This week’s Zoom call will be at our regular time: Friday at 1 PM. Our guest will be Munther Isaac, a Palestinian minister and theologian based in the West Bank. He gained international attention for his Christmas 2023 sermon, Christ in the Rubble. We’ll talk about Palestinian life in the West Bank, Munther’s critique of Christian Zionism, his views of Hamas and his interview with Tucker Carlson. Please join us.
I also recorded a conversation with former US ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro, where we debated the reasons the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” didn’t produce a Palestinian state, and whether a Jewish democracy is a contradiction in terms. We’ll send that conversation to subscribers this week as well.
Cited in Today’s Video
Sam Harris on why he won’t debate critics of Israel.
B’Tselem on Military Order 101.
Salam Fayyad’s exit interview with the New York Times.
Neve Gordon on “human shields.”
Yoav Gallant’s statement on October 9, 2023.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Josh Nathan-Kazis writes about how the Israel Day Parade backfired.
In the New York Times, I argued that America will keep launching disastrous wars until the people who champion them are held to account.
Nikole Hannah-Jones on the end of the civil rights era.
Israel’s new strategy for changing global opinion.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, there’s a guy named Sam Harris, been a pretty prominent political commentator in the U.S. for quite a few years. He really kind of specializes a lot in what he claims is the kind of thread of jihadism or Islamism to the West. And he’s also a supporter, a defender of the state of Israel.
And he wrote a post a couple days ago that’s been getting a lot of attention—I’ve seen it sent around a lot—about why he won’t debate critics of Israel. His argument is that he won’t debate critics of Israel because the things that he believes are so self-evidently true that it would be a waste of time to subject them to interchange with someone who holds a different point of view. And, because Sam Harris is a pretty kind of highbrow defender of Israel, I just think it’s worth looking at the statements that he considers to be self-evident statements of fact. And you can ask yourself whether, in fact, you think they are the case or not.
The first thing he claims is that you should understand the conflict in Israel-Palestine as a struggle between a free society, Israel, and jihadism. So, let’s take the first part of that equation: the idea that Israel is a free society. Sam Harris offers no evidence for this. He doesn’t quote any human rights organizations, he doesn’t quote any laws, anything, he just asserts it, ex cathedra: Israel is a free society.
Okay, well, imagine you’re reading that, you’re sitting there in the West Bank. The West Bank has been under Israeli control since 1967. You’re a Palestinian. You’ve lived your entire life without citizenship in the state in which you live. A government that has life and death control over you does not give you the right to vote. You live under military law, with a 99% prosecution rate, even though your Jewish neighbors enjoy full due process as Israeli citizens. You need military permission to travel, even though they can travel freely, and you’re also subject to something called Military Order 101, which says that you need military permission if you want to congregate with 10 or more people for a political purpose, even in a private home. Even in a private home, you can’t congregate for a political purpose with 10 or more people without military permission. This is what Sam Harris says, without any evidence, he describes as a free society. I suspect for that West Bank Palestinian, it doesn’t feel all that free.
The second part is the idea that you can understand Palestinians and Palestinian politics in the Israel-Palestinian conflict through the prism of jihadism. This is what Sam Harris writes. ‘The problem in the Middle East’—actually not just Israel-Palestine, the entire Middle East—’is not, and never has been the existence of the state of Israel. The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism, militant Islam, or whatever words you want to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.’
So, for Sam Harris, Muslims and Palestinians are synonymous, and the problem is that too many of those Muslims are jihadis. There’s no evidence that Sam Harris has ever heard of a guy named George Habash, for instance. George Habash, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of the most radical Palestinian organizations in the 1970s. It was responsible for some of the most spectacular and terrible acts of violence, of armed resistance, including against civilians.
Why am I mentioning George Habash? Because he was a Greek Orthodox Christian who grew up singing in a choir, right? The head also of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, another Palestinian group that was more radical than Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, that denounced Arafat for accepting Israel’s existence in 1988, also a Christian. Edward Said, perhaps the most prominent English-language Palestinian intellectual in the world, a Christian. Azmi Bishara, perhaps the most important Palestinian politician in Israel proper at a certain period of time, a Christian. Hanan Ashrawi, famous as one of the key figures in the First Intifada and the early Oslo years, also a Christian.
Sam Harris shows no evidence of any understanding whatsoever that there are Palestinian Christians, that many of the people who have been the harshest critics and activists against Zionism in Israel, even violently, have been Christian. And, not to mention the fact that even many Palestinian Muslims, for instance, in a party like Fatah, are not actually Islamists. So, all of this is considered not mentioned at all by Sam Harris, and it’s just self-evident for him that you can understand Palestinians and Palestinian politics through the prism of jihadism. And this is a guy who’s considered to be kind of like an intellectual defender of the state of Israel.
Then he says, you may have heard this one before, he says, if the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace. Now, it’s first worth noting, right, that peace can mean a lot of different things, right? I mean, peace just means the absence of conflict. You might say that the Native Americans got peace from the United States government in the 19th and then through the 20th century, because actually, there’s really no open-armed warfare between Native Americans and the United States anymore, because the Native population was largely destroyed in the United States. So, this category of peace says nothing about things like freedom and justice that we might think are also important values.
But even on the question of peace, this idea that Sam Harris has, that Palestinians have never put down their weapons, and if they did, everything would be fine. He evidently is not aware that for the last 20 years since the end of the Second Intifada, the Palestinian Authority has put away its weapons. Not only has it not done any significant amount of armed resistance itself, it’s actually worked with the Israeli Defense Force to prevent other Palestinians from committing armed resistance.
This, by the way, is something that the African National Congress in South Africa, or the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland never did—never would have thought of doing—because it would have been considered so wildly collaborationist. This has actually been the strategy of the Palestinian Authority for the last 20 years. And for several of those years, the Palestinian Prime Minister was a guy named Salam Fayyad, who was considered the most moderate Palestinian politician, the one who was most popular in Washington, the one who was most popular in Israel, right? The person who went furthest in essentially doing the test that Sam Harris is sure that could get the Palestinians everything they want: putting down their arms—not just putting down arms—but preventing other Palestinians from picking up their arms.
When Salaam Fayyad left politics in 2013, he did a kind of exit interview with Roger Cohen of the New York Times. And he said that he could not get the Israelis to stop settlement growth in the West Bank for a single day through his strategy of renouncing armed conflict and preventing other Palestinians from using armed resistance. And he writes, ‘we have sustained a doctrinal defeat. We have not delivered. I represent the address for failure. I question whether the PA delivered. Meanwhile, Hamas gains recognition and is strengthened.’ Again, no evidence in Sam Harris’s writing that he knows who Salam Fayyad is, or has any understanding or familiarity with the experience of Salam Fayyad.
He goes on to say, Sam Harris, that the Palestinians bear responsibility for this conflict because ‘Hamas is a death cult that uses its own civilian population as human shields.’ There’s something uniquely pathological about Hamas and Palestinians because they fight from within an urban territory. Evidently, Sam Harris is unfamiliar with the work, for instance, of the Israeli political scientist Neve Gordon, who’s written and co-authored an entire book about this idea of human shields. I’m going to quote from Neve Gordon here. He writes, ‘from the American Revolution and the Italian Risorgimento to anti-colonial struggles in Malaya, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam, as well as Algeria, Angola, and Palestine, militants have hidden among civilians. Hamas, in this sense, is no outlier,’ right?
Sam Harris shows no, evidently, knowledge whatsoever of the fact that Hamas is not the only insurgent group that fights in from among a civilian population. That it is actually the norm among insurgent groups. Insurgent groups don’t generally put on brightly colored uniforms, go out into an open space, and then fight against one of the world’s most powerful armies and say, here we are, right? People act as if Hamas is the first insurgent group to ever build a lot of tunnels. They ever heard of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese who built massive, massive networks of tunnels because they, too, were facing a military with an extremely powerful air force that they had no defense against, so they built tunnels underneath their population, right?
And so, I think there’s lots and lots of things that you can criticize Hamas for. I have spent much of my time doing exactly that. It’s attack on civilians, first and foremost among them. But the idea that there’s something uniquely pathological about an insurgent group fighting from within a population, it’s the norm among insurgent groups. It’s part of the reason that fighting insurgent groups is so difficult. And by the way, it’s not only insurgent groups that do this. I don’t know if Sam Harris knows what the Kirya is, Israel’s military headquarters? I don’t know if he’s ever thought about where it’s located, but it’s not located in a remote area. It’s located in downtown Tel Aviv, surrounded by office buildings, by schools, by civilian infrastructure. So, is the Israeli Defense Force, the Israeli government, therefore, a death cult that uses its own civilian populations as human shields because it has placed its own version of the Pentagon right in downtown Tel Aviv, surrounded by civilian areas? No evidence that Sam Harris has ever contemplated that whatsoever, but he considers his point of view so self-evident that it doesn’t need to actually be argued for.
Then he goes on to say that the opposition to Israel must be fueled by antisemitism because ‘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,’ right? That nobody cared about these things. Actually, I don’t know how closely Sam Harris has followed the debate over U.S. arming of the Saudi war in Yemen but, in fact, there was tremendous pressure coming from Congress, from people like Bernie Sanders, from Chris Murphy, from organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, denouncing America’s funding of Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen. And they actually had some degree of success. The Obama administration, at the very end, decided to limit military support for the Saudi campaign in Yemen because of this pressure that was coming from human rights groups and from Democrats, but also some Republicans in Congress. And then when the Biden administration took over, it announced that it was ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen. Not all weapons, but in offensive operations. And then the Saudi effort actually ended in the ceasefire in 2022. Again, I’m not saying that the U.S. was not complicit in horrible, horrible crimes in the Saudi and Emirati war in Yemen. Of course it was.
But what Sam Harris seems not to be aware of is the same kind of human rights-oriented folks who are appalled by what Israel is doing in Gaza were also appalled by what Saudi Arabia was doing. I don’t know that Sam Harris was on the front lines of doing that. He seems to be one of these guys who gets mostly upset about human rights abuses in other places when he can use them to deflect against criticism of human rights abuses in Israel. But the kinds of people who are most upset about what Israel has done in Gaza were also, generally, people like Bernie Sanders, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, were very, very upset about what the Saudis were doing.
But perhaps the reason you didn’t get as many big protests was that actually there was much less resistance. These folks who wanted to limit U.S. military support for the Saudis and the Emiratis succeeded much more quickly than the effort against Israel, and they were able to put serious restrictions on U.S. military aid in a way that they haven’t been able to do in Israel, because the Saudis and the Emiratis didn’t have supporters like Sam Harris, basically, who defend whatever Israel does.
Then, Sam Harris goes on to say, ‘there’s only one state whose legitimacy is still debated everywhere. There’s only one nation on Earth that must continually argue for its right to exist.’ Again, this is considered by Sam Harris so self-evident that it doesn’t even need to be debated. I don’t know if Sam Harris has noticed that there’s a war that the United States and Israel have been engaged in vis-a-vis Iran, in which we’ve explicitly called for the Islamic Republic to be overthrown, right? There’s no other country in the world whose political system the United States calls illegitimate. Actually, we did a regime change war in Iraq because we considered its political system illegitimate. We called for the overthrow of the political system and the regime in Syria. We’re currently raging a war in order to try—not very successfully—to topple the political system in Iran. The Trump administration has also declared that the Cuban political system is illegitimate, and we’re imposing vicious sanctions and potential military force to do that. We literally abducted the president of Venezuela because we said their political system is illegitimate. We’ve said many, bipartisanly, American political leaders have said that Vladimir Putin’s regime is illegitimate because it’s authoritarian and undemocratic. And you can find many, many American prominent leaders, from Mike Pompeo over the years to Marco Rubio, to saying the Chinese Communist Party political system is illegitimate, not to mention the regime in North Korea.
The United States says this all the time, right? This is what this right to exist language masks, which is that the question is about the legitimacy of Israel’s political system, a political system that has been declared to be an apartheid system by the world’s leading human rights organizations and Israel’s own. And in fact, the United States ultimately did come around to the idea that apartheid in South Africa was an illegitimate political system, and we call lots of political systems illegitimate. And in many cases, we impose sanctions on those political systems, and sometimes we invade them, right? Again, Sam Harris shows no evidence, knowledge of this whatsoever.
And then another example for him that shows that the criticism of Israel must be antisemitic is that he said that even right after October 7th ‘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.’ Now, there were people who celebrated October 7th, which I think was despicable, but actually the vast, vast majority of people were saying two things. First of all, that you have to understand the terrible violence of October 7th within the context of the brutal oppression that the Palestinian people face, A. And B, that Israel’s attack on Gaza was likely to be horrifying, and that there therefore should be a ceasefire.
And this idea that Sam Harris has, that it was antisemitic to start calling for a ceasefire, and criticizing Israel’s attack, assault on Gaza on October 8th, October 9th, right, evidently forgets the fact that we had a pretty good idea, as early as October 8th and 9th, that Israel’s response in Gaza was going to be absolutely horrifying, right? I don’t know, again, if Sam Harris is familiar with this quote from Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, where he says, there will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly, right? This is one of the things cited by the International Criminal Court in indicting Yoav Galant.
So, the idea that you had to be an antisemite to say that, right, early in October, there should be a ceasefire, and to be protesting what Israel was doing and starting to do in Gaza, anybody who knew the history of what Israel had done in previous rounds of violence in Gaza, and was simply listening to Israeli leaders, could have predicted that what Israel would do in Gaza would be utterly horrifying. And in fact, it’s been horrifying beyond even what most people could have imagined.
So, these are a series of things that Sam Harris says that he thinks are so self-evident, he’s so sure of himself, that he doesn’t think he needs to engage, they don’t have to be interrogated by someone of a different point of view. I’m glad that there are people who are supporters of Israel who don’t take that view. I recently did an interview, a conversation with Coleman Hughes from the Free Press. I just did one for my substack with Dan Shapiro, the former ambassador from Israel, and before that with the author Ariel Beery, who wrote the book Being Israeli After the Destruction of Gaza.
I’m glad that there are supporters of Israel who don’t take the view that their views are so self-evident, they don’t need to be interrogated in a respectful conversation with someone who differs, because I think that actually having conversations with people who you differ from is a good way of being reminded that your views are not self-evident. That actually other people, including other people who consider themselves thoughtful and smart and well-meaning, actually see things from a different point of view. There’s something humbling about realizing that no matter how fervent you are in your views, that other people may see things in a different way, and may be able to gather evidence from their different perspective. I would really suggest that Sam Harris could benefit from a little bit of that humility. And if he decides that he’s humble enough to recognize that not everything that he believes and states in his Substack is so self-evident, I’d be more than happy to discuss it with him in some kind of public conversation.
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