On Sam Harris’ controversial essay on Israel

Zionism “the initial demagogic lie (actually two lies) that a land without a people needs a people without a land. … 

“Israel doesn’t ‘give up’ anything by abandoning religious expansionism in the West Bank and Gaza. It does itself a favor, because it confronts the internal clerical and chauvinist forces which want to instate a theocracy for Jews, and because it abandons a scheme which is doomed to fail in the worst possible way. The so-called ‘security’ question operates in reverse, because as I may have said already, only a moral and political idiot would place Jews in a settlement in Gaza in the wild belief that this would make them more safe.

“Of course this hard-headed and self-interested solution of withdrawal would not satisfy the jihadists. But one isn’t seeking to placate them. One is seeking to destroy and discredit them. At the present moment, they operate among an occupied and dispossessed and humiliated people, who are forced by Sharon‘s logic to live in a close yet ghettoised relationship to the Jewish centers of population. Try and design a more lethal and rotten solution than that, and see what you come up with.”

— Christopher Hitchens, Frontline interview, May 2007

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For all the intense criticism that has been hurled against neuroscientist Sam Harris for his recent essay, “Why Don’t I Criticize Israel?,” I think a lot of his naysayers, including Andrew Sullivan, P.Z. Myers, A Million Gods blog and others, missed the larger point.

First, Sullivan seems to take issue with the fact that although the title announces the fact that Harris doesn’t criticize Israel, he then proceeds to criticize Israel numerous times, not the least of which is a statement against Israel’s right to be in the first place. In the text of the essay, however, Harris admits that his position on Israel is “somewhat paradoxical:”

For those of you who worry that I never say anything critical about Israel:  My position on Israel is somewhat paradoxical. There are questions about which I’m genuinely undecided. And there’s something in my position, I think, to offend everyone. So, acknowledging how reckless it is to say anything on this topic, I’m nevertheless going to think out loud about it for a few minutes.

I don’t think Israel should exist as a Jewish state. I think it is obscene, irrational and unjustifiable to have a state organized around a religion. So I don’t celebrate the idea that there’s a Jewish homeland in the Middle East. I certainly don’t support any Jewish claims to real estate based on the Bible. [Note: Read this paragraph again.]

Now to the main part of the essay. Essentially Harris’ point is that Israel, as a democracy in the Middle East surrounded by enemies that have threatened to wipe it off the map for decades now — and for centuries before that — Israel should not be blamed for defending itself, and although thousands of deaths have resulted from the conflict on the Palestinian side, which has been wholly “disproportionate” in Israel, the latter nation has a vested interest in preserving civilians because of the residual and humanitarian backlash that has occurred for years and has flared up again in recent weeks. I don’t necessarily agree with that assessment, and I think Israel has played too strong a hand in responding to the threat from Gaza, and likewise, Hamas’ strategy of using humans as shields is reprehensible to the highest degree. In short, so-called “leaders” on both sides have failed their own people and failed miserably in refusing to broker longterm peace. Neither side has any winners for sure, but innocent people of Gaza, serving only as pawns for Hamas, have suffered the most. 

Here is one of Harris’ main points:

But there is no way to look at the images coming out Gaza—especially of infants and toddlers riddled by shrapnel—and think that this is anything other than a monstrous evil. Insofar as the Israelis are the agents of this evil, it seems impossible to support them. And there is no question that the Palestinians have suffered terribly for decades under the occupation. This is where most critics of Israel appear to be stuck. They see these images, and they blame Israel for killing and maiming babies. They see the occupation, and they blame Israel for making Gaza a prison camp. I would argue that this is a kind of moral illusion, borne of a failure to look at the actual causes of this conflict, as well as of a failure to understand the intentions of the people on either side of it.[Note: I was not saying that the horror of slain children is a moral illusion; nor was I minimizing the suffering of the Palestinians under the occupation. I was claiming that Israel is not primarily to blame for all this suffering.]

And this, I think, is where critics have departed from Harris’ actual meaning and inferred their own. Myers, in his usual explosive tone, had this to say in retort:

The “Palestinians have suffered terribly for decades under the occupation”. Stop right there. What do you mean, we critics are “stuck”? Isn’t that a terrible, awful fact of Middle East history that is being blithely glossed over? Of course it is. Sam Harris apparently does not think it’s that big a deal that the Palestinians are suffering under an occupation, and for someone who wants to claim we have to look at the big picture to see the causes of the conflict, he doesn’t seem to see how that could have led to the hatred expressed by Hamas. Again, not to excuse it…but if you want to address it, you can’t simply call the Palestinians evil bad guys and offer no solutions other than shooting them. Both sides have deep antecedents and a thousand justifications.

Harris didn’t call everyday Palestinians evil or say their mass slaughter was acceptable. Indeed, and perhaps regrettably, Harris barely mentioned the plight of actual on-the-ground civilians who are the real victims in all of this, and regrettably again, he didn’t seem to make it clear that by “Palestinians,” in almost every instance, he meant members of Hamas, not innocent residents of Gaza.

One would think that astute readers such as Sullivan and Myers would have understood the nuance in context of Harris’ larger claim, which was that religious fanaticism such as practiced and preached by leaders of Hamas is really to blame for the suffering in Gaza. In the Middle East, the Israel-Palestinian conflict is ground zero in the whole saga, as fanatics have spent thousands of years tearing each other apart with their thinly veiled claims over territory in the so-called holy land. Compared with the likes of Hamas, Israel is a virtual Mecca of secular thought with a reported 42 percent defining themselves as more worldly Jews.

The larger point, then, is that Hamas’ endgame, if it could have its way, is ultimate submission under Allah for Israel and everyone else for that matter. Perhaps Harris didn’t make a larger enough deal about Israel’s settlements in Gaza, which Hamas views as an invasion of their territory, and he’s probably mistaken to think that the settlements are solely for security, but his basic thesis was not so much a whole cloth defense of Israel — he said clearly that civilian deaths in Gaza amounted to a “monstrous evil” and freely admitted that Israel has probably committed war crimes — but a castigation of religion and its grip on the region:

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.

This kind of confusion puts all of us in danger. This is the great story of our time. For the rest of our lives, and the lives of our children, we are going to be confronted by people who don’t want to live peacefully in a secular, pluralistic world, because they are desperate to get to Paradise, and they are willing to destroy the very possibility of human happiness along the way. The truth is, we are all living in Israel. It’s just that some of us haven’t realized it yet.

Sullivan seems to have completely misunderstood this last part, adamantly disagreeing and detailing all the reasons why we are not, in fact, living in Israel. As I understand it, Harris’ point here is that if radical religion such that is festering in parts of the Middle East is allowed to hop the river and infect us to any large degree in the United States, we will then take on the role of Israel, in beating back the fanatics at our own doorstep. In the same way, radicalism threatens to destroy any society in the world that values human peace and solidarity.

2 thoughts on “On Sam Harris’ controversial essay on Israel

  1. Sam Harris? That would be the guy who supports profiling brown-skinned people at airports as a method of preventing terrorism? Even though it doesn't work, and Israel — which he has cited as a justification for doing this — doesn't do that, because according to them it doesn't work? THAT Sam Harris? Why are you even bothering to pay any attention to him on this issue? He's a fool.

  2. Nowhere does Harris advocate for profiling brown skinned people at airports, and that's an absurd generalization. He even included himself category to be profiled. I commented on it because it has generated a lot of attention, as I noted.

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