I am writing this piece as response to a podcast on the ongoing conflict in Gaza by the prominent American atheist Sam Harris. As an atheist myself I frequently look at the evil in the world through the prism of atheism, however as Harris displays (and as I hope to outline below) there is a definite limit to how far this mode of thought can take you on certain issues; the Israeli Palestinian conflict being one of them. First of all it might be helpful to read or listen to in full what Harris has to say on the issue as I have cherry picked some elements that I found particularly egregious. So here is a link to the full podcast and the transcript of the same with some editorial notes added by Harris to complement the spoken piece: Sam Harris: Why Don't I Criticise Israel?
While some people might not find Harris to be a worthwhile target for comment particularly on this issue. I will just point out that he does have a substantial following and this post in particular invoked ire and praise in varying measures on his Facebook page, to which there are some 250,000 subscribers. Furthermore as an atheist I find that Harris is an interesting person to examine as he shows that his lack of faith brings him to conclusions that are massively devoid of critical analysis and conclusions based nowhere in proximity to reality. For anyone who bothers to read this the notes I have made relate chiefly to the transcript of the podcast simply because this is easier and allows me to address his notes as well.
Harris begins by outlining the fact that he has upset some people by keeping a sense of proportion noting that some hundred times more Muslims exist than Jews on the earth. While Harris may feel that this puts the conflict into proportion it pays no attention to the diversity of Muslim life or opinion, and infers that merely by being Muslim you are willing and capable of assaulting Israel. Harris creates an entirely fatuous link between the number of Muslims in the world and the balance of power in the conflict. By putting the conflict into proportion in this way Harris misses the key point, which is not the proportion of one religion to another but the issue of proportionality in the conflict itself. In terms of hardware and body count the conflict is stacked heavily in favour of Israel.
Harris elucidates his point by saying in essence that Jews are the lesser of two evils as many Jews are in fact atheists, a position that cannot be reasonably held in Christianity or Islam. That Jews can more comfortably be atheists than Muslims or Christians and that this makes Jews more desirable can be contested as advantageous when looking at the world entirely through the aforementioned prism of atheism. This view however lends no weight to any argument in favour of Israeli state aggression or even to the argument that their actions are somehow more reasonable than the largely Muslim opposition to them. It should also be noted that while the primary opposition to Israel in a predominantly Muslim part of the world is Muslim, they are also opposed on an annual basis by practically the whole international community when they vote on an end to the occupation.
After some meanderings regarding Jewish suffering and the existence of a Jewish state Harris gets back to the conflict again. He concedes that in order to build and defend this state the Israelis have done things that amount to war crimes and that "[t]hey have been brutalised by this process- that is made brutal by it." Something that Harris contends is "due to the character of their enemies." He then goes on to note that he was not giving Israel a pass to commit war crimes but was "making a point about the realities of living under the constant threat of terrorism and of fighting multiple wars in a confined space." Here again Harris' complete ignorance of the conflict and his reliance on a purely anti-faith outlook severely tarnishes any chance of a reasoned response. He need not have looked very far to review the history of the conflict. It is one of persistent blockage by Israel and the United States, in opposition to pretty much the entire world, of a peaceful settlement to the conflict. Everybody knows this formula but for Harris it is not the US and Israel's consistent and constant opposition to it that has driven Israel to commit ever more flagrant acts of terror against the Palestinians. It is in fact the Palestinians themselves who have brought on their own punishment by the nature of their resistance. While I have no fear of calling the character of Hamas' resistance terrorist nor should Harris shy away from realising that he leaps to the aid of two of the leading terrorist states that have ever existed. He furthermore may not have noticed that these states' capacity for inflicting suffering far outweighs the capacity of any resistance group lined up against them.
Harris then immediately gets into the standards that Israel is held to and again exposes his rather shameful lack of knowledge on the subject. What Harris says of this is: "They
have endured more worldwide public scrutiny than any other society has ever had
to while defending itself against aggressors." Here he singularly misses the entire crux of the conflict by reading that Israel is the defender and Hamas the aggressor. Again Harris would not have found it difficult to look up the definition of an occupation (which he concedes in the very same article does exist). He furthermore would not have had to search high and low to have found out that there is the right enshrined in international law to resist occupation.
The very next paragraph is quoted at length as there are a few points worth making about it:-
"One
of the most galling things for outside observers about the current war in Gaza
is the disproportionate loss of life on the Palestinian side. This doesn’t make
a lot of moral sense. Israel built bomb shelters to protect its citizens. The
Palestinians built tunnels through which they could carry out terror attacks
and kidnap Israelis. Should Israel be blamed for successfully protecting its
population in a defensive war? I don’t think so. [Note: I was not suggesting
that the deaths of Palestinian noncombatants are anything less than tragic. But
if retaliating against Hamas is bound to get innocents killed, and the Israelis
manage to protect their own civilians in the meantime, the loss of innocent
life on the Palestinian side is guaranteed to be disproportionate]"
Harris, while earlier having kept a sense of proportion regarding the conflict decides to drop this perspective when it comes to dealing with the proportionality of the conflict proper. Instead he posits a rather cynical and ill informed explanation for it; namely that Israel is basically better at protecting its citizens. While with all of its resources Israel certainly has a greater capacity to protect its citizens it is expected that it should do so. There are a couple of other points to bear in mind here however. For many years now Gaza has been under a severe air, land and sea blockade preventing even the most basic amenities getting into the area. One of the most bitter points of contention has been over access to concrete. What Harris expects Palestinians to build bomb shelters from I'm not sure. Perhaps he feels they should be recycling the ruins of their schools, hospitals, reservoirs and electricity stations. That he uses the excuse that Gazans have simply chosen not to defend themselves adequately is a rather shameful and hollow defense. Again even the most basic realities of the conflict, even with the proportion he sought to put it in, manage to elude him. He does however pay some lip service, as he does a couple of times throughout, to the Palestinian victims of the violence. It should also be recognised that in terms of military capacity the disparity between Israel and Hamas borders on laughable. While I dare not deny that Hamas do have weaponry capable of striking some parts of Israel, in comparison to Israeli military hardware (paid for and provided by the US) they are practically prehistoric.
In the next paragraph Harris turns to the genocidal intentions of Israel's enemies invoking specifically The 1988 Hamas Covenant as a proof that there is a significant moral difference between Israel and her enemies. Harris is clearly not familiar with Plan Dalet. While I am not in the business of defending Hamas or its documents there are a some things worth mentioning about the Hamas Charter. It is a document that is oft pointed to as the proof positive that Hamas are bloodthirsty demons hellbent on the destruction of Israel and accepting of nothing less than that. The reality is that Hamas, regardless of their charter (which make no mistake about it I find offensive), have obtainable political goals that happen to be largely in alignment with the international consensus. Hamas likely take their charter as seriously as the US government take the more tricky elements of the US Constitution. In the short term they have made quite clear their terms for peace, which is a lifting of the economic strangulation of Gaza as embodied in the blockade. While some may find it naive of me to accept the Hamas' terms for peace from a pronouncement from leadership (Khaled Meshaal) Israel would do itself many favours by showing a greater flexibility towards the idea espoused by this leadership. The fact of the matter is that there is rhetorical flourish and there is political reality and for the leadership of both sides it is the latter that will determine the nature of the conflict and its eventual resolution.
This feeds into my next point which is a point on Harris' contention that:-
"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."
After an aside regarding the character of Jewish restraint and a defense of the many 'accidents' that cause more death Harris moves on to this point. The simple fact is that this hypothetical serves absolutely no purpose. Palestinians do not enjoy the same benefits of Israeli citizens, they do not share economic nor social parity. Harris assumes merely because of their religion that the Palestinians want to see Israel destroyed. He refuses to see that were his own family blown to pieces, his own home bulldozed, his own life controlled and dictated at every turn he too might well be nudged somewhat closer to hatred of those who inflicted that pain upon him. While in this paragraph he does connect the word Palestinian automatically to the word Hamas it is a statement he corrects and then produces another fallacy to complement the correction:-
"Again,
I realize that not all Palestinians support Hamas. Nor am I discounting the
degree to which the occupation, along with collateral damage suffered in war,
has [fuelled] Palestinian rage. But Palestinian terrorism (and Muslim
anti-Semitism) is what has made peaceful coexistence thus far impossible."
He contends that he has not discounted that the occupation has fuelled Palestinian rage he points to Palestinian terrorism as what has made peaceful coexistence thus far impossible. Harris again displays an ignorance of pre-war, pre-Holocaust Palestine when there was a large degree of Jewish and Muslim cooperation. As well as this Harris ignores the diplomatic record of the conflict, which shows clearly the causes of both sides inability to reach a lasting settlement. Harris, though these words do not do the fact any justice, is an intelligent educated man. One can only reach the conclusion that viewing the world solely through the lens of disbelief has caused him to be wilfully ignorant of some very basic realities. There is no history in his outlook and there is basically no understanding of diplomatic and international affairs evident in his analysis.
In the very next lines he invokes the argument of human shields. Harris here does not stray far from the complete dehumanisation of Palestinian resistance in bringing up this often cited but infrequently substantiated claim of Hamas using human shields. A more useful term for his arguments might be a sub-humanisation perhaps leaving Harris wondering, as Sting did of the Russians, whether or not Gazans love their children too. Harris in this section also links to what other militant Muslim groups have done in Iraq and Afghanistan, using human shields with reckless abandon. Not to be facetious but he is so clearly ignorant of world affairs it might be stretch for him to tell us what Afghanistan and Iraq share in common. To illuminate Harris' sub-humanisation I will let him speak for himself:-
"The
Palestinians are trying to kill everyone. Killing women and children is part of
the plan."
As he draws to a conclusion Harris broadens the issue by as mentioned above bringing ISIS (now IS) into the discussion. On this point he states:
"If
Israel kills a dozen Palestinians by accident, the entire Muslim world is
inflamed. God forbid you burn a Koran, or write a novel vaguely critical of the
faith. And yet Muslims can destroy their own societies—and seek to destroy the
West—and you don’t hear a peep."
While I am primarily attempting to deal with what Harris has to say about Gaza this point is worth discussing. I am unsure from under what rock he has been broadcasting but anyone with access to even basic news facilities will know that the idea that there isn't a peep of criticism against IS is simply untrue.
I will again quote Harris at length below as the depths of his misunderstanding and the consequences of a mind living in self-imposed exile from reality reaches a quite breathtaking low as he concludes his 'argument'. He states:-
"So,
it seems to me, that you have to side with Israel here. You have one side which
if it really could accomplish its aims would simply live peacefully with its
neighbors, and you have another side which is seeking to implement a seventh
century theocracy in the Holy Land. There’s no peace to be found between those
incompatible ideas. That doesn’t mean you can’t condemn specific actions
on the part of the Israelis. And, of course, acknowledging the moral disparity
between Israel and her enemies doesn’t give us any solution to the problem of
Israel’s existence in the Middle East. [Note: I was
not suggesting that Israel’s actions are above criticism or that their recent
incursion into Gaza was necessarily justified. Nor was I saying that the status
quo, wherein the Palestinians remain stateless, should be maintained. By
“siding with Israel,” I am simply recognizing that they are not the primary
aggressors in this conflict. They are, rather, responding to aggression—and at
a terrible cost.]"
Here Harris draws a clear line in the sand, Israel is peace, resistance to Israel is Islamo-fascism. I will again simply direct him to the diplomatic and historical record of the conflict. Regardless of what Palestinians want in their own lives it might be high time that Harris concludes that they be given some say in it. While he again pays lip service to this possibility he neglects to mention that in choosing Hamas to represent them Gazans endure bombardments and collective punishment to a degree that Harris clearly does not want to recognise. In painting Israel as the perpetual victim of aggression he shows that he has no concern for justice for Palestinians but constructs an egregious and fallacious deconstruction of the right to resist occupation. Simultaneously he whitewashes Israel, and while he contends that they are not above reproach, he holds in higher regard the Israeli right to exist because Jews have a greater propensity for atheism. Furthermore by misrepresenting Palestinian resistance to aggression as aggression he allows himself to buy and sell all the stock propaganda arguments drawn from human shields, the Hamas Covenant etc.
The final prime example of this comes in the form of Harris' question:-
"What do groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda and even Hamas want? They want to
impose their religious views on the rest of humanity. They want stifle every
freedom that decent, educated, secular people care about. This is not a trivial
difference. And yet judging from the level of condemnation that Israel now
receives, you would think the difference ran the other way."
Without even recognising the obvious flaw in piling these groups together there is a very simple answer to the relevant question, which is what do Hamas want? They have made their terms for peace clear. They have outlined a willingness to discuss the solution to the problem that has been endorsed by the entire world excluding Israel and the US, namely UN Resolution 242 as a basis for ongoing peace talks. Hamas want to practice, as is their right under international law, opposition to the occupation of Palestinian land. There is an answer to his question if he was not willing himself away from seeing it.
Harris in constructing an argument on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict entirely through the narrow prism of atheism has made some serious errors in judgement. To uphold the conclusions he has reached as a supposedly intelligent person requires a lot of cognitive dissonance, though he happily achieves this by ignoring the facts of the situation. He
has been blinded as much by his lack of faith as many of those he criticises
have been blinded by the opposite. Harris points to many of the stock propaganda arguments human shields, the Hamas Charter as a foundation document, the refusal to recognise the reality of Israel. He might do well to question how many Israeli politicians in positions of power have sought recognition of a Palestinian state within its internationally recognised borders?
To say Israel is more morally upright than those opposed to it on the basis of religion is to wilfully and explicitly ignore reality, something for which Harris rightly and frequently condemns others. I share many of Harris' views on faith or a lack thereof, to make this the entire basis of your outlook on the world however is to purposefully mentally impoverish oneself and to make oneself look quite stupid. This is something he achieves with astonishing statements that bear absolutely no reflection on the reality of the conflict, and in spite of me taking time to critique them, add absolutely nothing to the discussion of the conflict or how it can be resolved. In truth if Harris was concerned with the fate of Israel he would be well advised to advocate the advancement of the settlement they consistently block the passage of. It is only at this point can Israel stop acting like a lunatic state and take its place among the civilised peoples of the world by becoming a true democratic force (imperfect as our democracies are). In the meantime it must content itself with being a half diluted gloater, bragging about its tepid watered down democratic forms, while suppressing even the most basic freedoms of those living under its brutal occupation. Until this happens it can never be normal, and only in normalcy will it achieve the praise it feels it deserves merely by existing. If he is correct Harris' conclusions lead down one road and that is the destruction of every semblance of justified Palestinian resistance, a conclusion in which there is no peace but more blood, more suffering and greater even more dangerous extremes. In closing I will say of Harris' argument what Dr. Norman Finkelstein said of Alan Dershowitz's The Case for Israel: "I wouldn't use it as a shmata."
