Sam Harris from his “Making Sense” podcast in 2014, when i still subscribed, and he hadn’t yet come down with his severe and apparently chronic case of TDS.
This below does make sense.
[ADDED: I’ve heard criticism of this view as showing that Sam Harris “was always stupid”, and that the comparison itself if nonsense. The basis of that view is that neither Israel nor Hamas has a choice, therefore to look at the hypothetical is nonsense. After all, if Israel cannot in reality attack Palestinians because they are forbidden to do so, as a result of their anti-genocide, anti-holocaust nature, then that’s nothing to do with their morality; it’s forced on them. I would argue against that, that in each case, Israel and Hamas, we have differing conclusions from history. Israel’s is “Never Again” shall there be a holocaust. Hamas view is: (i) What Holocaust? (ii) A Holocaust should have happened and we will make it happen, Inshallah!.
Each of these conclusions from history is based on a morality. And one is better than the other. Surely any humanist view would agree that the Israeli morality on this issue is better than Hamas']
It was said more simply by Golda Meir: “If the Palestinians lay down their arms there will be peace. If the Israelis lay down their arms there will be a massacre”. The demand to kill Jews is in the Charter of Hamas. It reflects passages in the Koran. Transcript from Sam:
The truth is that there is an obvious, undeniable, and hugely consequential moral difference between Israel and her enemies. The Israelis are surrounded by people who have explicitly genocidal intentions towards them. The charter of Hamas is explicitly genocidal. It looks forward to a time, based on Koranic prophesy, when the earth itself will cry out for Jewish blood, where the trees and the stones will say “O Muslim, there’s a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.” This is a political document. We are talking about a government that was voted into power by a majority of Palestinians.
The discourse in the Muslim world about Jews is utterly shocking. Not only is there widespread Holocaust denial—there’s Holocaust denial that then asserts that we will do it for real if given the chance. The only thing more obnoxious than denying the Holocaust is to say that it should have happened; it didn’t happen, but if we get the chance, we will accomplish it. There are children’s shows in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere that teach five-year-olds about the glories of martyrdom and about the necessity of killing Jews.
And this gets to the heart of the moral difference between Israel and her enemies. And this is something I discussed in The End of Faith. To see this moral difference, you have to ask what each side would do if they had the power to do it.
What would the Jews do to the Palestinians if they could do anything they wanted? Well, we know the answer to that question, because they can do more or less anything they want. The Israeli army could kill everyone in Gaza tomorrow. So what does that mean? Well, it means that, when they drop a bomb on a beach and kill four Palestinian children, as happened last week, this is almost certainly an accident. They’re not targeting children. They could target as many children as they want. Every time a Palestinian child dies, Israel edges ever closer to becoming an international pariah. So the Israelis take great pains not to kill children and other noncombatants.
What do we know of the Palestinians? What would the Palestinians do to the Jews in Israel if the power imbalance were reversed? Well, they have told us what they would do. For some reason, Israel’s critics just don’t want to believe the worst about a group like Hamas, even when it declares the worst of itself. We’ve already had a Holocaust and several other genocides in the 20th century. People are capable of committing genocide. When they tell us they intend to commit genocide, we should listen.
There is every reason to believe that the Palestinians would kill all the Jews in Israel if they could. Would every Palestinian support genocide? Of course not. But vast numbers of them—and of Muslims throughout the world—would. Needless to say, the Palestinians in general, not just Hamas, have a history of targeting innocent noncombatants in the most shocking ways possible. They’ve blown themselves up on buses and in restaurants. They’ve massacred teenagers. They’ve murdered Olympic athletes. They now shoot rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas. And again, the charter of their government in Gaza explicitly tells us that they want to annihilate the Jews—not just in Israel but everywhere.
