that he’s willing to vilify them to the extreme extent of creating fictional scenarios where he vilifies them even more, just to justify his manufactured and vile “racism posing as thought experiment” worldview.. He has no legitimacy, given that he’s beloved by another illegitimate pseudo intellectual Bill Maher, and their echo chamber of new atheists…
Good point. Fundamentally the reason he’s more worried about made up scenarios than about real people being killed is because most of the people being killed are Arabs and Muslims and to him they don’t matter as much as other people do. A lot of the new atheists are personally doing their best to disprove their claims that atheism produces better morality and better politics than religion does.
I think SH and others (Bill Maher) are responsible for a more sophisticated version of 'radio mille collines' style dehumanization. Their rhetoric has enabled liberal America to continue to give their indispensable support for the international crimes perpetrated against Palestinians. They should be recognized and treated as such.
I like the balance of your approach to someone I am allergic to. I couldn’t be so open minded.
His bigotry is undeniable, but that could be the basis for interesting debate if he himself were more interesting.
For example, his lauded confrontation with Noam Chomsky was embarrassingly lopsided, yet he seemed to think it was the Foreman /Ali fight transposed to two intellectual heavyweights. No one seems to have told him that he’s not all that bright.
Not all that bright is too kind
Thank You for sharing this thorough analysis.
People like him get away with so much, I don’t know where to start. If i ever did thought experiments at my work, i would be fired. He is everything he says he is not. He is a tribal, non technical ‘intellectual’ and a bigot.
Where are these ‘open societies’ Harris refers to? Surely not the UK, where you can now be arrested for having the wrong opinion, such as being opposed to your government being complicit in genocide.
Spot on analysis
He doesn't deserve your attention, but your attention to his racist arrogance is important.
A trenchant critique. I remember the spat between you and Harris in the early days. I was a teenager, and I had just rejected any shred of religiosity for an atheism that still, in large part, resembles Harris's even today. There is much to dislike about Islam, about all religion really. Not much has changed for me on that front.
But one thing absolutely has changed. It has become almost impossible for me to regard Harris's obstinance on this subject as anything but very thinly veiled racism. I mostly stopped listening to him in 2020 when his response to the George Floyd riots was, for the 1,000th time, to rail against woke excess. His analysis was shallow, trite, and staggeringly incurious.
I almost want to apologize to you for the opinions I am sure I held at the time of your spat with Harris. You have been vindicated. His disinterest in the history of the conflict, the explicit motivations of Netanyahu and the Israeli far-right, his unforgivably credulous belief in the claim that the war would be over if Hamas released the hostages, his inability to examine anything in which religion can be said to play a role without using thought experiments that tendentiously essentialize the conflict to the enlightened West vs the barbarian horses... again, it is staggering.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment, and I agree his sheer incuriosity is disappointing. There has to be an element of hubris there. Ironically there was a very good Turkish Muslim/atheist writer named Taner Edis who had been complaining about this for many years maybe even before me.
I met Sam what seems a million years ago before he became the Dark Web-ish persona he currently occupies. I claim no personal relationship with him, it was just a conference meet and greet with brief conversation.
He’s genuinely a smart and insightful guy. Very personable, bordering on charming.
Reading his stuff regarding Islam and geopolitical analysis over the past few decades leaves me with the flavor of vacuous opportunism. It’s as if he and his minions spot a cultural opening and rush to wedge themselves into it in an attempt to remain relevant and profitable. I have no confidence that the arguments follow genuine convictions and analyses, but more that they are crafted to shove any bit of half fact into a propaganda point that US media will lap up.
The first time I saw him railing about how Islam was supposedly such a violent and subversive outlier among belief systems was on some cable news outlet while I was in an airport. I just glanced up and thought… “is that the same guy I met at a conference ? How TF is he now an expert on culture and belief systems ? “
Similar to the rest of the professional provocateurs out there, relevance, power, influence, and primarily profit… seem the primary drivers in when and where they suddenly appear.
How many media and political figures do you witness which, while you’re being exposed to their spiel, you’re thinking “this is a genuinely held belief that this individual has developed based on rational analysis and ethical debate”…
… or more “how much is this bullshitter going to profit off this performative garbage?”
I’ll leave it there.
Great article. Thanks for your effort.
Best to all.
Well, I for one am glad I met you all those years ago at a church at Durham, NC. Harris is propped up by state. He is far from a public intellectual and really needs to address his anti-Muslim racism along with his "friends" in the industry. I for one will not be listening to his podcast because it was too overwhelming seeing him on Bill Maher's show.
Great commentary. It is sad that America is getting brainwashed by figures like this, who in spite of having little experience in the region, feel empowered to brainwash their considerable platforms with much ignorance
I am truly disappointed with Sam Harris’s views on “just war” and his support to war and violence in the Middle East. I got to know of him through his meditation App. I used to read and listen to him on the App. But on this platform I see a different Sam - one who is intolerant, anti Muslim, justifying violence and war. I have stopped reading him and will also quit his App. I feel every human life is valuable and precious and cannot accept that any war is “just”.