Transcript for #362 — Six Months of War

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, it's been six months since October 7, 2023, and the blizzard of moral confusion about the atrocities committed on that day. And about Israel's response to them remains something to behold. In this episode, I speak with Douglas Murray and Josh Seps about the current state of the war and public opinion. Several things have happened since I recorded this conversation with Douglas and Josh, however. Most notably, the IDF accidentally killed some of the staff working for Chef Jose Andreas's aid organization, World Central Kitchen. This was obviously a tragic accident, and yet, much of the world has responded as though it weren't an accident at all, and that it is somehow plausible that the IDF has intentionally murdered in aid workers The fact that so many people have responded in this way tells you everything you need to know about the status of Israel and the level of moral intelligence out there. Some people have asked me if the ongoing carnage in Gaza and in particular this killing of eight workers has changed my view of the war. The short answer is no, which might be surprising to some of you. I shouldn't be surprising to anyone who has listened to what I've said previously about the war. I've released several solo podcasts since October 7th, in particular the sin of moral equivalence, the bright line between good and evil, what is Islamophobia, and five myths about Israel and the war in Gaza? If you've listened to any of those, you probably understand what I think. But I'll make a few very condensed points here, which might help explain why I think Israel absolutely has to win this war. And that any call for a ceasefire, especially one that doesn't first demand the return of the hostages. is not only absurd, but obscene. Now generally, I'm very hawkish on the topic of geodism. And I have been ever since September 11, 2001. While my views here are widely mischaracterized and often misunderstood, I make no apologies for them. Any one who thinks that we can compromise with jihadists, either doesn't understand jihadism or some species of lunatic. But please believe me when I say that I wish I never had to touch this topic ever again. It is vile. And confusion about it, especially on the part of secular liberals, is also vile. Nothing reduces my faith in humanity more. Then routinely confronting educated people who have no capacity to discern the moral hierarchy here. The difference is so stark and so simple. For instance, there are people who use their own children as human shields or worse as bombs or there are people who kill their own daughters for the crime of getting raped because they have stained the family's honor. There are people who care more about violence done to a truly terrible book than about the destruction of whole societies. And at this point in human history, the overwhelming majority of people, who are this confused about how to live good lives, are Islamic extremists, and the worst of these are jihadists. Now Hamas is a jihadist organization. In my view, that's all we need to know about it. The question of how it got that way is fundamentally uninteresting. As is the question of why so many Palestinians have come to support it. It would be like asking in 1941 how the SS became so radicalized. And why do so many millions of Germans support it? That's an interesting question now, right now that Naziism has been defeated. But in 1941, there was nothing to do but kill Nazis. I feel exactly the same way about jihadists. In fact, jihadists are worse than Nazis in my view. They don't have the same power the Nazis had in the 30s and 40s, which is a very good thing, and we should keep it that way. But their ideology is actually worse. Gehodism is essentially Nazism plus an expectation of paradise. It's Nazism plus religious fanaticism. Nazism plus an eagerness to be martyrred and to see their children martyrred. There are many differences between Nazism and Gehodism, of course. But they only make the Nazis look comparatively benign. Okay, Naziism was a quasi-religious phenomenon. These people were not rationalists. There's basically racist mysticism anchored to a cult of personality. But the Nazis didn't use their own women and children as human shields. That would have been worse. How could you have made Auschwitz worse? Well, you could have given the guards a belief system that made them feel actual religious ecstasy, as they heard at innocent people into gas chambers. That would have been worse, and it would have been worse had these beliefs been central to the worldview of a majority of ordinary Germans, and therefore difficult to separate from their other religious beliefs that gave their lives meaning. Right, that would have been worse than what Naziism actually was. And that would have made it harder to purge from German society after we had killed a sufficient number of committed Nazis. Now, to have made clear many times before, my support for Israel in this conflict. is not born of my identity as a Jew. It's not born of my attachment to the religion of Judaism, of which I have none. And while the eruption of global antisemitism in response to October 7 has changed my sense of the vulnerability of Jews everywhere. My support for Israel in this war isn't due to a special focus on the problem of antisemitism, or a special connection to Israel as a country. is born of a special connection to civilization, to the norms of open societies, to individual rights, and freedom of thought, and to secularism, and rationality, and basic decency, that is to everything that Jihadists seek to destroy. which is to say that if Denmark were fighting a war against jihadists, who had just murdered 1,200 innocent people and taken hundreds hostage, I would express precisely the same support for the Danes. And if you doubt this, just take a look at what I wrote and said, during the Danish cartoon controversy, which obviously had nothing to do with Israel or Judaism. or go back and see what I said or wrote about any other eruption of Islamist insanity in the last 20 years. Conversely, if the Israelis were as captured by religious fanaticism and intolerance as the Palestinians are, if they had literally elected a death cult of aspiring martyrs to run their government, if their main cultural product for decades had been suicide bombing, I wouldn't care who won this war. Again, for me, the conflict is between civilization and its enemies. Now, as for the loss of civilian life in Gaza, it's absolutely horrific. As I've said before, there is no argument that makes sense when you're watching the bodies of dead children pulled from rubble. But as terrible as the destruction of Gaza is, Hamas is ultimately culpable for what has happened there since October 7. There was a ceasefire on October 6th, and at that point Gaza was getting more international aid than almost any place on Earth. Hamas was using that aid to prepare for war, and then they started that war by butchering over 1,000 people and taking hundreds hostage, and Hamas could stop the destruction of Gaza at any time. They could not have started the war in the first place and could have used the billions in international aid to create a peaceful society on the Mediterranean. But obviously that was not a life project that interested them. They are, after all, Gihadists. But at any point in the past six months, they could have returned the hostages and surrendered, or perhaps just returned the hostages and gotten safe passage to Qatar. And the loss of innocent life in Gaza would have stopped. Ask yourself, how is it that everyone has forgotten the hostages? How is it that Americans have forgotten or perhaps never even knew that there are American hostages among them? These are not prisoners of war, their hostages. How is it that all the pressure and condemnation has been on Israel and not on Hamas? It is completely surreal. As I said before, apart from knowing that Israel really must destroy Hamas, I haven't known how they should go about doing that. Surely the strategy of bombing an occupying Gaza can be debated. But after October 7th, what can't be debated is whether Israel is justified in doing what it needs to do to destroy Hamas. And it does seem quite plausible that some significant invasion and destruction and occupation of Gaza was the only way to do that. There was probably a better way for the Allies in World War II to have defeated the Nazis, and if I had been alive then, I certainly hope I would have felt compassion for the non-combatants of Dresden and Hamburg and Colon and Munich. I wouldn't want to have to defend every aspect of those Allied bombing campaigns today. I'm sure that some of what we did was morally indefensible. That way of waging war was world's apart from what the IDF has done in Gaza. There's no comparison. But the reality was that Germany started that war and that mattered. Germany produced the SS and the Einsatzgruppen and produced the ultimate example of genocide to which all other genocides are compared. And Hitler was extraordinarily popular among the Germans all the while. There was no clear line of demarcation between Nazis and ordinary Germans, because so many millions of Germans fully supported the aims of the Third Reich. Well, the Palestinians have given us a mass and a validly genocidal death cult. And Hamas remains quite popular in Gaza and the West Bank. This matters. There will be no peace in the Middle East until Gehondism is destroyed. And in my view, it has to be destroyed just as emphatically as Nazism was at the end of World War II. It has to be seen by ordinary Palestinians and the so-called Arab street and Muslims worldwide to be discredited. And given how much international pressure has been brought to bear on Israel, I'm not sure how likely that outcome is. Of course Israel has made some terrible mistakes in Gaza, and the recent killing of aid workers is the latest example. But this is the kind of thing that happens in every war. There are always friendly fire incidents where the good guys wind up killing their own soldiers to say nothing of innocent non-combatants. Every conflict the US has been in has produced horrors of this kind. We bombed weddings and funerals in Iraq and Afghanistan. Remember Pat Tillman? We killed our own celebrity football player. Killing anyone but the bad guys, amounts to an act of spectacular self-harm, especially for Israel, which has held up to greater scrutiny and to higher standards than any other nation, and under conditions that are objectively more challenging than any other nation has ever faced. Now hopefully Israel is busy learning whatever lessons it can learn to make fewer tragic mistakes, but none of its mistakes, however terrible, suggests that Israel is on the wrong side of this conflict, or that they should stop fighting before destroying Hamas. They are fighting an urban war against a terrorist regime that is doing everything within its power to maximize the loss of civilian life on its own side. The length to which Hamas has gone to ensure civilian casualties is unprecedented, again, on its own side. Linger over this detail for a second. This gets my vote for the most perverse behavior in human history. No one else does this. Using your own people as human shields, relying on the fact that your enemy will care more about the lives of your own children than you do. How is it that so many people in the media and on podcasts to say nothing of the activists and the college students and the TikTok zombies can't see the asymmetry here. It is everything. and everything we care about only exists on one side of this divide. It really is safe to say that no army has ever faced the challenge that Israel is confronting in Gaza. Hundreds of miles of tunnels under hospitals and schools and mosques and homes built to shelter jihadists not innocent men, women and children. The innocent men, women and children are meant to stay in place as human shields to protect the tunnels This is totally diabolical and totally new. And there's good reason to believe that the IDF is done a better job in waging this war ethically than we have done in any of our past engagements that didn't present nearly the same challenges. At some point I'll have a military expert on the podcast who can discuss these claims in detail. And as I say in today's conversation, I don't think the war will end here. I don't see how Israel can stop before they destroy Hezbollah in Lebanon. In fact, I don't see how this war stops until they or we topple the current regime in Iran. Israel just assassinated some Iranian commanders in Damascus and now the world is waiting for Iran's response. Even if Iran doesn't respond or responds in a way that's calibrated not to escalate things. After October 7th, I don't see how Israel can live with the current regime, just wittling away on a nuclear weapon. It is the very definition of an existential threat. In any case, none of what I just said entails support for Netanyahu or any hard-right government in Israel, much less for the building of settlements in the West Bank. It's absolutely clear that Israel needs to sideline its own religious fanatics, and I've been saying as much for 20 years. But to equate the fanatics of Israel with Hamas, is to once again fail to understand the problem of geodism. We have to have some sense of proportion. Anyway, I cover some of this ground with Douglas and Josh in today's conversation. Again, this was recorded about 10 days ago before the killing of the eight workers, which seems to have marked some kind of tipping point for a world opinion. I caught Douglas and Josh toward the end of their tour of Australia, where they were doing a series of public talks. Douglas Murray is an associate editor of the spectator. He has written several books, including the strange death of Europe, the madness of crowds, and the war on the west. And he has been tirelessly covering the aftermath of October 7th, and the war in Gaza. Josh Zepz is an independent journalist who left legacy media to focus on his own platform, which is uncomfortable conversations with Josh Zepz. A podcast, a live events operation, and a YouTube channel. Today we discussed the war in Gaza, the common confusions about it, the prospect of a widening war with Hezbollah and Iran, whether the iron dome was a mistake, a point which Douglas raises, which is interesting to contemplate, the sentiments of Israeli Arabs, there are certainly glimmers of hope there, the problem of Islamism in Europe, the risk of a resurgent right wing in Europe, the crisis at the southern border in the U.S., and other topics And now I bring you Douglas Murray and Josh Seps. I am here with Douglas Murray and Josh Seps. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me.

So I hear you are completing your conquest of Australia, Douglas, facilitated by a local. Where are you in the tour?

Well, this is diplomatically. As a famous atheist back in the day, I can tell you my average groupie for probably a decade was a 70 year old man. So I know that crowd.

Yeah, I'll talk a while though. So Douglas, you know, you've been omnipresent in coverage of the war in Gaza, at least online. I mean, I'm not because I'm seeing it at all broadcast to YouTube in general, but how much time have you spent in Israel at this point since October 7th?

And can you give a general impression of what it's like there and how it is real feels? I mean, we hear reports of just, there are various political schisms. I mean, it's widely reported that politically the government is in disfavor, but everyone is quite united around the war. And can you dissect out the sense of what it's like politically and socially there?

What do you make of the reasons for that beyond it being a symptom of, I'll be an unacknowledged one of anti-Semitism?

Well, some people will say, certainly in the U.S. and the U.K. that the crucial difference is that we're implicated in what Israel does because we sell them weapons. This is a point that, you know, Nome Chomsky always makes.

But I mean, you know, this to my eye is just clearly bullshit because we sell Saudi Arabia weapons. In fact, they're the largest buyer of our weapons, I believe. And, you know, as you know, they've killed something like 400,000 people in Yemen fairly recently and one could well ask where are all the protests, you know, where are the convulsions of conscience throughout our universities? You know, it hasn't happened and I think it won't happen because what really seems to be energizing here is a hatred of the West and, you know, to a degree that has surprised many of us a hatred of Jews as somehow the strangely, some kind of a pothiosis of Western oppression.

Nobody was just to defeat ISIS, right? No one made the moral property of defeating ISIS, contingent upon anyone having a plan for what to do after ISIS was repeated. ISIS was acknowledged. to be pure evil. And the question here, I mean, I think there's this mystery that we're to some degree glossing over, which I think certainly your push back against Douglas glosses over at Josh, which is that why is it that there's such a glaring sin of omission here on the part of almost the whole world, which would be the acknowledgment of the shocking moral disparity between the two sides, right? And this conflation is as though the IDF and as though the Israeli government were the moral equivalent of Hamas. And it is though you can with a clear conscience articulated demand for a ceasefire in Gaza, which is understandable given all the carnage in Gaza, but it shouldn't be possible to even form the sentence demanding a ceasefire without first calling for his Douglas pointed out a return of the hostages. And really, I would say without first calling for an unconditional surrender of Hamas, I mean, that if you want to get back to zero as, you know, untenable as zero actually was, You have to acknowledge that there was a ceasefire on October 6th and Hamas, a group of sheer barbarians committed atrocities of a sword that no one should be able to make the slightest apology for. This is not resistance. It's barbarism and the fact that not only can't the world acknowledge that clearly We live in a world where the UN has brought more charges against the state of Israel than in his broad against all other countries on earth combined. And this includes Iran and Sudan and North Korea and countries that have actually committed genocide in the case of Sudan. So that is a starting point that's so bizarre here.

Just one question for you guys on the point of the erosion of support, such as the support was ever given. There was certainly support from the United States, and that appears to be eroding to some degree in the Biden administration. And then as you point out, someone like Schumer has said some surprising things. To what degree do you view that as a sincere erosion of support and to what degrees adjust a panicked democratic party signaling to a local audience that all you could people in Michigan should really still vote for us because we're worried.

Well, to what degree is this mirrored on the Israeli side where you have Israel seemingly incapable of communicating to the rest of the world in English in a way that's persuasive because I worry that perhaps Netanyahu for similarly cynical and personal reasons is playing a Trumpian game with his own political future. But perhaps any Israeli Prime Minister would have to play to domestic politics to keep some coalition together. So what degree is Israel's failure to be as transparent and as soul searching and as willing to make obvious concessions to the concerns of the world publicly. Do you think that's a symptom of its own domestic political pressures? I think I share your view that no matter how articulate Israel could be in self-criticism of any missteps in the war thus far and its own commitment to You know, humanitarian purposes and Gaza, etc. I still think that the rest of the world wouldn't much care. It would buy them, you know, maybe 15 minutes of leeway, and then people would be just as condemning of them attempting to win a war in the first place. But maybe not. I'm just, I do think it's true that their messaging has been fundamentally inadequate.

We know that the day after plan would be for Israel's actual enemies. I mean, the more or less imagery here is so glaring, because Israel's actual enemies, you know, Hamas has below the regime that controls Iran at the moment, you know, if not the Iranian people themselves, their aspirations are explicitly genocidal, right? That's the day after.

And that's, you know, as you know, I view this situation through this larger lens of geodism and Islamism versus the West, or open societies generally. And I think, you know, we can leave aside the question which we've all touched on one another degree about what degree Islam itself is. invariably a part of this problem, but that, you know, in my view, that really is for the world's two billion Muslims to figure out, right? I mean, they have to figure out whether they're going to effectively repudiate the doctrines around martyrdom and jihad and blasphemy and apostasy and the rights of women, et cetera, that make Islam such a wellspring of intolerance. But it's just to say, the problem is much bigger than Israel and Hamas, and it's much bigger than global antisemitism, though I think I share everyone's shock at what a massively resurgent problem that turned out to be. But I mean, this is why I think parsing the history here, which everyone is eager to do, and many of the listeners to this podcast are eager to have me do it. I think parsing the history is a fool's game because everyone, you know, every each side and perhaps they're more than two here, have their completely discordant and, you know, incompatible views of the history. And it simply doesn't matter. It would be going forward, I think we have to focus on what the various groups want to accomplish now. And what would they do? What would each group do if they had the power to do it? And there again, I think we come back to a crystal clear asymmetry, which is one side would actually commit a genocide. And to focus narrowly on Hamas for the moment, that's absolutely clear. They have said they want to perpetrate October 7th again and again and again and again. And I think the idea that there's a bright line of demarcation between Hamas and the Palestinians is a delusion at this point. It's not to say that all Palestinians share this genocide, but most of them do.

Yeah, I mean, there's certainly enough to, so as to make any notion of a two-state solution, with real states, more or less unthinkable at this point. So I'm wondering, what you think the solution is even in principle now. I mean, like, I just, you know, I don't see how I just give you my view of it and feel free to debunk it, but I consider, I don't consider it especially informed. It's really just based on my doing the moral math around this. dichotomy between the two sides, but I don't see how the war stops with Hamas. I don't, first of all, I don't see how Israel can do anything other than truly eradicate Hamas. I mean, if they reduce Gaussage a rubble and there still is an effective core of Hamas that rises up and takes control over the rubble. That is a loss, right? And it's a loss that will be triumphantly spun by jihadists everywhere. So Hamas has to be destroyed, but I don't see how they can live with the status quo in the north. So I don't see how they avoid the imperative of destroying his beloved. And frankly, I don't see how we avoid the imperative of destroying the regime in Iran, either. So I don't see where the stops And I certainly don't see how we reboot to a status quo where anyone with a straight face is talking about a two state solution.

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