Shalom.
This post is the 3rd in a series of special Wednesday editions that will focus on myths about Israel and the war in Gaza, based primarily on Sam Harris’s essay by the same name. Last Wednesday we covered “Proportional Response”, this week will focus on the myth that the Jews are “colonizers” and the wacky notion that October 7 was a legitimate response by Hamas and the Palestinian people. But first, a few words on Kamala’s first major decision, her VP selection, Tim Walz, who some have coined, “a progressive in a hunting cap.”
Did Kamala cave to the Bernie wing of the party by passing over a devout Jew, Josh Shapiro, because he might cost them, as the satirical Babylon Bee put it, the “Death To America” vote? Could be. Given the criticality of Pennsylvania, and the tremendous popularity of Shapiro in that state, it certainly makes you wonder. (On the positive side, with Cori Bush losing her primary, at least The Squad now has one less anti-semite in their ranks.)
Political pundits make the point that a VP selection should follow the hippocratic oath: “do no harm”. And, like it or not, even though a clear majority of Americans, (even college kids!), still support Israel and the war to eradicate Hamas, in the current version of the Democratic Party, Shapiro probably harms the ticket. But as the Daily Free Press put it, “consider what this means: the most qualified person to help a major party nominee win the presidency was passed over because he’s a proud Jew with a strong connection to his heritage.” Ugh.
As I said in my previous post, any three of the finalists would have made a good VP, and I am excited about Walz and supporting the ticket. I am not a huge Kamala fan, but she seems to have matured as a politician since her horrible 2020 campaign where she couldn’t garner more than 15% in any state, and she certainly has surrounded herself with a better team, bringing on a new echelon of senior advisers, most prominently David Plouffe, the former top political adviser to Barack Obama. And with the news yesterday from Nate Silver showing Kamala beating the orange turd in his latest model, things are looking up!
Now for some myth busting, courtesy of Sam Harris.
Myth #3: The Jews Are Colonizers and the Palestinians are Indigenous People.
There has been a continuous presence of Jews in the land of Israel for thousands of years. The Jews, therefore, are an indigenous people of the region. They were also indigenous to Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Turkey, Iran, and other Muslim countries—before being driven out of those countries by Muslims. (Curiously, no one at the U.N. is worried about the Jews so-called “right of return.” Is anyone pressuring Muslim countries to give Jews their homes back? No. These are the sorts of asymmetries one should notice.)
In any case, Israel is not unique among states in having been created by outside powers, just drawing lines on maps in the aftermath of WW2. Pakistan was born in the same year and in the same way, and yet no one questions its right to exist. Nearly every nation on Earth has emerged from a chaotic history of conquest and the displacement of people. There are now 22 official Muslim States and over 50 Muslim-majority countries. This is the result of centuries of Muslim conquest. There is exactly one Jewish state. And yet only Israel must continuously confront charges of its illegitimacy. Only Israel must continually advocate for its right to exist. There are nearly 200 member states of the UN, and Israel has been sanctioned by that body more than all the countries in the world combined. Does that mean that Israel has behaved especially badly? No. There are countries like North Korea that have turned its entire society into a prison camp. There are countries like Sudan, that have perpetrated actual genocides. There are counties like Egypt and Somalia, where nearly 100 percent of girls are subjected to genital mutilation. There are countries, like Syria, that have killed orders of magnitude more Muslim noncombatants. As I already pointed out, there are countries like Iran that have used child soldiers, by the tens of thousands, in suicide operations. And yet the UN sits in perpetual judgment of the one embattled democracy in the Middle East that is fighting for its actual survival—against a death cult that revels in atrocities and in the martyrdom of its own civilians. I know the UN sounds like it still has some gravitas—it’s the United Nations, afterall—but on this and several other points, it has become a morally bankrupt organization. There are even reports that employees of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) took part in the massacre of October 7th—as insane as that sounds. And the United States has now paused funding because of this. The US alone gives UNRWA around $300M a year. And, as has been widely reported, UN funded schools teach Palestinian kids to hate Jews and aspire to martyrdom. The word “corruption” doesn’t even begin to encompass the problems here.
Myth #4: The atrocities committed by Hamas (and over one thousand Palestinian civilians) on October 7th were a legitimate response to oppression.
Israel left Gaza in 2005—forcibly removing thousands of its own citizens—and billions of dollars in international aid have since been spent there. So the “oppression” of the Palestinians in Gaza—by Israel—is at least debatable. While Israel has sought to maintain a secure border with Gaza all those years, so has Egypt—and yet no one blames Egypt for making Gaza an “open-air prison.” However, even if we accept the charge of “oppression,” it must be said that not all oppressed people respond by raping, and torturing, and murdering noncombatants.
The Tibetans have been truly oppressed by the Chinese for many decades, and yet they have never committed atrocities against Chinese civilians. When the Jews of Germany were herded into ghettos by the Nazis, those who escaped didn’t rape and mutilate German teenagers or burn German babies alive in reprisal. There are countless historical examples of real oppression, and yet very few cultures have produced a bottomless supply of suicidal terrorists. There might be many societal factors that explain these differences, but one is surely the Islamic doctrines around martyrdom and jihad. People’s religious beliefs really are motivating. We can see this with fundamentalist Christianity in the West. The fundamentals of religion matter when you’re a fundamentalist. And it matters that the fundamentals of our various religions are different. Mere religious tribalism is always a potential source of intolerance and violence—it is much worse when there are specific doctrines that advocate intolerance and violence. Again, we need the world’s 2 billion Muslims to honestly acknowledge this problem and find some way of moderating their faith, specifically around the doctrines of martyrdom, jihad, apostasy, and blasphemy–which put their faith in perpetual conflict with the modern world.
That’s all for now. Let’s hope things don’t get any crazier in Israel and the entire region this week.
Brad out.
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