{"id":59664,"date":"2026-06-10T10:47:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T18:47:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=59664"},"modified":"2026-06-10T11:48:41","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T19:48:41","slug":"response-to-sam-harris-refusal-to-debate-critics-of-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/10\/response-to-sam-harris-refusal-to-debate-critics-of-israel\/","title":{"rendered":"Response to Sam Harris’s Refusal To Debate Critics of Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the outset of his recent article<\/a>, Sam Harris explains that he considers \u201cHamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the IRGC\u201d to be \u201cworse than Nazis.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is noteworthy. Over the last 25 years, these groups have killed a total of maybe several hundred thousand people. By contrast, the Nazis killed 30 million people during World War II, including six million Jews. In Iran, there is a small but active Jewish community, which the IRGC has not attempted to exterminate. By contrast, the Nazis attempted to exterminate most or all Jews in the lands they occupied.<\/p>\n

Also, lumping the groups together makes little sense<\/a>. Hezbollah and the IRGC fought against<\/em> al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. (Meanwhile, former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan described<\/a> al-Qaeda as being \u201con our side in Syria.\u201d) And al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have killed far more people in\u00a0terror attacks<\/a>\u00a0than Hamas, Hezbollah, or other Iran-backed groups.<\/p>\n

Putting all that aside, Harris goes on to say that his \u201cviews about the conflict in the Middle East will not fundamentally change unless my critics produce evidence that Israel has become as evil as her enemies.\u201d Given how evil Harris regards Hamas as being, he would presumably consider any outside organization that sought to prop them up as being similarly evil.<\/p>\n

We know that Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s government did precisely this<\/a> \u2013 as numerous<\/a> quotations<\/a> from public officials attest. In fact, Netanyahu reportedly<\/a> sent Mossad chief Yossi Cohen to \u201cbeg the Qataris to keep funneling money into Hamas.\u201d His explicit aim was that of dividing the Palestinians and preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state. In other words, Israel\u2019s government sought to keep an organization that is \u201cworse than Nazis\u201d in power to achieve the cynical aim of dividing the Palestinians.<\/p>\n

Suppose we accept that Hamas is evil. Is it not also<\/em> evil to prop them up for cynical reasons, knowing they could attack at any time, and then, when they do attack, launch a bombing campaign that kills tens of thousands of innocent people?<\/p>\n

Harris might decline to answer. After all, he\u2019s \u201cnot interested in exploring all the ways that Israel has missed the mark\u201d because \u201cthe ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast.\u201d As evidence for the latter claim, he lists various heinous things that Palestinians have done.<\/p>\n

However, a similar list of heinous<\/a> things<\/a> done by Israelis could be compiled, which is why Harris\u2019s critics would obviously reject any claim of a \u201cvast\u201d ethical difference between Israelis and Palestinians. In any case, the question of which side is more ethical in some overall sense is less important than whether specific policies are ethical. Is Israel\u2019s denial<\/a> of political rights to Palestinians in the West Bank ethical? Is the bombing<\/a> of suspected militants while they\u2019re at home with their families ethical?<\/p>\n

Harris concedes that \u201cIsrael has its religious fanatics too\u201d but maintains \u201cthey aren\u2019t the same sort of fanatics we find in Hamas or Hezbollah.\u201d He is presumably aware of all the incendiary<\/a> statements<\/a> from Israeli politicians and public commentators concerning what should be done \u2013 not just to Hamas but to the people of Gaza. It is unclear why these individuals should be regarded as different from \u201cthe sort of fanatics we find in Hamas or Hezbollah.\u201d No reason is given.<\/p>\n

Harris places \u201cmilitant Islam\u201d at the root of the conflict, declaring that \u201cI think militant Islam is ten times worse than you think it is.\u201d Yet he omits that for much of the conflict\u2019s history the Palestinians were represented by the PLO<\/a>, a secular nationalist organization. (Hamas<\/a> wasn\u2019t even founded until 1987.) \u201cThe problem\u201d is surely a fundamental disagreement over land, not one particular ideology that has become prominent since the late \u201880s.<\/p>\n

As an aside, Israel supported<\/a> Islamists in Gaza as a counterweight to the PLO, leading the historian Avner Cohen to describe Hamas as \u201cIsrael\u2019s creation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harris proceeds to argue that \u201cif the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace.\u201d As many pro-Palestine commentators have noted<\/a>, there is a clear test case of this prediction, namely the West Bank. Here, the Palestinian Authority rules in coordination with Israel. There are a few tunnels, rockets, or armed militants.<\/p>\n

So, is there peace? Not for the Palestinians. Israeli settlers terrorize them<\/a> with impunity. And they face numerous controls, checkpoints, and other indignities in their daily lives. It is very far from the \u201cdiverse, tolerant, and prosperous society\u201d that Harris envisions for such circumstances.<\/p>\n

To his credit, Harris acknowledges the \u201cmany crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank.\u201d Yet he can\u2019t see how anyone would disagree that this is all the Palestinians\u2019 fault for not laying down their arms.<\/p>\n

Harris also acknowledges that \u201cthe suffering in Gaza is terrible.\u201d However, he suggests the attention it receives is out of proportion with its severity when compared to other conflicts around the world. As an example, he cites the war in Yemen in which 377,000 people may have died. He further notes that, like in Gaza, the US supplied arms to some of the belligerents (Saudi Arabia and the UAE).<\/p>\n

A case can certainly be made that the war in Yemen should have received more attention. However, the comparison with Gaza is incomplete. The figure of 377,000 deaths in Yemen comes from a UN study<\/a> that estimated, for the period 2015\u20132021, the number of deaths that occurred given the war as well as the number that would have occurred in the war\u2019s absence. It is therefore similar to an estimate of excess deaths<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To make such estimates comparable across times and places, they are typically<\/a> expressed as a percentage of the expected deaths \u2013 that is, of the number that would have occurred in the war\u2019s absence. In the case of Yemen, this comes out as 43%.<\/p>\n

In the case of Gaza, the corresponding figure<\/a> for the first year of the war is over 600%. The reason this is so much larger than the figure for Yemen is that there were only 6,454 deaths<\/a> in Gaza the year before the war, owing to the enclave\u2019s small population and comparatively low pre-war mortality (thanks to the efforts of UNRWA). So in terms of excess mortality, the war in Gaza is far worse.<\/p>\n

Referring to Israel, Harris claims, \u201cThere is only one nation on Earth that must continually argue for its right to exist.\u201d This is remarkably obtuse. While some commentators do dispute Israel\u2019s \u201cright to exist\u201d and many regional countries do not grant it full recognition, Israel does in fact exist as a state. By contrast, Palestine does not<\/em> exist as a fully fledged state \u2013 largely because of the actions of the US and Israeli governments.<\/p>\n

So on the one hand, we have a state whose \u201cright to exist\u201d is disputed by some people. And on the other hand, we have a non-state being prevented from existing by the very state Harris claims is the only one on Earth \u201cthat must continually argue for its right to exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Noah Carl is Editor at Aporia Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @NoahCarl90.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the outset of his recent article, Sam Harris explains that he considers \u201cHamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the IRGC\u201d to be \u201cworse than Nazis.\u201d This is noteworthy. Over the last 25 years, these groups have killed a total of maybe several hundred thousand people. By contrast, the Nazis killed 30 million people during […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":669,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_seopress_news_disabled":"","_seopress_video_disabled":"","_seopress_video":[],"_seopress_pro_schemas_manual":[],"_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable_all":"","_seopress_pro_rich_snippets_disable":[],"_seopress_pro_schemas":[],"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_social_image_id":0,"_social_image_url":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1358],"class_list":["post-59664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"0","custom_donate_message":"","_social_image_id":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/669"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59664"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59669,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59664\/revisions\/59669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59664"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=59664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}