Transcript of podcast, “5 Myths about Israel and the war in Gaza”, by Sam Harris
I’m posting the whole of the Myth about Genocide, because it’s so much in the news. The rest at the link above.
Myth #1: Israel is guilty of “genocide” in Gaza.
The term “genocide” has a clear meaning—it’s the destruction or attempted destruction of a whole people. According to the 1948 international genocide convention, genocide constitutes
“acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”
To claim that Israel has perpetrated a genocide in Gaza, or that it has attempted genocide anywhere, is patently false. There were around 250,000 people in Gaza in 1948. There are now more than 2 million. This rate of growth is triple the world average. So if Israel has perpetrated a genocide in Gaza, it is the most inept genocide in history. And yet this false charge has been made against Israel for years. It’s telling that the most recent allegations of genocide could be heard before Israel had dropped a single bomb in response to the atrocities of October 7th. Really, people were shrieking “genocide” on October 8th. What does that tell you? This is just a new blood libel.
Of course, it is true that the Israeli Defense Forces have killed a lot of people in Gaza. However, it is also true that if the IDF wanted to kill every person in Gaza next week—that is, actually commit genocide—it could. But, of course, it doesn’t want to do that and has never wanted to do that. In fact, the Israeli army routinely drops leaflets, and broadcasts on the radio, and calls cellphones to alert Palestinian civilians when specific areas will be bombed. They did this for weeks in advance of their most recent invasion of Gaza. Conversely, Hamas is using its own population as human shields. It built its headquarters under a hospital, and built hundreds of miles of tunnels under civilian apartments and schools and mosques, and fires its rockets from populated areas, and often prevents families from evacuating in a conscious attempt to maximize the loss of innocent life. These are war crimes.
Of course, the IDF makes terrible mistakes, and this is inevitable in war. The IDF recently killed Israeli hostages who were mere moments away from being rescued. There are tragic accidents and errors of judgment in every war. However, any conflict with jihadists is made immeasurably worse by the tactics they use. Why can’t Israeli soldiers simply trust people who appear unarmed and want to surrender or move to safety? Because they are confronting a culture of religious fanatics that has produced an endless supply of suicide bombers over the last 50 years. Just take a moment to contemplate how the tactic of suicide bombing changes everything. Nothing and no one can be taken at face value. Normally, if someone is driving a car or truck, you can be confident that he hasn’t rigged it to explode. Most people aren’t eager to die. We rely on the near universality of that attitude in all kinds of ways.
But here we are talking about people who have literally rigged children to explode—this has happened in a dozen different conflicts with jihadists across the world—many of which had nothing to do with Israel or the West or even non-Muslims. How do you expect an army, or a police force, or any other organization, to deal with this possibility in a compassionate and civilized way—one that is recognized to be compassionate and civilized by all the innocent people who are subjected to it, day after day and year after year, at check points, and in other places where they have to be treated like they too might be suicide bombers?Just imagine what it is like to have to wonder whether a child is actually a bomb? And just think for a moment about a culture that has normalized this nihilistic behavior—a culture that literally teaches the love of martyrdom to 6 year-olds in school. This has nothing to do with Israel or Jews—or the Palestinians even. This is just jihadism. For instance, Boko Haram routinely uses children as suicide bombers in Nigeria, and elsewhere in Africa. This insane behavior has nothing to do with Israel. Most members of Boko Haram have never met anyone who has ever met anyone who has met a Jew. This nihilism falls directly out of the doctrines around martyrdom and jihad, which are unique to Islam. Again, I’m not saying nationalism and ordinary grievances never play a role. They do. I’m talking about the religious layer of these conflicts that make them worse than other types of conflict.
I’m going to take a little detour here, just to hammer this point home—because in my experience, secular people find it impossible to understand what’s going on here. This from The New York Times on February 12, 1984… Almost exactly 40 years ago. Reported by Terence Smith, who at the time was a former foreign correspondent and chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. Reading from the start of the article, about the war between Iran and Iraq. This is being reported from the Iranian side, about their routine use of child soldiers on suicide missions. Again, this is from The New York Times 40 years ago:
“THEIR TICKET TO PARADISE IS the blood-red headband and the small metal key that they wear into battle. ''Sar Allah,'' (''Warriors of God''), some of the headbands read in Farsi script, identifying the wearers as divinely designated martyrs who will use their keys to go directly to heaven if killed in the holy war against Iraq declared by their leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The headbands and the keys are worn by young boys, aged 12 to 17, [I should note that younger ages have been reported elsewhere, I’ve read about children as young as 9 used in this way] who are recruited by local clergy or simply rounded up in the villages of Iran, given an intensive indoctrination in the Shiite tradition of martyrdom, and then sent weaponless into battle against Iraqi armor. Often bound together in groups of 20 by ropes to prevent the fainthearted from deserting, they hurl themselves on barbed wire or march into Iraqi mine fields in the face of withering machine-gun fire to clear the way for Iranian tanks. [Just picture this from the Iraqi side: You’re an Iraqi tank commander, and you see groups of children coming at you across a minefield, tied together with rope, clearing the mines and barbed wire with their lives.] Across the back of their khaki-colored shirts is stenciled the slogan: '’I have the special permission of the Imam [that’s the maniac Khomeini] to enter heaven.’
“In dozens of interviews conducted by this reporter in recent weeks with Iranian exiles, academics and government and intelligence officials in the United States and Europe, the blind faith of these teen-age martyrs was frequently cited as symbolic of the fanaticism that is part of life today in the Islamic Republic of Iran. An East European journalist who witnessed one of these human-wave assaults, in which tens of thousands of young Iranians have gone willingly to their deaths, could hardly believe what he was seeing, as first one boy, and then another, detonated a mine and was hurled into the air by the explosion. ‘We have so few tanks,’ an Iranian officer explained to the journalist, without apology.”
Ok, a few things should be clear. Again, this madness has nothing to do with Israel. Here, we’re talking about the war between Iran and Iraq, 40 years ago. These were Muslims fighting other Muslims. And it was a zombie movie. This belief in martyrdom is cancer for the mind. Until the Muslim world outgrows it—anathematizes it, vomits over it, can’t believe it ever indulged it—the potential for the most insane violence will never go away. And this is why nuclear weapons in the hands of jihadists cannot be tolerated. As bad as nuclear proliferation is in every other context—just think of how bonkers things are with North Korea. North Korea has nuclear weapons. And they have also built ICBMs. Though their accuracy is still debatable. And they have threatened to bomb the United States. As bad as that is, one thing makes it tolerable: We don’t believe that Kim Jong Un is eager to die. The guy loves basketball. He has 100 cars and a harem and a private island. If a fanatical belief in martyrdom were endemic to North Korea and its leaders, that would make the situation incalculably worse. The entire world, and the Muslim world in particular, needs to recognize that jihadism is the one ism that can no longer be tolerated.
As for genocide, the intentions of Hamas, as declared in their founding charter, and as they have reiterated numerous times since October 7th, are explicit: They aspire to commit an actual genocide. This is something they proudly claim to want to do. And the worst part is that they don’t ultimately care about their own survival. Members of Hamas, like jihadists everywhere, routinely chant, “We love death more than the Jews, or the infidels, or the Americans, love life.” While this might sound like posturing, and it may be posturing for any specific person who lacks real faith, in general, it is an honest expression of their religious worldview. They are a death cult. And Hamas is a death cult that happens to be very popular among Palestinians. Even though Hamas has engineered a situation in which to fight them effectively requires that Palestinian civilians also die.
Again, they are consciously using their own population as human shields. They have built hundreds of miles of tunnels under Gaza, more extensive than the London underground, with thousands of entrances that use hospitals, mosques, schools, apartment buildings, and other civilian infrastructure as cover. Hamas fighters are hiding in these tunnels right now, and using the innocent civilians they kidnapped from Israel as an additional layer of human shields. Crucially, these tunnels are not being used as bomb shelters for the civilian population. On the contrary, the civilian population is being sacrificed to protect the tunnels. Again, that was the whole plan. They have spent billions of dollars, over the course of 17 years, building these tunnels.
The Palestinians in Gaza have received more international aid than almost any community on earth. They could have built a Singapore on the Mediterranean. In fact, if they were pacifists, they would already have a state. Pacifism would actually work if practiced by the Palestinians against Israel. There is no way that Israel could resist a Gandhian-style campaign of nonviolence in support of a 2-state solution. The Palestinians would absolutely win a moral contest like that, and could have won it 50 years ago. But, generally speaking, they are a culture of religious fanatics, ruled by absolute fanatics, who are willing to sacrifice everything for martyrdom. As a top Hamas official said in response to all the destruction in Gaza, “We are called a nation of martyrs. And we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.” That is the problem that Israel is dealing with. What Hamas is doing is not, in any sense, normal human behavior in a time of a war. But it is normal for jihadists. What Israel is doing, in a desperate attempt to eradicate Hamas, while minimizing civilian death, is not in any sense an act of genocide.
Again, nothing that I just said, even while true, makes sense when you see the bodies of dead children being pulled out of rubble. The only thing that provides moral clarity here is the recognition that this whole catastrophe is Hamas’s fault. And that there can be no peaceful response to jihadism. Anyone calling for a cease fire at this point needs to ask themselves, why aren’t you calling for Hamas to release the hostages? And why don’t you remember that there was a ceasefire on October 6th? The truth that we cannot lose sight of is that Hamas has deliberately engineered the chaos on both sides of the Gaza border. More...
