Thank you for this. The only thing I'd add: does Sam Harris know about Israel's role in funding Hamas? And the reason behind that "strategic" choice - namely, to split the Palestinian movement into competing factions so that it would be less likely to achieve the goal of an independent Palestinian state?
It's ironic that Harris, who's reputation is partly the result of his attacks on religious faith; which he describes as, belief in the absence of evidence, promotes his own Islamophobic beliefs in the absence of evidence.
I’m not sure why it took Professor Beinart nearly twice as long as usual to get so many details about Sam Harris wrong. First and foremost, I do disagree with Sam Harris’s decision not to engage in debates with those who oppose his views. However, I largely agree with the facts Harris presents; I often use them myself. I intend to just cover a few of the more bizarre arguments made by Professor Beinart, to get a full, devastating one-by-one takedown. You can find it here:: (59) Everything Read, Nothing Learned - Rabbi Steven Abraham. I am sure Professor Beinart has seen this already.
In discussing jihad, how can anyone leave out an organization called Islamic Jihad? After all, its name says everything. But never mind, we don’t have to discuss it. But what about Hamas? Hamas is also a Jihadi organization in its goals. The Hamas charter has been clear
Article 7 of the 1988 Hamas Charter contains a hadith that is not easily dismissible: "The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Muslim).
This hadith appears in both Sahih Muslim and Sahih al-Bukhari — the two most authoritative hadith collections in Sunni Islam, which gives it significant canonical weight.
The charter calls for the killing of Jews as Jews, not merely Zionists or Israelis. The 1988 charter, particularly Articles 7 and 22, also incorporated classic antisemitic conspiracy theories — blaming Jews for controlling Western banking, creating Communism, and running Freemasonry to plot against nations.
Hamas issued a revised charter in 2017 that dropped this language and reframed the conflict as being against "Zionists" rather than Jews — but without explicitly revoking the 1988 charter. So both documents technically remain in force simultaneously, which is its own problem.
Anyone who ignores the above or treats Hamas purely through a resistance/colonial lens without confronting Article 7 directly is being intellectually dishonest. It doesn't resolve the political questions about Gaza, but it does make the Hamas-as-purely-nationalist-movement framing untenable. Hamas support has declined, but Hamas is the most popular Palestinian faction.
The comparison of the Gaza protest to the Saudi-Yemeni war is false by any measure. The protest volume comparison is simply false. The scale of street protests, academic boycott campaigns, institutional resolutions, UN emergency sessions, and media saturation around Gaza and Lebanon has no parallel in the Western response to Yemen. The Yemen war has killed hundreds of thousands, involved deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, a blockade causing mass starvation, and US/UK arms sales actively enabling it — and the protest response in Western cities, on campuses, and in parliaments has been a fraction of what Gaza generated.
The institutional activism is also not comparable. The BDS movement, campus encampments, faculty letters, museum deaccessions, artistic boycotts, athlete statements — none of this has a Yemen equivalent. There is no "Boycott Saudi Arabia" academic infrastructure with remotely comparable reach.
Finally, American actions to stop weapons were partial and came only at the end of the war, but by then, more than 350,000 were dead.
Professor Beinart conflates regime change with state elimination — these are categorically different. Changing the Iranian regime does not end Iran or replace its people. Ending Israel as a Jewish state does exactly that. When we talk about Israel’s right to exist, we are discussing Israel’s right to be a Jewish state. There are no discussions anywhere on this planet about the right of any state to exist. No other state on earth is asked to justify its right to exist as a particular kind of state. After all, even Professor Beinart wants a bi-national state—in other words, a non-Jewish state. However, one's feelings about Israel and the concept of regime change are not the same as ending a state.
Adding to what I said, I would be delighted if the U.S. ended its support for Israel and Saudi Arabia and any other country which uses our weapons to commit massive war crimes and it is safe to say that most of the people who protested the atrocities in Gaza would say the same. Furthermore, some of the same people involved in our support for the Saudi War in Yemen were also involved in supporting Israel’s war in Gaza. Tony Blinken comes to mind. It took years of actvism to sway Congress on the Yemen War and I think it would be great if we had a movement that worked to stop any future American support for barbaric wars like those in Gaza and Yemen. Using the Yemen War simply as part of a whatabout argument is exactly the wrong way to go.
As for your last paragraph, Israel is a Jewish state because it expelled the majority of Palestinians. It had no right to do that.
This is not my Substack (and I do not have a Substack to direct you to). A full response to your position would require a very long essay.
Suffice it to say that if the US decided not to sell weapons to Israel or Saudi Arabia, let me assure you that the US would lose influence in those countries and that both those countries are wealthy enough to procure weapons elsewhere.
When it comes to Israel, substantially all the funds Israel receives for weapons procurement stay in the US and create jobs for Americans. The US tried to deny Israel weapons in the 1980s, and it simply created the Israel Military Industrial complex, and today, much of Israel's military requirements are locally produced.
There is another fact, and that is that Israel is America's one and only 100% loyal ally. It pays back to the US in terms of basic military testing and advanced design in a greater proportion than the funds it receives. From an American perspective, Israel is its largest aircraft carrier, well-positioned if hostilities break out.
As for your last comment about Israel expelling Palestinians, I think that is a much longer and much more complicated discussion. And expulsion did not start there. For example, did you know that in 1929, the Jewish community in Hebron, which had been there almost continuously, was expelled by an Arab mob? Did you know that in 19 Jewish communities that were in the West Bank (before it was the West Bank) were set upon by a mob, 4 communities were destroyed, and almost 250 people were killed. My point is that both sides engaged in ethnic cleansing. It's a long story. Not fit for a paragraph or two.
Having read Tom Segev and several other Israeli writers,as well as a few Palestinian ones, yes, I did know about Hebron and an earlier pogrom in the early 20’s and have never denied that both sides committed atrocities, but the way the story has been told in America it has been mostly slanted in favor of Israel. I wish I had a nickel every time I have seen someone on the pro- Israel side give the Leon Uris version of the history. In fact, when I read the history it is mostly depressing. One of the early Zionists ( I am blanking on the name) wrote that the early settlers in the 1890’s treated the Arabs with contempt and beatings. Segev, I think, mentions that. The entire history in my opinion is sordid and ugly with leaders on both sides doing ugly things. It is somewhat like America’s colonial history. Set aside the romanticizing tendencies on both left and right and that is largely a story of theft, with atrocities on both sides, many of them quite gruesome. History is often that way.
On your points about the money spent, who is an ally, weapons research etc…, you are making your pitch to the wrong person. If I thought Israel had a defensible human rights record and really was this wonderful democracy defending itself from irrational hordes, I would be happy to support them.
We are again mostly in agreement. Segev and others document the typical European contempt for the Arab. Of course, they also quote a conversation between Arab notables with Jews, saying that they are fine with the Jews, or as they said, a loaf of bread needs some salt, as referring to the Jews, but too much salt will spoil the bread. The Jewish response was, of course, we prefer to be the loaf of bread.
The reality is that land was not stolen. Land was bought. And if you read the books, land was often bought from the very notables who objected to the Jewish presence, and they were mostly not absentee landlords.
The Palestinians blew their chances with a revolt in the mid 1930s, which decimated their military capabilities. That revolt also saw the first meaningful exodus of monied Palestinians to Beirut, Cairo, and Europe. And in by far the most idiotic move, they turned down a Palestinian state that the British offered them in 1938 because the British permitted the Jews to stay. It sealed their fate.
Of course, in 48 the Jews were more effective in securing their space, and in the process, a significant number of Palestinians were pushed out as well. But here again, even before the 48, more than 100,000, possibly 200,000 Palestinians left of their own volition for foreign ports, and these were the people who could have jump-started a Palestinian state. The story is complicated.
Whoops, just rechecked the data; the number left before the 48 war is closer to 50K.
Nonetheless, it's all more complicated. For example, the Arab community in Haifa was surrounded by the Jews and wanted to surrender (Haifa was a successful mixed Arab -Jewish city with equal population), but the Arab high command told them they may not surrender. When the British governor in Haifa heard this, he was so apoplectic he marshaled an armada of boats to evacuate them to Lebanon. In other words, they did not have to leave; in fact, the Jewish community leaders of Haifa urged them to stay.
Finally, most Palestinians have been exiled to the lands that were to be a Palestinians state, which could and should have been declared but was not. Read what happened to the Arab national government of Gaza in 1948-1952.
What I have read was that one Jewish local leader ( the mayor?) wanted the Palestinians to stay, but Zionist militias for the most part did not. If one wanted a majority Jewish state,the majority of Palestinians had to leave and so the Zionist leaders expelled them.
My impression is that in the 20’s and 30’s there were individuals on both sides who got along fine and I could imagine an alternative timeline where it could have worked out, but terrorism on both sides poisoned the atmosphere. Regarding details, I have seen conflicting claims about what Ben- Gurion, for example, really wanted and my views of the leaders on both sides tends towards the cynical.
I agreed with all of Peter’s response and particularly aporeciated what he had to say about Yemen. Peter is correct. The same people who opposed the support of Israel’s barbaric war in Gaza also opposed our support for the barbaric Saudi war in Yemen. I was one of them.
You mention the fact that far more people protested the Gaza genocide. You can blame the media for that. I would see maybe one story every month or so about Yemen and that isn’t enough to break through. In my own experience in real life, I never met a single person who knew about Yemen unless I brought it up. The vast majority of ordinary people disgusted by Israel’s atrocities would have been disgusted by the Saudi a famine, but few knew about it.
Now you can reach for the usual antisemitism excuse if you want, but the fact is we know about Gaza because it started off with a massacre of 1200 Israelis. And guess what? Far more people in the US know about the killing of the Israelis than about the nearly 400,000 dead in Yemen. I don’t see you or others complaining about that, but it is exactly the same phenomenon. In the case of Yemen and Gaza, the problem was that the U.S. supported both Israel and the Saudis and opposed Iran and its allies, so when our allies slaughter people, the US supplies them with the weapons needed to do it. And some of the biggest apologists for Saudi Arabia were people hoping to see an open alliance between the Saudis and Israel against Iran. The big foreign policy goal for both Trump 1 and Biden was to extend the Abraham Accords to include the Saudis.
So it is rich to see so many Israel apologists now talking about Yemen. It was the far left and a few principled people on the right and of course the human rights organizations who were talking about Yemen when it mattered.
You are essentially agreeing with me on Yemen. As you write: "I would see maybe one story every month or so about Yemen and that isn’t enough to break through. In my own experience in real life, I never met a single person who knew about Yemen unless I brought it up. The vast majority of ordinary people disgusted by Israel’s atrocities would have been disgusted by the Saudi a famine, but few knew about it." That was my point and Mr. Harris's point no one cared. SO infact Professor Beinart is wrong to suggest that Yemen protest was similar to Gaza. It was not.
You are missing the point. It was the mainstream press that was responsible for people’s ignorance. Those of us who follow human rights issues more closely knew about it and we spoke against our policy of supporting the Saudi war just as we spoke against supporting Israel. Leftwingers such as Adam Johnson were writing about this in 2016. I remember one of his articles at FAIR pointing out how MSNBC went an entire year mentioning Yemen once or twice.
This is a very common complaint on the left regarding the press. As for Gaza, the entire world knew that Hamas had slaughtered Israelis within a day, so naturally the world also focused on Israel’s response. You can’t have it both ways. If it was correct for the world to know about Hamas’s atrocity, even though far fewer died than died in Yemen, then you are also going to hear about what Israel did.
And again, I can’t tell you how disgusting it is for people to bring up Yemen now only for scoring invalid points. The time to have condemned our support and raised a stink about it was then, when Obama gave the Saudis the green light. And by the way, I first became aware of the existence of John Kirby when he was making excuses for our support of the Saudis. Several years later he was doing the same thing for Biden, defending our support for Israel in Gaza.
I don't know how else to put it to you. Yes, the mainstream press was not interested, nor were college students interested. And that is precisely the point Harris made.
College kids didn’t know. And no, Harris is not making the point regularly made on the far left about mainstream lack of coverage of US supported atrocities. And you are missing the point I made about Oct 7.
The number of people killed on Oct 7 was about 300 times smaller than the number of civilians who died in Yemen but I have never seen anyone on the Israel side complain about the amount of attention given to Oct 7.. We had flags lowered everywhere. Politicians condemned it, as they should. We are always hearing about how ignorant college protestors are. Fine. Why weren’t all the pro- Israel types yelling about Yemen when it mattered? They supposedly follow the issue, know the history, etc..Where were they?
And anyway, given that Oct 7 was given vastly more coverage than Yemen, probably hundreds or thousands of times more, why would you not expect the same attention to be given to Israel’s response, esp since the same politicians who condemned Hamas’s atrocities funded and whitewashed Israel’s.
You and Harris can’t have this both ways. Oct 7 probably got more coverage in a day than Yemen did over several years.
You are right Oct 7 was heard around the world. 1,200 men, women, and children were killed. Some were burned alive, others raped. And Hamas paraded the 250 abductees to cheering crowds in Gaza.
Yes big news. That would be equivalent to 30,000 killed in the US in one day, and that would be big news as well.
But even on that day, many around the world said it was justified. Some hailed it as resistance, and others suggested it should be understood in "context".
All before Israel even responded. Or as Professor Beinart said, the reaction was because of fears about the horrific response that was expected from Israel--bizarre. (If so, maybe Hamas should have thought about this before they started?)
None of these changes the facts as documented by Harris or me that Gaza was a daily headline for two years and counting, and the murder of Yemenis by the Saudis was not on any campus protest, and I believe you agree on that.
The jihad/jihadism distinction is fair, and if I conflated them, I'll own that. But you're doing something different, conflating a politician's rhetoric with an organization's founding ideology. When Israeli politicians cite Amalek, that's wartime rhetoric. When Hamas's founding charter grounds the conflict in cosmic war against Jews as Jews — not Zionists, Jews — and that organization then carries out October 7, the religious framing isn't incidental. It's structural.
On the Likud charter: yes, it calls for sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, and Israel's settlement expansion is real and damning. But Likud has governed for decades without formally annexing the West Bank. Hamas attempted, on October 7, to do what its charter describes. These are not symmetrical situations.
Beautifully stated, Peter. I read Sam Harris’s post and immediately knew you would address his “self-evident” points. After you undermined almost everything he said, it would be cowardly of him to continue to refuse to engage with those who disagree. We shall see.
What I think Peter does better that most is to remove the "debate" format from his conversations with those he disagrees with.
People who "win" debates rarely do so on the basis of facts, data or documented history. They play on emotion, prejudice and shared cultural/tribal myths.
Peter simply engages those he disagrees with and introduces historical facts and corrective dialog as necessary, while presenting his point of view in a clear and well reasoned tone.
Thanks, even for this early on the West Coast. You are so right. Sam, like so many in the American Jewish Community, is the enabler of the drunk person to continue his bad behavior. And in the Israeli case, the "Organized Jewish Community" has been the enabler of the apartheid regime for longer than South Africa.
This is the sort of context that one NEVER encounters in the corporate media.. Most people and most anchors featured for instance on CNN are closer to Sam Harris in their opinions than they are to Beinart’s facts. That is the real problem. If Beinart and people like him —and not Scott Jennings types—were regulars on mainstream media platforms, Sam Harris would not be taken seriously by anyone
There is an entire class of "Intellectuals" who have been identifying as zionists whether jewish or not for decades and who have accepted as "self evident" the idea that Israel was right, had no choice, but hamas, etc. etc. They never challenged it and obviously, never considered Palestinians as fully formed human beings : if they had, they would not have been able to make it fit with their zionism, because this narrative just can't coexist with the basic notion that Palestinians and Israelis are equally precious and entitled to human rights.
Now that the "Israel is right / has no choice" mantra is being exposed as a very tattered fig leaf trying to cover very ugly crimes against humanity, people who didn't much care before are starting to challenge a lot of this former groupthink : and those intellectuals, for a large part, they just can't handle it. My french fb thread has quite some examples of supposedly liberal, supposedly intellectual zionists who are globally both embarrassing themselves by the shallowness of their "reasoning" and comfortably outing themselves as despicable Palestinianophobes.
It's, well, eye-opening. Sad, and tragic, but eye-opening.
Well done Peter. It is foolish for a person to claim their infallible opinion, and Sam Harris is one of the intellectual elites that look down on others. When you judge the content of a person’s opinions or actions, you must also look at their output. There are things that I reluctantly debate (and rarely do) based on my morality, but with the understanding that others don’t always agree. If Sam had used an excuse like, “I find these debates exhausting and bad for my mental health,” I think people would have respected that. But he didn’t. He has so much hubris, that it makes him blind.
Peter, I realized I was reading and listening to you and only you for a month because you are my favorite kind of intellectual. It was about time I became a member. (I think you assisted me in Cambridge on an animation series for the Getting To Yes Project. Tom S.)
Recently I watched the leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, Kemi Badenoch, being interviewed by Piers Morgan. Some of her views were very similar to Harris’s.
She is asked about Israel’s government at 11 minutes.
Sam Harris would have to be dumber than he looks to discuss this with someone like Peter Beinart. Sam is about as "intellectual" as Donald Trump when it comes to Palestine. "Me so smart. Palestinians bad." Like, seriously, that's about the extent of it. It's humiliating to watch. It is a kind of derangement. And it's so deranged, it cannot see its disgusting, violent ahistorical racism as anything but the Truth with a capital T.
A conversation with the likes of Sam Harris would be as Ghassan Kanafani said "a conversation between the sword and the neck".
It would be a waste of time. Zionist like Sam Harris should be openly scorned and ostracized for what they are, genocide supporting Jewish supremist. not legitimize with respectful conversation.
Would love to see a conversation between Peter and Sam.
Will be known as Sam’s Reckoning.
Thank you for this. The only thing I'd add: does Sam Harris know about Israel's role in funding Hamas? And the reason behind that "strategic" choice - namely, to split the Palestinian movement into competing factions so that it would be less likely to achieve the goal of an independent Palestinian state?
I had the same question!!
It's ironic that Harris, who's reputation is partly the result of his attacks on religious faith; which he describes as, belief in the absence of evidence, promotes his own Islamophobic beliefs in the absence of evidence.
I’m not sure why it took Professor Beinart nearly twice as long as usual to get so many details about Sam Harris wrong. First and foremost, I do disagree with Sam Harris’s decision not to engage in debates with those who oppose his views. However, I largely agree with the facts Harris presents; I often use them myself. I intend to just cover a few of the more bizarre arguments made by Professor Beinart, to get a full, devastating one-by-one takedown. You can find it here:: (59) Everything Read, Nothing Learned - Rabbi Steven Abraham. I am sure Professor Beinart has seen this already.
In discussing jihad, how can anyone leave out an organization called Islamic Jihad? After all, its name says everything. But never mind, we don’t have to discuss it. But what about Hamas? Hamas is also a Jihadi organization in its goals. The Hamas charter has been clear
Article 7 of the 1988 Hamas Charter contains a hadith that is not easily dismissible: "The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Muslim).
This hadith appears in both Sahih Muslim and Sahih al-Bukhari — the two most authoritative hadith collections in Sunni Islam, which gives it significant canonical weight.
The charter calls for the killing of Jews as Jews, not merely Zionists or Israelis. The 1988 charter, particularly Articles 7 and 22, also incorporated classic antisemitic conspiracy theories — blaming Jews for controlling Western banking, creating Communism, and running Freemasonry to plot against nations.
Hamas issued a revised charter in 2017 that dropped this language and reframed the conflict as being against "Zionists" rather than Jews — but without explicitly revoking the 1988 charter. So both documents technically remain in force simultaneously, which is its own problem.
Anyone who ignores the above or treats Hamas purely through a resistance/colonial lens without confronting Article 7 directly is being intellectually dishonest. It doesn't resolve the political questions about Gaza, but it does make the Hamas-as-purely-nationalist-movement framing untenable. Hamas support has declined, but Hamas is the most popular Palestinian faction.
The comparison of the Gaza protest to the Saudi-Yemeni war is false by any measure. The protest volume comparison is simply false. The scale of street protests, academic boycott campaigns, institutional resolutions, UN emergency sessions, and media saturation around Gaza and Lebanon has no parallel in the Western response to Yemen. The Yemen war has killed hundreds of thousands, involved deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, a blockade causing mass starvation, and US/UK arms sales actively enabling it — and the protest response in Western cities, on campuses, and in parliaments has been a fraction of what Gaza generated.
The institutional activism is also not comparable. The BDS movement, campus encampments, faculty letters, museum deaccessions, artistic boycotts, athlete statements — none of this has a Yemen equivalent. There is no "Boycott Saudi Arabia" academic infrastructure with remotely comparable reach.
Finally, American actions to stop weapons were partial and came only at the end of the war, but by then, more than 350,000 were dead.
Professor Beinart conflates regime change with state elimination — these are categorically different. Changing the Iranian regime does not end Iran or replace its people. Ending Israel as a Jewish state does exactly that. When we talk about Israel’s right to exist, we are discussing Israel’s right to be a Jewish state. There are no discussions anywhere on this planet about the right of any state to exist. No other state on earth is asked to justify its right to exist as a particular kind of state. After all, even Professor Beinart wants a bi-national state—in other words, a non-Jewish state. However, one's feelings about Israel and the concept of regime change are not the same as ending a state.
Adding to what I said, I would be delighted if the U.S. ended its support for Israel and Saudi Arabia and any other country which uses our weapons to commit massive war crimes and it is safe to say that most of the people who protested the atrocities in Gaza would say the same. Furthermore, some of the same people involved in our support for the Saudi War in Yemen were also involved in supporting Israel’s war in Gaza. Tony Blinken comes to mind. It took years of actvism to sway Congress on the Yemen War and I think it would be great if we had a movement that worked to stop any future American support for barbaric wars like those in Gaza and Yemen. Using the Yemen War simply as part of a whatabout argument is exactly the wrong way to go.
As for your last paragraph, Israel is a Jewish state because it expelled the majority of Palestinians. It had no right to do that.
This is not my Substack (and I do not have a Substack to direct you to). A full response to your position would require a very long essay.
Suffice it to say that if the US decided not to sell weapons to Israel or Saudi Arabia, let me assure you that the US would lose influence in those countries and that both those countries are wealthy enough to procure weapons elsewhere.
When it comes to Israel, substantially all the funds Israel receives for weapons procurement stay in the US and create jobs for Americans. The US tried to deny Israel weapons in the 1980s, and it simply created the Israel Military Industrial complex, and today, much of Israel's military requirements are locally produced.
There is another fact, and that is that Israel is America's one and only 100% loyal ally. It pays back to the US in terms of basic military testing and advanced design in a greater proportion than the funds it receives. From an American perspective, Israel is its largest aircraft carrier, well-positioned if hostilities break out.
As for your last comment about Israel expelling Palestinians, I think that is a much longer and much more complicated discussion. And expulsion did not start there. For example, did you know that in 1929, the Jewish community in Hebron, which had been there almost continuously, was expelled by an Arab mob? Did you know that in 19 Jewish communities that were in the West Bank (before it was the West Bank) were set upon by a mob, 4 communities were destroyed, and almost 250 people were killed. My point is that both sides engaged in ethnic cleansing. It's a long story. Not fit for a paragraph or two.
Having read Tom Segev and several other Israeli writers,as well as a few Palestinian ones, yes, I did know about Hebron and an earlier pogrom in the early 20’s and have never denied that both sides committed atrocities, but the way the story has been told in America it has been mostly slanted in favor of Israel. I wish I had a nickel every time I have seen someone on the pro- Israel side give the Leon Uris version of the history. In fact, when I read the history it is mostly depressing. One of the early Zionists ( I am blanking on the name) wrote that the early settlers in the 1890’s treated the Arabs with contempt and beatings. Segev, I think, mentions that. The entire history in my opinion is sordid and ugly with leaders on both sides doing ugly things. It is somewhat like America’s colonial history. Set aside the romanticizing tendencies on both left and right and that is largely a story of theft, with atrocities on both sides, many of them quite gruesome. History is often that way.
On your points about the money spent, who is an ally, weapons research etc…, you are making your pitch to the wrong person. If I thought Israel had a defensible human rights record and really was this wonderful democracy defending itself from irrational hordes, I would be happy to support them.
We are again mostly in agreement. Segev and others document the typical European contempt for the Arab. Of course, they also quote a conversation between Arab notables with Jews, saying that they are fine with the Jews, or as they said, a loaf of bread needs some salt, as referring to the Jews, but too much salt will spoil the bread. The Jewish response was, of course, we prefer to be the loaf of bread.
The reality is that land was not stolen. Land was bought. And if you read the books, land was often bought from the very notables who objected to the Jewish presence, and they were mostly not absentee landlords.
The Palestinians blew their chances with a revolt in the mid 1930s, which decimated their military capabilities. That revolt also saw the first meaningful exodus of monied Palestinians to Beirut, Cairo, and Europe. And in by far the most idiotic move, they turned down a Palestinian state that the British offered them in 1938 because the British permitted the Jews to stay. It sealed their fate.
Of course, in 48 the Jews were more effective in securing their space, and in the process, a significant number of Palestinians were pushed out as well. But here again, even before the 48, more than 100,000, possibly 200,000 Palestinians left of their own volition for foreign ports, and these were the people who could have jump-started a Palestinian state. The story is complicated.
Whoops, just rechecked the data; the number left before the 48 war is closer to 50K.
Nonetheless, it's all more complicated. For example, the Arab community in Haifa was surrounded by the Jews and wanted to surrender (Haifa was a successful mixed Arab -Jewish city with equal population), but the Arab high command told them they may not surrender. When the British governor in Haifa heard this, he was so apoplectic he marshaled an armada of boats to evacuate them to Lebanon. In other words, they did not have to leave; in fact, the Jewish community leaders of Haifa urged them to stay.
Finally, most Palestinians have been exiled to the lands that were to be a Palestinians state, which could and should have been declared but was not. Read what happened to the Arab national government of Gaza in 1948-1952.
What I have read was that one Jewish local leader ( the mayor?) wanted the Palestinians to stay, but Zionist militias for the most part did not. If one wanted a majority Jewish state,the majority of Palestinians had to leave and so the Zionist leaders expelled them.
My impression is that in the 20’s and 30’s there were individuals on both sides who got along fine and I could imagine an alternative timeline where it could have worked out, but terrorism on both sides poisoned the atmosphere. Regarding details, I have seen conflicting claims about what Ben- Gurion, for example, really wanted and my views of the leaders on both sides tends towards the cynical.
I agreed with all of Peter’s response and particularly aporeciated what he had to say about Yemen. Peter is correct. The same people who opposed the support of Israel’s barbaric war in Gaza also opposed our support for the barbaric Saudi war in Yemen. I was one of them.
You mention the fact that far more people protested the Gaza genocide. You can blame the media for that. I would see maybe one story every month or so about Yemen and that isn’t enough to break through. In my own experience in real life, I never met a single person who knew about Yemen unless I brought it up. The vast majority of ordinary people disgusted by Israel’s atrocities would have been disgusted by the Saudi a famine, but few knew about it.
Now you can reach for the usual antisemitism excuse if you want, but the fact is we know about Gaza because it started off with a massacre of 1200 Israelis. And guess what? Far more people in the US know about the killing of the Israelis than about the nearly 400,000 dead in Yemen. I don’t see you or others complaining about that, but it is exactly the same phenomenon. In the case of Yemen and Gaza, the problem was that the U.S. supported both Israel and the Saudis and opposed Iran and its allies, so when our allies slaughter people, the US supplies them with the weapons needed to do it. And some of the biggest apologists for Saudi Arabia were people hoping to see an open alliance between the Saudis and Israel against Iran. The big foreign policy goal for both Trump 1 and Biden was to extend the Abraham Accords to include the Saudis.
So it is rich to see so many Israel apologists now talking about Yemen. It was the far left and a few principled people on the right and of course the human rights organizations who were talking about Yemen when it mattered.
You are essentially agreeing with me on Yemen. As you write: "I would see maybe one story every month or so about Yemen and that isn’t enough to break through. In my own experience in real life, I never met a single person who knew about Yemen unless I brought it up. The vast majority of ordinary people disgusted by Israel’s atrocities would have been disgusted by the Saudi a famine, but few knew about it." That was my point and Mr. Harris's point no one cared. SO infact Professor Beinart is wrong to suggest that Yemen protest was similar to Gaza. It was not.
You are missing the point. It was the mainstream press that was responsible for people’s ignorance. Those of us who follow human rights issues more closely knew about it and we spoke against our policy of supporting the Saudi war just as we spoke against supporting Israel. Leftwingers such as Adam Johnson were writing about this in 2016. I remember one of his articles at FAIR pointing out how MSNBC went an entire year mentioning Yemen once or twice.
This is a very common complaint on the left regarding the press. As for Gaza, the entire world knew that Hamas had slaughtered Israelis within a day, so naturally the world also focused on Israel’s response. You can’t have it both ways. If it was correct for the world to know about Hamas’s atrocity, even though far fewer died than died in Yemen, then you are also going to hear about what Israel did.
And again, I can’t tell you how disgusting it is for people to bring up Yemen now only for scoring invalid points. The time to have condemned our support and raised a stink about it was then, when Obama gave the Saudis the green light. And by the way, I first became aware of the existence of John Kirby when he was making excuses for our support of the Saudis. Several years later he was doing the same thing for Biden, defending our support for Israel in Gaza.
I don't know how else to put it to you. Yes, the mainstream press was not interested, nor were college students interested. And that is precisely the point Harris made.
College kids didn’t know. And no, Harris is not making the point regularly made on the far left about mainstream lack of coverage of US supported atrocities. And you are missing the point I made about Oct 7.
The number of people killed on Oct 7 was about 300 times smaller than the number of civilians who died in Yemen but I have never seen anyone on the Israel side complain about the amount of attention given to Oct 7.. We had flags lowered everywhere. Politicians condemned it, as they should. We are always hearing about how ignorant college protestors are. Fine. Why weren’t all the pro- Israel types yelling about Yemen when it mattered? They supposedly follow the issue, know the history, etc..Where were they?
And anyway, given that Oct 7 was given vastly more coverage than Yemen, probably hundreds or thousands of times more, why would you not expect the same attention to be given to Israel’s response, esp since the same politicians who condemned Hamas’s atrocities funded and whitewashed Israel’s.
You and Harris can’t have this both ways. Oct 7 probably got more coverage in a day than Yemen did over several years.
You are right Oct 7 was heard around the world. 1,200 men, women, and children were killed. Some were burned alive, others raped. And Hamas paraded the 250 abductees to cheering crowds in Gaza.
Yes big news. That would be equivalent to 30,000 killed in the US in one day, and that would be big news as well.
But even on that day, many around the world said it was justified. Some hailed it as resistance, and others suggested it should be understood in "context".
All before Israel even responded. Or as Professor Beinart said, the reaction was because of fears about the horrific response that was expected from Israel--bizarre. (If so, maybe Hamas should have thought about this before they started?)
None of these changes the facts as documented by Harris or me that Gaza was a daily headline for two years and counting, and the murder of Yemenis by the Saudis was not on any campus protest, and I believe you agree on that.
The jihad/jihadism distinction is fair, and if I conflated them, I'll own that. But you're doing something different, conflating a politician's rhetoric with an organization's founding ideology. When Israeli politicians cite Amalek, that's wartime rhetoric. When Hamas's founding charter grounds the conflict in cosmic war against Jews as Jews — not Zionists, Jews — and that organization then carries out October 7, the religious framing isn't incidental. It's structural.
On the Likud charter: yes, it calls for sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, and Israel's settlement expansion is real and damning. But Likud has governed for decades without formally annexing the West Bank. Hamas attempted, on October 7, to do what its charter describes. These are not symmetrical situations.
Beautifully stated, Peter. I read Sam Harris’s post and immediately knew you would address his “self-evident” points. After you undermined almost everything he said, it would be cowardly of him to continue to refuse to engage with those who disagree. We shall see.
Well said Peter. I doubt that Sam will have the courage to debate you. He is like Trump, empty blather.
What I think Peter does better that most is to remove the "debate" format from his conversations with those he disagrees with.
People who "win" debates rarely do so on the basis of facts, data or documented history. They play on emotion, prejudice and shared cultural/tribal myths.
Peter simply engages those he disagrees with and introduces historical facts and corrective dialog as necessary, while presenting his point of view in a clear and well reasoned tone.
Thanks, even for this early on the West Coast. You are so right. Sam, like so many in the American Jewish Community, is the enabler of the drunk person to continue his bad behavior. And in the Israeli case, the "Organized Jewish Community" has been the enabler of the apartheid regime for longer than South Africa.
Hats off, Peter! Calling out such ignorant, blind, Israel apologists is much needed. IGNORANCE NO MORE!
This is the sort of context that one NEVER encounters in the corporate media.. Most people and most anchors featured for instance on CNN are closer to Sam Harris in their opinions than they are to Beinart’s facts. That is the real problem. If Beinart and people like him —and not Scott Jennings types—were regulars on mainstream media platforms, Sam Harris would not be taken seriously by anyone
You are a treasure
There is an entire class of "Intellectuals" who have been identifying as zionists whether jewish or not for decades and who have accepted as "self evident" the idea that Israel was right, had no choice, but hamas, etc. etc. They never challenged it and obviously, never considered Palestinians as fully formed human beings : if they had, they would not have been able to make it fit with their zionism, because this narrative just can't coexist with the basic notion that Palestinians and Israelis are equally precious and entitled to human rights.
Now that the "Israel is right / has no choice" mantra is being exposed as a very tattered fig leaf trying to cover very ugly crimes against humanity, people who didn't much care before are starting to challenge a lot of this former groupthink : and those intellectuals, for a large part, they just can't handle it. My french fb thread has quite some examples of supposedly liberal, supposedly intellectual zionists who are globally both embarrassing themselves by the shallowness of their "reasoning" and comfortably outing themselves as despicable Palestinianophobes.
It's, well, eye-opening. Sad, and tragic, but eye-opening.
Well done Peter. It is foolish for a person to claim their infallible opinion, and Sam Harris is one of the intellectual elites that look down on others. When you judge the content of a person’s opinions or actions, you must also look at their output. There are things that I reluctantly debate (and rarely do) based on my morality, but with the understanding that others don’t always agree. If Sam had used an excuse like, “I find these debates exhausting and bad for my mental health,” I think people would have respected that. But he didn’t. He has so much hubris, that it makes him blind.
Peter, I realized I was reading and listening to you and only you for a month because you are my favorite kind of intellectual. It was about time I became a member. (I think you assisted me in Cambridge on an animation series for the Getting To Yes Project. Tom S.)
thank you!
Recently I watched the leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, Kemi Badenoch, being interviewed by Piers Morgan. Some of her views were very similar to Harris’s.
She is asked about Israel’s government at 11 minutes.
https://youtu.be/PtzJJf1L4d0?is=n4T29l4izPcynNYZ
I’ve noticed many of Israel’s defenders repeat the same talking points, presumably scripted by the ministry of Hasbara.
Sam Harris would have to be dumber than he looks to discuss this with someone like Peter Beinart. Sam is about as "intellectual" as Donald Trump when it comes to Palestine. "Me so smart. Palestinians bad." Like, seriously, that's about the extent of it. It's humiliating to watch. It is a kind of derangement. And it's so deranged, it cannot see its disgusting, violent ahistorical racism as anything but the Truth with a capital T.
A conversation with the likes of Sam Harris would be as Ghassan Kanafani said "a conversation between the sword and the neck".
It would be a waste of time. Zionist like Sam Harris should be openly scorned and ostracized for what they are, genocide supporting Jewish supremist. not legitimize with respectful conversation.
Israel delenda est.