I made a terrible mistake. I read an essay by that amazing moral “philosopher,” Sam Harris. He hasn’t changed since those days of rationalizing nuking Mecca — he still hates Islam in his slow, ponderous, superficially philosophical way, and now he has written a justification for killing Palestine. Don’t worry, it’s OK, because we’ve always been in a Crusade, and Israel is a shining city on a hill.
So, whether we want to admit it or not, we are perpetually at war with them [Jihadists]. And we must win a war of ideas with everyone, both within the Muslim world and outside it, who is confused about that—and there are legions of the confused. And there is no place on Earth where the truth about jihadism is more obvious or excruciating, and moral confusion about it more reprehensible, than Israel today.
He later claims that there are bright lines that divide good and evil
, with Israel definitely on the good side, while Palestinians are evil. To support that rose-colored binary, hhe has to greatly simplify the status of Palestinians in Gaza.
Incidentally, there has been no occupation of Gaza since 2005, when Israel withdrew from the territory unilaterally, forcibly removing 9000 of its own citizens, and literally digging up Jewish graves. The Israelis have been out of Gaza for nearly 20 years. And yet they have been attacked from Gaza ever since.
That is very much a half-truth. Gaza was under a military occupation until 2005, when Israel partially pulled out. Israel still controls the strip, in charge of all land crossings, it still controls access to food, water, electricity, and communications, it controls all access by air and sea, and they reserve the right to send troops in whenever they feel like it. It is maintained as a prison for Palestinians, where the residents are either neglected or at the mercy of Israeli soldiers.
Is anyone surprised that Palestinians might resist? That they might learn to hate the entire nation of Israel? Apparently, Sam Harris is.
But, you see, the West is restrained and would never do any intentional harm, while Muslims have no respect for human life, so it’s OK that they be imprisoned.
At this moment in history, there are people and cultures that harbor very different attitudes about violence and the value of human life. There are people and cultures that rejoice, positively rejoice—dancing in the streets rejoicing—over the massacre of innocent civilians; conversely there are people and cultures that seek to avoid killing innocent civilians, and deeply regret it when they do—and they occasionally prosecute and imprison their own soldiers when they violate this modern norm of combat.
Whoa. Who carries out mass bombing campaigns? Who puts the light shows on TV for the patriotic masses to cheer over? We killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, a majority of whom were civilians, and Harris is going to tell us that we avoid and regret killing innocent civilians? Bullshit. It’s the West that invented that useful term, “collateral damage,” to excuse wholesale murder of innocents.
Yes, Palestinians have been seen to celebrate the killing of IDF soldiers and Israeli citizens. That’s not to excuse it, but to pretend that Israelis don’t similarly celebrate the death of Palestinians is a lie. Of course they do! Both sides are locked in mutual hatred.
The boisterous crowds danced and chanted Jewish religious songs outside Damascus Gate as scores of Israeli police stood guard. In several cases, groups chanted slogans such as “Death to Arabs,” “Mohammed is Dead” and “Burn Your Village” as they stared at Palestinian onlookers. Some of the youths wore clothing identifying themselves as members of Lehava — a far-right Jewish supremacist group that opposes assimilation or romantic relationships between Jews and Palestinians.
Israel has a long history of promoting hateful propaganda to its children. And now Sam Harris is in the business of pushing similar propaganda on American adults.
There is myriad evidence of Israel’s brainwashing of its citizens to erase the humanity of Palestinians spanning many decades.
Israeli scholar Adir Cohen, for example, analysed for his book titled “An Ugly Face in the Mirror – National Stereotypes in Hebrew Children’s Literature” some 1700 Hebrew-language children’s books published in Israel between 1967 and 1985, and found that a whopping 520 of them contained humiliating, negative descriptions of the Palestinians.
He revealed that 66 percent of these 520 books refer to Arabs as violent; 52 percent as evil; 37 percent as liars; 31 percent as greedy; 28 percent as two-faced and 27 percent as traitors.
But Harris believes in a fantasy Israel.
Simply counting the number of dead bodies is not a way of judging the moral balance here. Intentions matter. It matters what kind of world people are attempting to build. If Israel wanted to perpetrate a genocide of the Palestinians, it could do that easily, tomorrow. But that isn’t what it wants. And the truth is the Jews of Israel would live in peace with their neighbors if their neighbors weren’t in thrall to genocidal fanatics.
Wait a minute–why isn’t counting the bodies a way of judging the moral balance? If Hamas killing 1100 people is bad and justifies stopping them, why isn’t killing 27,000 people (including 10,000 children) also bad? I agree that stopping terrorism is good, just like stopping Nazis is good, but the casualties aren’t negligible, they matter. If we’re concerned about justice, we have to balance that with the number killed to accomplish it.
But then…to claim that the mass of Israeli citizens don’t want to commit genocide and could just flip a switch and become a nation of benevolent do-gooders? What nonsense. Those citizens elected Netanyahu. Those citizens have been implementing a policy of brutal containment for 20 years. Those citizens have been characterizing Palestinians as liars and greedy traitors for 60 years. If only they hadn’t been in thrall to genocidal fanatics, says a nation that elected genocidal fanatics.
In the West, we have advanced to a point where the killing of noncombatants, however unavoidable it becomes once wars start, is inadvertent and unwanted and regrettable and even scandalous. Yes, there are still war crimes. And I won’t be surprised if some Israelis commit war crimes in Gaza now. But, if they do, these will be exceptions that prove the rule—which is that Israel remains a lonely outpost of civilized ethics in the absolute moral wasteland that is the Middle East.
Civilized ethics:
Declaring that your opponent lives in a moral wasteland while turning their home into a literal wasteland is either hypocrisy or irony or both. Maybe some Israelis will commit war crimes, he says, as the entire weight of Israeli military might is used to level the entire territory, bombing schools and hospitals and homes. It’s a bright line
, he says, because he can excuse all the atrocities on one side as justified, while on the other, everyone is an amoral monster.
To deny that the government of Israel (with all of its flaws) is better than Hamas, to deny that Israeli culture (with all of its flaws) is better than Palestinian culture in its attitude toward violence, is to deny that moral progress itself is possible. If most Americans are better than their slaveholding ancestors, if most Germans today are better than the people who herded Jews into gas chambers, if the students protesting this war on your college campus—who are so conscientious that they lose sleep over crimes like “cultural appropriation” or using the wrong pronouns—if they are better than the racists and religious lunatics that inevitably lurk somewhere in their family trees—then we have to recognize that there is no moral equivalence now, between Israel and her enemies.
I’m impressed that he can squeeze in a complaint about those darned woke college students while also complaining about and dismissing Palestinian victims of the most brutal violence as lesser moral actors. He wants to complain about moral equivalence and moral confusion while blithely and dishonestly papering over Israeli violence and oppression with assertions about moral superiority that are not in evidence.
He wants to claim that intent makes all the difference. But what is Israel’s intent? What intent is accomplished by wholesale bombing campaigns that kill massive numbers of civilians? What is the intent of decades of walling off millions of people and isolating them from the rest of the world? There must be an endgame, right? A benevolent, kind, generous endgame that will welcome their Palestinian captives into a world of mutual coexistence, at least, that must be the case if we’re to believe that Israel’s motives are entirely enlightened. Harris doesn’t provide any summary of that intent, except to try to paint Israel as blameless in everything, so there must be one.
Tell me how Israel will win this war. Tell me what clear signal will tell Israel that the violence is over. Tell me what actions Israel will take at the end of this war, if such a thing happens, that will produce a happy, productive, cooperative Palestine filled with partners living side by side with Israeli citizens. Harris can’t do that, because deep down, all he believes is that Islamic people are barbarians at our gates who must be exterminated. For new he’ll be satisfied with fueling the forges of hate on both sides.
You could also tell me how Hamas proposed to win the war it triggered in October. It looks to me like a spasm of hatred and rage on both sides, and I don’t see either side backing down…or “winning” this conflict. I guess Sam Harris would call that “moral confusion.”
There is no bottom but Sam Harris has left our universe of rational people capable of reasoning.
I suppose he is heading for the Black Hole of hate and lies at the center of his galaxy.
It’s not a half truth.
It’s an outright lie.
Gaza is the largest open air prison in the world with 2.3 million people. Israeli is the creator and keeper of that prison. They control everyone and everything that comes in and out of Gaza. People, food, water, electricity, internet, telecommunications, etc..
Hamas is right now the prison gang that has ended up on top, with a lot of help from Israel.
I didn’t get very far in PZ’s OP before stopping.
Gaza is an Israeli made disaster but there is nothing I can do about it but watch.
I can’t watch it for long without being appalled.
As far as I can tell, the Israeli strategy in Gaza is pure revenge.
.1. As most people who thought about it predicted, they can’t really even find Hamas fighters.
Israel has even said more or less that already. That is why they have been in Gaza for over a month.
This is guerrilla war.
The Hamas fighters are going to be hiding or have left Gaza. They also look like everyone else in Gaza.
.2. Which means that the current 27,000 dead Palestinians are almost all not Hamas. 70% of them are women and children.
The Israelis are just wrecking all the infrastructure in Gaza and killing civilians to wreck things and kill civilians.
.3. So what is their strategy after their inevitable “victory” over mostly unarmed civilians, three quarters of which are women and children?
They don’t have one
It’s pure revenge running on automatic pilot.
The kill ratio right now is 23:1 in Israel’s favor.
How many dead Palestinians is enough for their revenge anyway?
30:1, 36,000 dead?
50:1 60,000 dead?
100:1 120,000 dead?
I have no idea.
Obligatory statement cut and pasted from somewhere. I’m also appalled and condemn Hama’s pointless massacre of 1200 Israeli civilians.
It was an idiotic tactic that ended up being highly counterproductive.
Long history has shown that no one in the middle east can beat Israel by military means.
I don’t have time or stamina to read the whole awful thing, but I don’t think his first point is far off. Yes, we’ve been in the middle of a crusade for centuries, which may even go back from before Christianity and Islam…like when Alexander’s armies tromped through the region and imposed Greek culture on the area. However, he puts the blame on Jihadists, Muslims. That’s bull, unhistorical, and indicative of his biases. The “Crusades” were started by Christians. They invaded the Levant which was home to the Arabs for a very long time, whether they were Muslim, Christian, or otherwise. Of course, Muslim crusaders invaded Europe as well in their wars to convert the world to Islam…yet another bad idea.
Some how we have to figure out how all of us stop killing each other. God, country, or the price of oil is no reason to murder people of any ilk.
Sam Harris has been doing the “intentions matter” point for decades now and he has not learned a thing sinnce Chomsky whooped his ass on this exact point. Also he is even wrong about intentions matter and here’s why: Israel has chosen to engage their targets despite knowing the cost, Israel has chosen to use bombs US has not chosen to use and Israel has chosen to vastly increase the tolerance for civilian casualties. These are all fucking intentions stupid fucking Harris.
I’m sure at some point in the next week he’ll claim that his comments have been misinterpreted.
I recently had a friend, a liberal Democrat who considers Netanyahu a facist, give tacit moral approval to Israel’s current actions by claiming that it is essentially an inevitability due to the Palestinians prior actions, which he characterized as self-serving, violent, duplicitous and religiously zealous.
Everything Palestinians have done or would do was entirely due to their apparently obvious sinister nature, while the morally bankrupt actions of Israeli authorities happens only because, gee-golly-gosh, they can’t possibly do anything else other then genocide an entire population, amirite?
The double standard leaves me dumbfounded.
And obviously one wins a war of ideas with bombs.
Who exactly is confused again?
I’m still amazed at how fast so many “New Atheists” got old. Especially Dawkins and Harris.
Raging Bee @8
My personal pet-theory is that the downfall of many in the “New Atheist” movement was the classic cult of personality dilemma. The constant accolades around them during the heightbof the movement convinced them that their atheism (and by association, all their other ideas, including their bigotries, assumptions and cultural blind-spots) were new and novel and beyond reproach.
Did anyone ever try to remind Sam Harris that Hamas was propped up and financed by Israel? Did anyone remind him that Israel NEEDS and USES Hamas to be their “ideal enemy” and to de-legitimize Palestinian statehood, discredit all talk of peace and compromise, and justify whatever extreme retaliation Israel wanted to carry out against Palestinians? Guess what — on 10/7 Hamas did exactly what Israel had paid them to do. I’d eagerly await Harris’s response to that, if he were at all relevant anymore…
If I were you I would duck.
But that said, I always suggest that we compare Israel treatment of the Palestinians with the US treatment of the Native Americans. See, it all worked out for us.
wobbly: Another theory I heard is that criticizing and debunking religious claims is pretty easy to do, so one doesn’t have to be all that intelligent to do a good job of it. So it’s almost inevitable that at least a few of the people who do it well, will turn out to be embarrassingly less intelligent than they sound when criticizing religious beliefs.
Raging Bee @10
This was another incredibly frustrating part of the debate with my friend.
According to him the Palestinian leadership was shifty and manipulative because they “benefitted from continued conflict by staying in power”, but Israel “sees absolutely no benefit” in continued conflict.
The double-think is staggering.
Ronald: I’ve heard that comparison before — at least insofar as the observation that life on an Indian reservation was BETTER than life in Gaza.
Now the IDF is putting soldiers in disguises to stage false flag attacks on civilian infrastructure. Is there no low too low for Israel? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awchn_y39Rk
wobbly: Your friend isn’t wrong there, especially if “Palestinian leadership” includes all the Arab states who pretended to be “friends” of all the innocent displaced Palestinians while keeping them stuck in refugee camps, refusing to house or repatriate them, and using them as cannon-fodder in a war against Israel that promised total success in some far-distant future but was nothing but bloody costly failure in the present. A war, moreover, whose purpose was more about finding an easy scapegoat (as in, everybody’s old favorite scapegoat THE JOOS!) than about retaking and ruling territory.
Raging Bee @12
This is also very true. Even a child can eventually figure out that Santa doesn’t exist. Doesn’t necessarily mean said child therefore has anything substantively meaningful to say about mideast policy
Among many others, I’ve made that claim before.
Atheism is the low hanging fruit of philosophy and religion.
As Dennett states, all testable claims that the gods exist have been falsified.
It’s easy to say that the gods don’t exist.
They never contradict anyone, most likely because they can’t, a drawback of being nonexistent.
The various religions have had thousands of years to make their case, and they’ve never been able to prove anything.
After atheism, things get a lot harder and more complicated.
Most of our current problems are social and political, including such things as the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the right wingnut wars on women, children, Trans, gays, atheists, science etc.., the increasing belligerence of the second largest economy in the world, China, and rising inequality in the USA as the billionaires get richer at everyone else’s expense.
Raging Bee @16
That’s the thing, I absolutely did not and still do not deny that unfortunate reality…that the average Palestinian is, in part, the victim of a leadership system that exploits them and their outrage for their own continued existence and personal benefit.
But it’s intellectually and morally dishonest to try and claim that Israeli leadership doesn’t see a similar substantive and ideological benefit in maintaining the current violent status quo.
My problem with my friends position is that it’s a rhetorical shell game. State actions are horrible and awful and exploitative when it’s the “others” nation-state. But when it’s “our” nation-states then their actions are suddenly reasonable at best or unfortunate but necessary at worst. It’s bullshit.
Yes, let’s do that.
Gaza is an open air prison for 2.3 million Palestinians. Controlled by Israel, run by a prison gang called Hamas acting for Israel. Currently being bombed into rubble by Israel while they slaughter 27,000 civilians.
Our Reservations are Sovereign Nations by the US constitution and laws.
As sovereign entities, Indian nations are guaranteed the power and/or right to determine their form of government, define citizenship, make and enforce laws through their own police force and courts, collect taxes, and regulate property use.Mar 1, 2017
Reservations aren’t prisons.
In fact, 87% of the Native Americans…don’t live on the Reservations.
In reality, they live where the rest of us US citizens live, wherever they want and often in cities.
There are Native Americans living near me right now.
They go to the local university. A few of them are…college professors.
The last time I was on a Reservation, we stopped at the casino, had lunch, and played video games for a few hours.
Comparing Israel and Gaza with our current Native American’s situation is a false equivalence. There is nothing to compare.
PS: We have an Office of Minority Health for Native Americans.
The Israeli equivalent bombs and invades Palestinian’s hospitals.
“Tell me what clear signal will tell Israel that the violence is over”
The only signal that Israel will understand is when they are under a similar tonnage of bombs they dropped on Gaza. Thats what finally stopped Milosevic and Serbia from carrying out a genocide in Bosnia. Sadly it means more people will die but it won’t all be colateral damage and they won’t all be innocent civilians. They will include people who took up arms to commit genocide and people who elected leaders who had a clearly stated policy to exterminate Palestinians.
Sam… Harris, is it? Anyway, he’s someone whose existence is a given, anytime and anywhere. He fills, like most every “man of religion,” a safe and comfortable role as a sort of growling, toothless, super-mini bulldog who influences no one and whose opinions are as dense and persuasive as tea steam.
He and his clones in all fields do nothing and mean nothing. They’re purely minor parasites, to be medicated against after more serious ones (like, say, Andrew Tate or my own Congressperson) are dealt with.
He’s horrible, that’s his trade, but no one really takes him seriously, especially, in all his hollow cruelty and viciousness and pettiness, himself – I’ve read the pitiful, infantile mewlings of his fans. He’s the Wizard of Oz, but making mediocre shadow puppets on the wall with a kerchief over his face* and a bad imitation of a horror movie voiceover.
May he recognize what he’s made out of a human life and change, or not but be prevented from profiting on cheering for others to suffer.
This much attention is silly – unless you enjoy it, of course. As a hobby online, it’s better than many.
*A unintended courtesy on his part
The victims on both sides, but horribly mostly by far on the Palestinian side now, are utterly ignored by their “leaders,” who can be described as consciously, viciously selfish human monsters – as are any who support their pretended “goals.”
As I’ve said several times already the one so-called New Atheist who might have differed from Harris a bit per Palestine is Hitchens. That Hamas is a major player in Gaza would be one aspect I’m not sure about, but he was critical of Zionism and not anti-Palestinian in what I’ve read. Since he passed 12 years ago there would have been plenty of time for his views to have morphed into something horrifically Likudish though. His previous track record on that particular issue should be distinguished from his belly flop on the Iraq invasion.
To be fair to Sam Harris, he wrote that essay on Oct 13, which would have been a week into this whole fiasco.
And that is where I think being fair should end. I had already told my manager I would be quitting my job by that point after the CEO sent out an email about standing with Israel because I am not an idiot and had a good idea how this would turn out. And, based on Sam Harris saying, “Simply counting the number of dead bodies is not a way of judging the moral balance here,” I get the suspicion he knew what was coming, too, and that he knew the number of Palestinians killed would heavily outnumber that of Israelis before long.
And I am going to guess that, just like the CEO of the company I was formerly employed by, he has not retracted any of his statements since. After all, with that quote above, Harris seems to have set himself up to be ready to defend the killing of 25,000+ Palestinians and 90%+ of the population displaced from their homes as somehow not an attempt at genocide. It begs the question, though, as to how one determines if genocide is being committed if we’re told the body count matters not? Likewise, how can we say the Nazis were committing genocide those ~90 years ago if we must ignore 6+ million number of Jews murdered?
Oh, right…”intentions.” But how do we determine what the intentions are? This is definitely where he gets slippery like many right-wing weasels. This made me think about how politicians like Nikki Haley will say, “America is not a racist country.” Well no kidding! The USA is a thing that has no brain and, likewise, no autonomy. But the people who live in the USA can be racist! And establish laws that discriminate based on race! That is the conversation they are trying to avoid with rather obvious claims about a country not being racist. (It goes to a RIght-Wing Playbook video I also rewatched today titled “You Can’t Get Snakes from Chicken Eggs.”) Harris seems to be playing the same trick, but sort of in reverse, where somehow a country itself has agency (the CEO of my former employer did much the same) and in doing so tries to avoid putting the focus on people, like Benjamin Netanyahu, who do.
Raven @ 20. Perhaps I should have made clear that I was talking specifically about the 19th century and the way we were able to eradicate close to all Native Americans. You might have noticed that the vast majority of land in this country is not owned by Native Americans currently.
This is kind of tangential to the main point, but…
…the United States of America’s economy still runs on slavery. Apart from the millions in our prisons, whose enslavement is protect by the Fourteenth Amendment, there are millions of people overseas in enslaved for the profit of some of our largest corporations, and the millions of undocumented immigrants whose tenuous legal status is exploited by US businesses large and small.
Most USians don’t directly own slaves, true, but we all benefit from the products of slavery. This is not something I expect someone like Harris to understand, let alone acknowledge, but if he did I’m certain he’d have a neat explanation for why today’s slavery is morally superior to that of centuries past.
vucodlak @27
The 13th amendment seems more explicit:
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/13th-amendment
And there’s this: https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation-c6f0eb4747963283316e494eadf08c4e
And there’s the longer history of convict leasing and debt peonage.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/05/17/how-slave-labor-built-the-state-of-florida-decades-after-the-civil-war/
Raging Bee:
Did anyone ever try to remind Sam Harris that Hamas was propped up and financed by Israel?
Hamas was founded in the late 80s, after Israel had disempowered/mooted the PLO and other arab resistance. Crushing arab resistance goes back to the British Mandate, before the declaration of Israel (which occurred after the British fucked off) – Harris gets a lot of mileage out of the “Hamas is sworn to the destruction of Israel” while ignoring that a Whole Lot Of People have, at various times, been strongly opposed to Israel, to the point of wanting to destroy it. Simply demonizing Hamas is just the latest laziness Harris commits.
I recommend Collins and Lapierre’s book O Jerusalem, which is a blow by blow account of the colonization of Palestine and the foundation of the state of Israel. It’s horrifying all around. The Martyrmade podcast also has a few huge and excellent episodes on the topic, which (I believe) draw heavily from the aforementioned book. https://www.martyrmade.com/podcast-parts/1-fear-and-loathing-in-the-new-jerusalem
vucodlak@#27:
…the United States of America’s economy still runs on slavery
I recommend a book called Slavery’s Capitalism edited by Beckert and Rockman. It is fascinating and really, really depressing. Especially if you’re a free market libertarian capitalist. Because:
The argument of the book is correct, that the US economy was nitro-fueled by ultra low-cost slave labor to produce goods and services and to drive down the price of free labor. The US has, to this day, maintained a wage-slave underclass that props up its otherwise unsustainable capitalist business model. All of the capitalists fighting against unions are implicitly aligning themselves with the system of slave labor and the permanent underclass. As my father, the historian, once told me, “you cannot understand anything about the US without contextualizing it with the relationship between labor and slavery.”
Re: my previous@#30:
It is a popular myth that the south was the problem, being an agrarian economy more closely tied to slavery for field labor. But Beckert, Rockman, et. al. do a great job of explaining how it was not just the south, but the north also: all the textile mills in New England were selling cotton bought at surreally low prices from the south, even during the middle of the civil war. Tobacco, the original south of the border high, was also processed in the north, after being transshipped from the south, then sold in Europe. Banking was also dependent on slavery whether the bank was in the north or the south. There is one chapter in the book that is insane and chilling, which describes how – so long as one was white – it was possible to leverage oneself into a plantation lifestyle by borrowing the money to secure a mortgage loan with the ownership of a slave or two. There is a description of an enterprising Irish immigrant to got off the boat with nothing and had a full blown plantation with 100 slaves in 5 years by doing some Trumpian re-valuing of assets to inflate the values of his collateral. That particular bastard lost his shirt and plantation in the civil war but the founding fathers, who did basically the same thing 150 years earlier, were able to take their winnings off the table and become “great”s.
Harris’s anti-muslim zealotry and the ideas he writes about in “The Moral Landscape” couldn’t be more opposed to each other. Oh, I’m sure he could justify himself, at least in his own mind.
On the other hand he is a very good illustration of the main criticism of utilitarianism, the impossibility of quantifying happiness.
@Marcus Ranum — Hamas was founded (and has always been funded) BY ISRAEL, for the express purpose of giving them an excuse to do exactly what they’ve been doing for the last, oh, 40+ years (if not longer). Have some respect for yourself and do some research before you post.
Guys, these are half-truths and depending on the wording closer to lies. Read the details behind these claims, it’s not as black and white as you think it is.
For example, here’s one article on Times of Israel titled “For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces” but when you look into it more carefully you see things like this:
So the complaint is that the Israel government became tolerant of people hiring Gazan workers, i.e., they did not choke Gazans harder economically and this somehow is how “Netanyahu supported Hamas.” As I said, the truth is a bit more complicated, don’t believe any headlines you read. It is true that Netanyahu government tried a “divide and conquer” strategy wrt to Hamas and PLO but there are a lot of details which makes the above claims half-truths.
No, I think there’s been a lot of cold calculation by the leaders on both sides. The aim of the Hamas leadership was to stall the “normalisation” of relations between Israel and Arab states, most notably Saudi Arabia, and probably also to expose the hypocrisy of the USA and its NATO allies. They have succeeded in both these aims, thanks to the genocidal Israeli response. They knew perfectly well that the attack was likely to result in the destruction of Gaza and tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths, but considered this price worth paying to advance their long-term goals. Netanyahu and the Israeli fascists around him promptly saw the opportunity to “ethnically cleanse” Gaza, driving its inhabitants into the Sinai, and also to advance land theft in the West Bank in preparation for expelling its Palestinian population. They have not yet succeeded in the aim of depopulating Gaza, due to a combination of local resistance and the determination of the Egyptian dictatorship to prevent mass Palestinian immigration. The danger is that, thwarted in this way, Israel will simply starve the population of Gaza to death. Netanyahu now wants the war to continue indefinitely, as he knows he is likely to be ejected from power and imprisoned for corruption as soon as it is over; he and his allies also hope to entangle the USA in direct conflict with Iran – something Biden has so far resisted, but will come under increasing pressure to launch to avoid looking “weak”.
Marcus Ranum, #30-31
That’s what Marxist analysis calls “primitive accumulation” – the transformation of non-capitalist value, resources and labour into a commodified part of the capitalist system. The traditional assumption, from Marx himself onward, was generally that this process occurred at the establishment of a capitalist mode of production and then gave way to some kind of self-sustaining dynamic where the resource base reproduced and grew under its own steam. The classic example was the enclosure of the commons in England, which then gave way to technological improvements in farming that increased crop yields.
These days, a lot of analysts are not so sure. David Harvey writes a lot on this. It seems that primitive accumulation may well always have been – and is still – the main dynamic force behind capitalist growth. Third world countries and new sources of unexploited, un-commodified labour and resources are constantly being absorbed into the system, and without them it would cannibalise itself and collapse. Which, perhaps, has already started as the world’s stock of un-capitalised resources has dwindled.
It was always a parasite. It’s just done a very good job of pretending it can sustain itself.
Gaza is not a prison.
A prison, usually, people only live there after a due process and for a limited amount of time. Not so in Gaza.
Gaza is a concentration camp. And, at the moment, a destruction camp.
@KG:
Maybe the first reason could be true but I think the second one is overrated and I don’t think Hamas will care so much about it.
Honestly, I think they thought they could win a war of attrition and beat Israel militarily using their tunnels and guerrilla warfare. There is a lot more evidence for this, including them stockpiling lots of ammunition and weapons in their tunnels, and the level and the intensity of tunnels in urban areas. I don’t think even Hamas expected the level of Israeli aggression. Another evidence for this is the reports that right now Hamas’s top priority is to survive. Remember that even the worst Israeli attack on Gaza before this fares extremely pale in comparison. The severity of Israeli attacks is off the charts.
The intent of Israel is ethnic cleansing with a smattering of genocide for the good of a greater Israel. Nuff said.
many on each side of this stupid conflict has at the back off their mind “a final solution” not many will come right out and say it out loud but the actions each take yield the same thing in the end.
I once got into a very long , tedious and painful argument about Israel with a conservative really a reactionary conservative who was trying to deny that the war was not a religious war. It took a long time until he finally gave the reason for Israel the justification was god gave the land to the jews at that point all I could say was that is what I said. That idea underlies all the arguments and the entire question.
I saw some descriptions a while ago about what the climate on earth might look like due to the way things are going now with climate change based on what it was like when the atmosphere was a similar mixture. It looked like the middle latitudes would be almost completely uninhabitable with any thing resembling current levels civilization or habitation sounded more like “the empty quarter” how will the people sustain the conflict over their god given land then?
Reminds me of a lyric from Bob Dylan. “Those who philosophise disgrace”.
Okay, I really didn’t want to see Sam Harris humping Israel’s leg like an intact chihuahua. Seriously, gross.
“…we must win a war of ideas with everyone, both within the Muslim world and outside it…”
Here’s an idea- stop bombing innocent people. If you agree that this is a good idea for both sides it should be no big deal to stop first.
There’s so little cognitive complexity here, I refuse to believe he’s arguing in good faith.
He’s playing to the simpleminded Israel versus Palestine narrative that so many FOX & ONN watchers fall victim to.
But if you even go so far as to see it as four groups, Israeli government, Israeli civilians, Hamas, and Palestinian civilians, (and that’s still a very simplistic depiction), the ethical calculus changes entirely: The Palestinian civilians are the victims of the most violence while being directly & indirectly responsible for the least.
I don’t think even Hamas expected the level of Israeli aggression.
Really? Their attackers didn’t just kill soldiers on 10/7; they killed civilians and even paraded some of those dead civilians naked for all to see and record. That was clearly INTENDED to provoke the maximum level of Israeli rage and retaliation. And unlike Sam Harris, they knew fine well how Israel has responded to such terrorist aggression in the past. Hell, Israeli forces were already terrorizing Palestinians in the West Bank before Hamas attacked them from Gaza. So the idea that Hamas didn’t expect the response they got is quite implausible.
PS: Some here seem to be working under the assumption that Hamas are doing what they choose to do strictly for Palestinian interests; and this is clearly not true. Hamas, like other supposedly-pro-Palestinian groups before them, have a history of being led or manipulated by other states into serving the desires of those other states (apparently Iran this time), regardless of the cost to actual Palestinians.
Maybe the first reason could be true but I think the second one is overrated and I don’t think Hamas will care so much about it.
Hamas may not care, but the Iranians supporting them do, and they’re the ones calling the shots here. So do the Russians, who seem to be getting closer with Iran lately.
@Raging Bee:
Again, the point here is that the level of Israeli aggression has been off the charts, I honestly don’t have words to describe it. This is at the level of firebombing of Dresden scale, if not beyond, and it is not even fucking over. I don’t think it would have been predictable. Hamas probably also took hostages to be able to have some negotiating power and control over the Israeli aggression but it turns out the Israeli government does not give a flying fuck about the hostages. At October 8, did you honestly believe that Israeli will go and level half of Gaza despite hostages being there? I did not. I expected a land invasion. It’s possible that is what Hamas expected too and they thought they could win. I don’t think anyone would have or could have predicated this. You are letting your hindsight bind you. Just now there’s a report on CNN that roughly half of all the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed/damaged. Almost all hospital, universities, farm lands and so on have been destroyed. It might be the case that by the end of it, Israeli will literally level the entire region.
jasonfailes @ 44, with every Israeli response being to kick the snot and blood out of the Palestinians, Hamas ends up winning untold numbers of volunteers to be their stooges for the next cycle of attack and reprisal, further boosting their numbers.
lotharloo @ 47, there is absolutely no comparison to Dresden. In Dresden, 23% of the industrial buildings were destroyed, non-industrial was around 56%, residential 78k were damaged, of those 64500 easily rendered habitable. Israel is doing a far more through job.
Of greater import is, Israel has absolutely wiped its ass with the Geneva and Hague Conventions, sacrificing any protections their nation, military and population that existed. I’m amazed that the UN hasn’t ejected the Israeli ambassadors.
All I can say is, heaven help them if any enemies of Israel ever do get their hands on nukes, they’d likely become the first recipients in the world of salted neutron bombs.
@wzrd1:
Yeah I think it’s fair to say that we are way past Dresden at this point and this thing will continue.
I certainly did, but then I’m notoriously cynical about this sort of thing. My exact words on the morning of October 8 were “Gaza is going to cease to exist”. Never mind leveling half of Gaza, I was genuinely suprised that they didn’t just bomb everything flat in the first week.
On the other hand, I can see that Hamas might have assumed they’d stick to a more “normal” response profile, which has historically been around a 10:1 kill ratio. Still pretty fucking bad.
@Dunc:
Yeah, maybe people were expecting it but I thought at least the possibility of harming the Israeli hostages would give them some pause but it turns out they don’t give a shit about anyone’s life.