The Moral Question of Gaza

Imagine if, on October 6^th, Benjamin Netanyahu had called you with the following dilemma. The wall surrounding Gaza, despite looking impressive, has the value of the French Maginot Line. Israeli intelligence knows that Hamas is planning a major assault but cannot say when. For all we know, it might happen tomorrow. The only way to stop this attack is for Israel to launch a preemptive invasion of Gaza and kill, take your pick, ten thousand, one hundred one-hundred-thousand, or a million Palestinians. Failure to commit such an atrocity means that Hamas will send thousands of fighters into Israel, kill twelve hundred people, and take 250 hostages. At what point do you say: “Prime Minister, I understand that this is difficult to hear, but there are certain things that civilized people cannot stoop to doing no matter the cost. You must hold back even though it will lead to an unimaginable tragedy for Israel.

This is the fundamental question that has faced Israel since the attacks of October 7^th. On October 6^th, it was a matter of debate as to whether Hamas could pull off an October 7th-style attack. On October 7^th, they proved that they could. As such, any agreement that Israel makes that allows Hamas to remain intact as a military force, inevitably means that October 7^th will happen again at some point. It does not matter that Israel will learn from its mistakes, so will Hamas and its Iranian sponsors. Most importantly Hamas knows that it can commit large-scale terrorist attacks without losing sympathy in the Muslim world or even with the Western left. As such, Hamas is not going to be held back by the main practical consideration that usually keeps terrorists in check, the concern that killing children will make the enemy more sympathetic.

Let us be clear about what the consequences of repeated October 7^th attacks will be. A state that cannot stop invaders from crossing its borders will cease to have the confidence of its people and will collapse. There will be a mass exodus of people fleeing Israel seeking safety. Refugees are a vulnerable group under the best of circumstances. Combine this with traditional anti-Semitism and the fact that much of the world already thinks that Israel is the equivalent of Nazi Germany and you have the making of a second Holocaust.  

Presumably, there is some moral outer limit to what Israel can do even if the alternative is the Holocaust. The anti-Zionists have a point when they argue that having a State of Israel in the face of Arab opposition requires being willing to do terrible things to the Arabs. At what point do we say that it is not worth it even if we say that it is the Arabs who have brought this calamity upon themselves? To kill people, even bad people, means to be a murderer. This applies to the soldier who pulls the trigger as well as Jewish civilians outside of Israel like me in whose name this killing is being done.  

What if the only way to save Israel and, by extension, the Jewish people was to launch nuclear weapons in a first strike against Arab capitals? I can imagine not pressing that bottom and agreeing to be passively led, along with the rest of those Jews deemed not sufficiently anti-Zionist, to the gas chambers. Better a Final Solution to Judaism than Judaism being responsible for nuclear Armageddon, maybe.

Part of the dream of Zionism is that, in a world in which people want to do bad things to Jews, we should be able to plausibly threaten to do bad things in retaliation. It is a fair question whether the moral cost is worth it. What should not be in doubt are the real-world consequences of not having the power to do those bad things. Part of what I admire about Tolstoy’s pacifist writings was how honest he was about the consequences of his ideas. He was open about his willingness to set murderers free to repeat their crimes. Tolstoy did not believe that one should care about this world, certainly not at the price of destroying one's soul through violence. Like most people, I am too much a pragmatist to follow that path, but I can respect people who do as long as they are being honest about it and are willing to apply this principle to everyone and not just Israel. If oppressed people have the right to resist their oppressors then Israel has the right to storm Gaza.    

Thinking in terms of preventing the next October 7^th, allows us to have an honest conversation about Israel’s actions. A common argument against Israel is that Hamas cannot be destroyed and that Israel has no plan for what to do the day after in Gaza. These arguments sidestep the critical point. Israel certainly can wipe out Hamas. It is less obvious that it can do so without killing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. As for a day after plan, it is the international community that lacks a plan for allowing two million Palestinians to remain in Gaza while guaranteeing Israel that October 7th will not happen again. If you believe that Israel should allow another October 7th in order to save Palestinian lives, be honest about that. Make no mistake. The choice is between tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths as well as their likely mass expulsion and another October 7th.  

One of the things that shock me about the pro-ceasefire crowd is how open many of them are about wanting another October 7^th. It is not that they want to save Palestinian lives, they want Israelis to die. The charge of genocide serves a similar role. If Israel is guilty of genocide then the Palestinian people have the right to resist with October 7th-style attacks. Obviously, saying that you want a ceasefire to protect Palestinian children from being slaughtered in an Israeli genocide sounds a lot more humanitarian than you want to butcher Israelis.  

In Search of the People (Part III)

(Part I, II)

While leftist revolutionaries around the world came to embrace third-world peasants, Arab nationalists, and even Islamists as manifestations of the People, Western revolutionaries had a problem as they lacked these groups at home. The United States never had a peasant class. In Europe, capitalism and the Industrial Revolution had eliminated the peasant class in a mostly bloodless fashion and, until the end of the twentieth century, Arab and Muslim migration were not significant issues. The solution was to turn to racial and later sexual minorities.

Mid-twentieth-century American radicals “discovered” blacks, a group that was honestly being oppressed. At a time when white workers were embracing the New Deal and its protections for unions and even going so far as to vote for Eisenhower, blacks stood out as a group whose problems could not easily be solved by lobbying for some changes to current laws. Blacks were up against the well-organized conspiracy of segregation that was passively facilitated by a wider white society that, even subconsciously, looked down on blacks and did not see their plight as a priority.

In the end, though, the mainline Civil Rights Movement proved a failure for leftist revolutionaries. The Civil Rights Movement succeeded in defeating formal segregation by pursuing a moderate path that was fundamentally unrevolutionary. It avoided violence and framed itself as being within the American tradition. For Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., blacks were Americans who, as Americans, were now coming to collect on the American promise. He succeeded precisely because he managed to convince white America that he was not a revolutionary but an American asking for perfectly reasonable American things. 

While the Civil Rights Movement itself proved distinctively unrevolutionary and, even more subversively demonstrated that a reformist movement really could bring about real change within a liberal democracy, it still ended up proving useful to the left. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, while well-intentioned and perhaps necessary under the circumstances, effectively eliminated the constitutional balance between the federal and state governments. Now the federal government can force any law upon a state simply by claiming that it is a matter of civil rights, leaving us with a dangerously overpowered federal government just waiting for leftists to take control and turn it to their own ends.

At the end of the day, the Civil Rights Movement did not solve the economic problems facing the black community. This caused many civil rights leaders, including Dr. King in the last years of his life, to drift toward a more revolutionary mindset. This did nothing to help actual black people. This should only be expected as the purpose of a leftist revolution is not to improve the lives of actual individuals. A group is only useful, and therefore only counts as part of the People, when their problems are not being solved. Thus, leftist revolutionaries have needed to keep blacks poor and blame American racism for it. One can see this most easily in urban policy and education, areas dominated by the left, that have utterly failed the black community economically but have kept alive a sense of grievance.   

The less plausible the charge of racism, in the conventional sense, has become, as Americans have become less racist, the more racism has needed to be redefined in ever more abstract frameworks. This has benefited leftists as it makes the case for revolution. If you are black and your goal is for white people to not hate you and conspire to keep you out of middle-class jobs or even murder you, there is no need for a revolution. If your goal is to not be an outsider in a culture created by white people for the benefit of white people, then the only solution is for there to be a revolution. This will tear down white American culture and place blacks as the People at the center of the new culture. White people will be stripped of any positive identity and left only with the option of being allies of blacks if they wish to not be oppressors. 

The most important leftist success of the 1960s was the sexual revolution. This was indirectly connected to the Civil Rights Movement. As Shelby Steele has argued, white American parents who were complicit in tolerating segregation and felt guilty about it were not in a position to challenge their children over whom they slept with and their kids knew it. Sexuality has long been a tool of revolutionaries as communities require rigid sexual rules to establish clear lines of kinship that place children within the group. Allow children to be born outside of clear families and their community becomes the non-community of the revolution. The Sexual Revolution has been particularly effective at maintaining blacks as a revolutionary class. It has inhibited economic growth within the black community. At the same time, anyone who points this out can be charged as a racist. Thus, blacks are more likely to assume that the source of their problems is racism, as manifested in bourgeois values like the nuclear family, and the only solution is revolution.  

The Sexual Revolution also created a new oppressed group that could serve as manifestations of the People for leftist revolutionaries, sexual minorities. It was leftist revolutionaries who decided that gay people were actually a group as opposed to simply individuals who pursued an action that should or should not be tolerated to various degrees. Furthermore, the fact that the sexual revolution made sexual repression a form of oppression rendered gays an oppressed group. Gays are an even better class of revolutionaries than blacks as accommodating them within a traditional society is even more difficult, hence gays are more likely to assume that their only solution is the revolution and will not be bought off by minor reforms such as the removal of anti-sodomy laws.

Furthermore, the fact that even considering gays as a group is an invention of leftist revolutionaries has meant that the gay community is intrinsically tied to the leftist revolutionary cause and cannot easily exist without it. It makes perfect sense for a black conservative to still want there to be a black community such as their presumably black families. It is hardly obvious why an Andrew Sullivan style conservative gay community would want to operate as a gay community as opposed to being a tolerated minority within their presumably heterosexual families and the wider community. Keep in mind that gays, unlike blacks, are usually not raised with their identity. This is something they consciously embrace as teenagers or later in life.  

Much as with blacks, the gay rights movement involves an act of motte and bailey duplicity. Now that the sexual revolution has happened, it makes sense to not stigmatize people for sexual acts between consenting adults. We might even take the next step and say that government should recognize same-sex marriage. None of this, in itself, would be particularly revolutionary. On the contrary, accommodating homosexuals in such a fashion lessens their ability to serve as revolutionaries and risks their status as a manifestation of the People.

The revolutionary doctrine would be to say that the sexual acts of homosexuals give them authenticity as a manifestation of the People that heterosexuals lack, particularly if they submit themselves to traditional morality. Heterosexuality does make one part of the People but their oppressor. As such, heterosexuals need homosexuals to redeem and make them part of the People. This is done by allowing heterosexuals to become allies and share in the task of tearing down society and rebuilding it around homosexuals.

Homosexuality requires someone to do, or at least desire to do, something that most people would find repulsive. This limits the number of people who can be gay. The solution is for sex education that will encourage more people to overcome any predispositions against engaging in gay sex so there can be more gay people. Alternatively, there are the bi-sexual and queer identities that anyone can embrace. Thus, the LBTQ+ identity has the ability to become a larger group than African Americans and thus a better claim to being the American People. And since LGBTQ+ identity really means nothing more than rejecting traditional sexual norms, this manifestation of the People can be relied upon to truly embrace the revolution as their very identity is meaningless otherwise.  

More recently, as homosexuality has gained mainstream acceptance and lost its revolutionary edge, we have seen the rise of a transgender identity, which furthers the revolutionary logic of homosexuality. Unlike homosexuality, which requires no great metaphysical leap to accept that a person really is attracted to people of the same sex, accepting that someone is trans requires buying into a larger metaphysical system that the person really is a different “gender” from how they were identified at birth. The reason for accepting this new metaphysics is that leftist revolutionaries have placed transgender people as an authentic manifestation of the People and to reject this claim makes you an oppressor and not part of the People. This means that transgender people are dependent on leftist revolutionaries not only to have a transgender community but even to be trans in the first place.

Transgenderism, building off queer identity, is something so nebulous that anyone can claim to be trans and, thus become a manifestation of the People. That being said, “authentic” transgenderhood requires hormone injections and surgery. Going through this means that not only are you the male or female that you claim to be but you are more authentically that gender than those “assigned” their identities by their doctor at birth, thus you are an authentic manifestation of the People. Cisgender people can only become part of the People by being allies of transgenders and acknowledging their greater authenticity.

In the present discourse, it has become common to see rhetoric like “Gaza to Ferguson” or “Queers for Palestine.” If one thinks in terms of helping members of particular groups improve their physical lots in life and overcome oppression, this sounds strange. We are talking about different groups in different parts of the planet, with different needs that might even clash. For example, Hamas believes in murdering gay people. 

These claims begin to make sense once you realize that we are not talking about actual blacks, homosexuals, or Palestinians. Instead, these are simply names for manifestations of the People, united in being rhetorically useful for leftist revolutionaries. The point is not to improve the lot of members of any of these groups. On the contrary, doing so would lessen their usefulness to the revolution and render them no longer manifestations of the People.  Thus, we are not interested in helping gay Palestinians. Such a Palestinian undermines Palestinian peoplehood and, thus, it is a revolutionary act of the People to kill them. By contrast, a gay person in the United States does represent the People so not wishing them mazal tov on their wedding is a counter-revolutionary act that makes you an oppressor. 

The real purpose is for there to be the revolution. This will place the truest manifestation of the People, leftist revolutionaries, in power. In the end, not only will whites, Christians, and Jews not be part of the People but even the "oppressed" groups, which were supposed to be favored to make up for their lack of privilege will eventually also lose their place as they stop being needed and can be replaced with a more plausibly revolutionary manifestation of the People.   

Opposing the Ceasefire in Pasadena Before Purim

 

Last night I attended a Pasadena city hall meeting for a vote on a ceasefire resolution for the Israel-Hamas war. (If you look at the photo attached to the article, I am the person standing in the back in a red shirt and orange scarf.) Unfortunately, the ceasefire call passed in the form of a declaration as opposed to a resolution and the language included a mention that the hostages needed to be released. I guess, considering all things, it could have been worse. What truly struck me was how outnumbered we in the pro-Israel camp were, easily 10-1. I have never felt less sure that we can beat these people. 

I will give credit to the pro-Palestinian activists. For the most part, they were remarkably well-disciplined. There were exceptions such as the woman giving pro-Israel speakers the middle finger.

Also, someone went over to me and whispered in my ear: “We are all Hamas.” That being said, clearly, the organizers of the pro-Palestinian group made an effort to make sure that their supporters kept to the rules and did not boo their opponents. In the video, you can even see someone holding up a text on their phone telling people not to boo. I actually thanked one of their organizers for getting his people to quiet down. I even shook his hand. His response was: “I assume you support genocide.” This organizer might be an SOB, but at least he is a polite SOB.

Unfortunately, our opponents are not fools. They understand that, while anger is useful for whipping up people who are already on your side, it turns off precisely the sorts of average people that you need to convince. As Adam Smith argued in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, anger is the emotion that other people have the hardest time empathizing with. The pro-Palestinian speakers offered a tone of moral authority without coming across simply as angry or hateful. Having cute kids coming out to speak certainly did not hurt. (Yes, I assume that the kids were coached and rehearsed their statements. That being said, I have spent enough time in education to appreciate what it takes to get a kid to stand before a crowd and speak clearly.) The biggest ace cards that the pro-Palestinians were able to employ were the large numbers of Jews who went up to the microphone and said things like: “as a Jew who is descended from Holocaust survivors, I denounce the genocide being carried out by the apartheid Zionist state.” Obviously, it is hard to accuse the pro-Palestinians of hating Jews when so many of them are Jewish.

Seeing how badly one-sided the meeting was becoming, I put my name down to speak and was given a minute to address the council. Here is what I said:

It seems clear that, when talking about a ceasefire, quite a few people here mean that Hamas should get the chance to pull another October 7^th. (This got a response from the pro-Palestinians and they were called to order by the council chair.) This Sunday is the Jewish holiday of Purim when we celebrate being saved from the genocidal plot of Haman. I have a message for all the ideological descendants of Haman out there, particularly the Jewish ones. I admit that I am afraid of you. But I also know that, one day, my descendants will laugh at you. Perhaps, we will make cookies shaped like your ears, fill them with jelly, and eat them. The cookies and not your ears.

My basic idea was to make it clear where the moral high ground lies Our opponents are not human rights activists trying to prevent a genocide. On the contrary, their goal is to carry out one themselves. That being said, I did not want to come across as angry. Showing that you have a sense of humor can be an effective tool to humanize yourself in the eyes of your opponents. In contrast to anger, the desire to find humor even in difficult circumstances is something that people easily empathize with. Finally, and I guess this is Chabad having a positive influence on me, I wanted to reach out even to Jews who are so estranged from their Judaism as to willingly collaborate with people plotting to carry out another Holocaust. Perhaps, those who did not get my joke about hamantaschen will be intrigued enough to ask someone for an explanation. They might even come to realize that Judaism is far richer than simply spouting leftism and calling it tikkun olam. For example, Judaism has you teach your children to make a blessing on hamantaschen and share some with your neighbors.   

There is the old joke that the essence of Jewish holidays can be summarized as they tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat. Purim takes this a step further. Haman tried to kill us, he failed and we will remember his efforts not as tragedy but as farce. More than killing Haman, we get our revenge on him, Mel Brooks style, by making him ridiculous. We dress up like him, get so drunk that we confuse him with Mordechai, and, yes, we eat cookies shaped like his ears.    

Oppression and Alienation: Understanding Palestinian Terrorism

This post owes a debt to Clarissa. I made the decision not to talk about Russia here for the purpose of space and lack of competency in the field but much of what I say here about Hamas and the logic of alienation being used to justify irrational cruelty as an end in of itself has been influenced by her discussions of Russia’s motivations for invading Ukraine and their sense of grievance against the West.

Classical liberalism is fundamentally concerned with physical oppression. The problem with the world is that there are people out there willing to burn people at the stake for believing the wrong things about the nature of the Eucharist or some other obscure metaphysical issue. If only people learned to interfere in other people's private lives a little less, the world would become significantly better, though still far from a perfect, place. This needs to be contrasted with the leftist revolutionary tradition stemming from Jacques Rousseau. Here, the central crime is alienation. To be clear, there is usually a connection between physical oppression and alienation. People who claim alienation will usually be able to claim some sort of historical persecution. This allows leftist revolutionaries to cloak themselves as struggling against some sort of oppression. The reality is that alienation is distinct from physical oppression. By blurring the distinction, leftist revolutionaries can claim that opposing them by definition makes you an oppressor and justifies their use of physical violence against you. This has important implications for understanding current events like the Israel-Hamas war and why people on the left are so willing to support Hamas even as it goes against every value the left pretends to support. 

With persecution, Zayid does a conscious malicious action to Umar, who is the passive victim. The logical implication of this is that Umar has the right to respond by doing bad things to Zayid to cause him to stop. With alienation by contrast, Umar is the victim of historical forces that Zayid might, in some sense benefit from, but are certainly not his creation. These forces render Umar passive and stop him from developing his authentic self as a member of a particular group. Furthermore, alienation might even cause Umar to develop a false consciousness where he becomes grateful to Zayid as his benefactor and comes to identify with Zayid's group. If Zayid were merely Umar's persecutor, he could do something about it; mainly, he could stop or at least lessen his persecutory actions. With alienation, there is nothing that Zayid can do. First, he is not the cause of Umar's alienation, just the practical manifestation of it. Second, any attempt, on Zayid's part, to help Umar will actually increase his alienation. With persecution, there can be more or less of it; with alienation, its mere existence is an ultimate evil. Despite the fact that Zayid is not responsible for Umar’s alienation, by equating alienation with physical oppression, Umar gains the moral right to harm Zayid even if Zayid is a good person who honestly wants to help Umar.

How does this thinking look when applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Imagine a Palestinian living in Gaza before October 7. He is going to work in Israel and gets stopped at an Israeli checkpoint where a soldier beats him up. This would be physical oppression. In a classical liberal story, our Palestinian would get to work and his Israeli boss and co-workers would become aware of the injustices of Israeli rule over Palestinians. This they reject out of their liberal universalist humanism, which teaches that there is really no such thing as Israelis and Palestinians; rather, we are all united in a common humanity. As such, in addition, to getting the Palestinian to a hospital, the Israelis join with the Palestinian to protest against military abuse and work for a two-state solution or even a single secular liberal democracy for all. 

This story becomes quite different if we look at it from the perspective of alienation. Here, the primary crime of Israel is not any land they took from Palestinians or the occupation but the fact that they stand in the way of the development of a true Palestinian consciousness. From this perspective, the real threat is not the Israeli soldier. On the contrary, the soldier serves a valuable purpose. His persecution of Palestinians serves to awaken their consciousness as Palestinians, who as victims of Israel can claim moral superiority. By contrast, the liberal Israelis, through their universalist humanism, challenge the very notion of Palestinian identity. In fact, the more that they attempt to limit Israeli oppression the more they increase Palestinian alienation. It would not help if the liberal Israelis decided to leave their land and give it to the Palestinian. The Palestinian would still live under the hegemony of Western thought as he would be tempted to be grateful to the liberal Israelis and try to now be like them.  

To be clear, Palestinian alienation should be understood within the larger perspectives of Arab nationalism. Once upon a time, Arabs were a dominant power. Then came Imperialism, where Arabs came under European domination. More than just an injustice in the sense of persecution, it brought about alienation. Remember that, unlike the Mongols who destroyed Baghdad in 1258, the French and the British had a plausible argument that it was their right and moral duty to "civilize" Arabs. As such, Arabs lost their proper consciousness of being superior but also came to suspect that the West might really be better. To make matters worse, just at the moment that the British were finally leaving the Middle East, you had the establishment of the State of Israel and it turned out Arabs could not even defeat the Jews. This would imply that Arabs were really pathetic unless we assume that the Jews are the center of a vast conspiracy. The only way to escape this alienation is for Arabs to decisively demonstrate their superiority so that they no longer even have to compare themselves to the West. By destroying Israel and saving the world from the Jewish conspiracy, they would show that they had deserved to be on top as the movers of history all along. (To be clear, while being an Arab is not the same thing as being a Muslim, Islam can easily be substituted for the purpose of this narrative if that is what appeals to the particular individual.) 

Solving Palestinian alienation would require that Palestinians not only physically defeat Israel but do so in a way that gave them the moral high ground as the superior culture. This simultaneously means that Israelis must acknowledge that the Palestinians were right all along but that all the real work was done by Palestinians. Following the logic of Robin DiAngelo, Israelis would have to work to dismantle not only the State of Israel but also even the liberal Jewish identity that made it possible while acknowledging that, due to the enormous crime of Zionism, there is nothing that Israelis can ever do to atone for the unearned privilege of being Israeli. Even for Israelis to take credit for dismantling Israel would be an act of oppression as that would imply that Palestinians are not fully capable on their own and need the help of Israeli "white saviors." All credit must go to the Palestinians who not only defeated Israel all on their own but were magnanimous enough to allow Israelis the illusion of helping out of a desire to help even such loathsome beings as Israelis. In truth, Being an Israeli so twists a person's thinking that even their attempts to atone are secretly still attempts to exert power and therefore oppression. As such, there really is no way for Israelis to help Palestinians solve the problem of alienation. The closest that an Israeli can come is to acknowledge that there is nothing that they can do to atone for the crime of being Israeli but they can only strive to learn to better humiliate themselves. 

Clearly, Palestinian alienation cannot be solved and that is actually the point. As long as Palestinians never overcome their alienation, they can never be held responsible for any of their actions. Furthermore, they have a blank check to commit any atrocity. All of this becomes justified as part of the struggle against oppression. This is a highly attractive offer, one that few people have the mental health to resist.       

Once one recognizes this distinction between physical oppression and alienation, so much of what might confuse regular Westerners about the Israel-Hamas war begins to make sense. Why did Hamas seize power in Gaza after Israel left in 2005 and turn it into a terror base, building tunnels instead of trying to improve the economy? What sort of advocate for Palestine could have thought that attacking Israel on October 7th was a good idea knowing that it would lead to the current devastation of Gaza we are now seeing? Living in peace with Israel once Gaza could develop as its own state might have improved the lives of ordinary Palestinians but it would have still left them in Israel’s shadow, both economically and morally. To overcome their alienation, Hamas needs to defeat Israel militarily while claiming the moral high ground in the eyes of the world.

Most of the towns that were hardest hit were populated by Israelis on the left. These were people who worked hard to improve relations with Palestinians and provide employment for them. This kindness was repaid by Palestinian workers providing intelligence for Hamas on the layout and security procedures of these towns. The largest number of Israeli civilian casualties came from the Nova Music Festival, which presumably had a similar ratio of conservatives to liberals as you would find at Burning Man. This has helped unite Israel. Unlike attacks on settlements, which allow Israeli leftists to argue that it is only the "mean oppressive right-wingers" that stand in the way of peace, the attacks of October 7 have made it abundantly clear that Hamas wants to murder all Israelis, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum. It is liberal Israelis who truly threaten Palestinian identity. As long as the world thinks that there is a version of Zionism that is ok, they will not allow for the full river to the sea liberation of Palestine. Just as there can be no such thing as a liberal Nazi, there can be no such thing as a liberal Zionist. To demonstrate this point, it is precisely the liberal Zionists who must be murdered.

At first glance, it might seem absurd to accuse Israel of genocide. Where are the Israeli gas chambers and crematoria or their equivalent infrastructure-intensive machinery to indicate a top-down conspiracy to wipe out as many Palestinians as possible? Does anyone believe that even right-wing Israeli officials care so much about killing Palestinians for its own sake that they would sabotage the Israeli war effort to cause Israel to fall under foreign occupation just to kill a few more Palestinians? Here, genocide must be understood in the sense of alienation as opposed to physical oppression. Genocide in the sense of alienation does not require anyone to be murdered. You are guilty of genocide if you do anything to interfere with the development of a group’s identity. From the perspective of alienation, the Israelis living near Gaza and minding their own business, even if they were little kids, were the moral equivalents of Nazi concentration camp guards so it was right to kill them. 

From a leftist revolutionary point of view, such actions were not genocide. The Palestinian people rising up against their oppressors as part of the recovery of their national identity can never be guilty of genocide. Furthermore, Israelis, since they are oppressors, have no true identity to be wiped out. On the contrary, as we know from Freire, attacking an oppressor is not really violence but a redemptive act of love.

In a perverse sense, Hamas has been successful. The October 7^th attack surprised Israel. It required years of sophisticated planning and logistics. Now, no one can think of Hamas as incompetent at least militarily. An even more important victory for Hamas is that they have demonstrated that they can kill Israelis in all sorts of horrific ways without losing popular support on the Arab street or even on Western college campuses. The fact that Western leftists have been forced to go against their stated values such as protecting rape victims demonstrates the moral power of Hamas. They are so powerful that they do not have to conform themselves to Western values. On the contrary, it is the Westerners who wish to confirm to Hamas’ values.         

Shelby Steele argues that much of the radicalism of the 1960s was made possible because the mainstream white establishment had lost its moral authority due to being implicated in the crime of enabling segregation. As such, white elites now needed blacks to return to them the moral authority they previously possessed. This meant surrendering in the face of the demands of student radicals regardless of whether these demands had any connection to improving the lives of blacks living in poverty. 

A similar dynamic may be playing itself out between the Western left and Hamas. The Western left has a hypocrisy problem. For all of its rhetoric of overthrowing Capitalism, it has been too easily seduced by its comforts. Campus radicals are not about to give up their iPhones let alone the opportunity to work for Apple. This has given rise to a corporate pretend radicalism without any substance that actually strengthens big business.

Much as the Civil Rights movement revealed the hypocrisy of 1950s white liberals by showing what an actual liberal movement could be, Hamas has shown what it means to truly be a revolutionary decolonization movement. Hamas does not allow concerns about codes of conduct or even the day-to-day welfare of the residents of Gaza to stand in the way of their struggle against Zionism. The Western left knows that to restore their credibility as a revolutionary movement they need to embrace Hamas as the true embodiment of everything the left hopes to be. By supporting Hamas from thousands of miles away, leftists can maintain their moral authority as revolutionary opponents of Capitalism while still being able to live lives of Capitalist comfort at home.

One thing that I would hope readers take away from my discussion of alienation is that it is fundamentally a mind virus. Alienation cannot offer solutions to real-world problems. It is precisely the attempt to do so that worsens the problem. Thinking of oneself as suffering from alienation cannot even solve the personal psychological problem of alienation. On the contrary, feeling alienated is an addictive drug that feels good in the short run precisely because it presents the perfect excuse for not taking responsibility and attempting concrete actions to improve your life. All of this is quite intentional. The purpose of left-wing revolutionary ideologies is to have a revolution that places leftists in power. This requires a class of individuals who are psychologically broken to such an extent that they cannot function in society and therefore can be pushed into supporting a never-ending revolution in the hope that they can somehow be healed.

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Genocide, Ecocide, and, Christopher Columbus

  

I was recently helping a student with an assignment on putting Christopher Columbus on trial. The student struck me as reasonably intelligent and without any strong political axes to grind. My basic pitch to them was that there are good arguments to make against Columbus but he was not a simple cartoon villain. I asked them if they had ever heard of Howard Zinn, the primary influence for this particular assignment. They had not. This is in keeping with my general experience with students. They do not know who Zinn was even when copies of his People’s History of the United States are on their classroom bookshelves and posters with his quotes are on the walls. As counter-intuitive as this may sound, I do not take this as good news. These students are so thoroughly in Zinn classrooms that they are unable to imagine an alternative. Zinn as the author of a book can be countered by simply pointing out that there are other perspectives. Admittedly, this is assuming that the individual has not turned Zinn into scripture. Part of what makes Zinn so dangerous is that he presents himself as offering Gnostic knowledge as to the “true” nature of the United States. This means that, if you disagree with Zinn, you are by definition, one of the “unenlightened” or even the “Satanic” so your arguments can be dismissed out of hand.

What struck me as particularly interesting was that the text framed the charges explicitly in terms of modern concepts like genocide and ecocide as opposed to charges that would have meant something to someone in the sixteenth century like the violation of Natural Law and just war theory. Genocide and ecocide are such new concepts that we are still in the process of establishing what they even are. To be clear, this does not mean that these concepts are illegitimate. On the contrary, much hinges on our ability to incorporate them into a meaningful legal framework. This takes time and careful thought as opposed to throwing these terms around to make yourself sound sophisticated and socially conscious. 

No one has made any serious attempt to prosecute someone for ecocide so we really have no idea what such a charge would look like if brought to a court of law in the twenty-first century let alone to accuse someone in the sixteenth century, before anyone even thought in terms of humans being able to harm something as abstract as the environment. Even in the case of genocide, we are still in the beginning stages of establishing precedents to make it a meaningful crime. Contrast this with an established crime like first-degree murder, where all parties basically agree with the meaning of the charge, leaving the only question as to what the facts are. No defendant is going to get away with claiming that murder is legal.

Making sure that even the defendant recognizes that what they are accused of is actually a crime is important in order to establish a mens rea, a guilty mind. To get a conviction, the defendant needed to have known that what they were doing was illegal in some sense. For example, an essential part of the Nuremberg Trial was that the Nazi defendants knew that what they were doing was in violation of standards and norms of conduct and would invite retribution from the international community if they were caught. Otherwise, they would not have covered up their atrocities during the war and then denied any knowledge of them happening afterward. Without this, prosecutors could not have gotten around the fact that the entire trial was in violation of the principle of ex post facto as the defendants had not violated any clearly defined statutes.   

The recent ICJ charges against Israel are a good example of the problems facing anyone trying to make genocide a meaningful crime. Putting aside what one thinks about Israel’s actions in Gaza, does anyone honestly believe that this trial is really about the war with Hamas as opposed to the question of Israel’s right to exist? Until you can distinguish the two, no genocide trial is going to carry legitimacy.

Murder is a meaningful concept because it is an objective claim that can be disconnected from what anyone thinks of the rightfulness of the perpetrator’s action. For example, I may believe that it is moral to shoot an actual white supremacist like Richard Spencer and not simply punch him. That being said, such an action would be murder, however noble the cause. As such, as a juror, I would be obligated to vote guilty even though I would find myself agreeing with the defendant.

If legal professionals are still working out the details as to what counts as genocide and to distinguish it from what they personally think of the defendant, how are high school students supposed to do any better? One suspects, that part of the point of this exercise is to ingrain into students the anti-law belief that being guilty of a crime is all a matter of whether you like someone and agree with their morality. This is the natural way for humans to think. Unless it is actively educated out of people, we are left with not a legal system but a collection of warring tribes pursuing vendettas against each other. 

This use of contemporary terms to denounce Columbus is all the more frustrating because, if you want to teach students about Spanish atrocities in the New World in a meaningful way, there is no need to bring in concepts that we, let alone sixteenth-century Spaniards, do not yet understand. Instead, we can bring in concepts such as Natural Law and just war theory, which were widely understood at the time.

Sixteenth-century Europeans did not simply believe that they were superior to everyone else and could do with them as they pleased. Medieval Natural Law Theory, which Christians developed out of the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition, took as its starting point that ethics, while of divine origin, was something distinct from Christianity. As such, non-Christians had rights even to the point that non-Christians could be legitimate rulers with the ability to demand the obedience of Christians. For example, Jesus implied that one should pay taxes to the Romans. While medieval Natural Law assumed hierarchy with a king at the top and everyone else their subjects, the king had obligations to his subjects. As for foreigners, the king could not simply wage war, even against non-Christians, without a legitimate cause and once he conquered a land, the people, once they submitted themselves, became his subjects whose rights must be protected.

This is a useful lens to understand Spanish activity because it quickly became clear that the actions of many Spaniards in the New World violated Natural Law and many Europeans were horrified by what they heard. This included Ferdinand and Isabella, who saw Native Americans as their subjects whom they were obligated to protect both physically and spiritually. Far be it for me to want to defend Ferdinand and Isabella who were morally responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews during their expulsion from Spain in 1492. That being said, it is difficult to hold them responsible for what happened to Native Americans.

Introducing students to Natural Law and just war theory would have the advantage of helping them get into the heads of early modern Europeans so we could have a meaningful conversation as to what it meant to move from a medieval framework to the Enlightenment without falling into the Whiggish trap of assuming that this meant going from religious fanaticism to becoming a rational tolerant individual. 

Imagine that you are an educated European hearing about Native Americans for the first time. You might ask if they have governments, property, and marriage, which would establish them as “civilized” even if they are not Christians and greatly limit the right of Europeans to colonize their lands. For example, the Japanese, whom Europeans are soon going to encounter for the first time, are, even if they are not Christians, obviously civilized and, unlike Muslims, have no history of making war against Christians. As such, beyond sending missionaries and merchants, Europeans need to leave Japan to the Japanese.

Even if Native Americans are not civilized and cannot claim ownership over their land this does not mean that they are subhuman and can be abused at will. On the contrary, it is clear that they deserve protection and Europeans should help them become civilized. It would be difficult to teach them about Christianity unless they have already embraced the framework of European civilization and understand Natural Law, without which Christian doctrines like Original Sin make no sense.

It quickly becomes clear that not all Native Americans are the same. Some are warlike and brutal, a threat to Europeans and natives alike. The obvious solution is to fight the “bad” natives and protect the “good” ones. Unfortunately, it also becomes clear that many of the Spaniards who have come to the New World are nothing better than thieves and murderers. (The fact that people in the sixteenth century violated the moral code as they understood it on a regular basis should be no more surprising than seeing people today violate the moral code as we understand it.) Acknowledging the existence of  “bad” Spaniards means that it is hard to tell the difference between the “good” natives who are merely fighting to protect themselves and the “bad” natives motivated by greed and a desire to kill. How about we send godly friers to help form native communities? The good intentions of these friars can be seen from the fact that they are risking their lives to come to America and preach the gospel to the natives without any hope of material gain. The friers will control the soldiers by reminding them of their Christian duty. The friendly natives should want to join of their own free will to learn European ways and become Christians. Those who do not want to join can assumed to be hostile.

All of this sounds reasonable until you realize that the biggest threat to Native Americans was never European guns and steel but the germs Europeans unknowingly carried. An important lesson that I want my students to take away is that millions of Native Americans died despite European good intentions. My students may mean well and their ideas might still end up killing millions for reasons that are beyond their comprehension.    

Contrary to popular myth, pre-modern Europeans did not believe that they were superior to other people. They knew better. It was the Enlightenment that pretended to have discovered the fact that China was an advanced civilization that had developed useful insights regarding ethics. This was somehow supposed to refute Christianity even though Christians had never denied this fact. One could not have been a scholastic who admired Greco-Roman thought without being aware of this. On the contrary, Natural Law is premised on the assumption that one can develop an advanced society with an ethical system without Christianity. It was because our ancient Greco-Roman pagans were basically decent people that they recognized that they fell short of the ethical principles that they knew were true. This led many of them to become Christians in the first place as they felt they needed atonement. It should be noted that Protestants are going to turn against this Natural Law tradition precisely because it so readily conceded that humans could be good, at least a little bit, without believing in Jesus. In this, Protestants ended up accidentally bringing about the Enlightenment.

The only advantage that pre-modern Europeans believed they had was Christianity, which allowed them to go to heaven. They knew that they were not more advanced than other people. It was only once we get to the eighteenth century that Europeans have a decisive edge over everyone else. It is only at this point that Europeans could even begin to ask the question of why they had this advantage and conclude that it actually had something to do with them being somehow superior. It should be noted that for Adam Smith the European advantage was solely due to social and legal systems and not any innate European abilities.

If you were a Native American running into a European who was in the process of dropping the medieval Natural Law model in favor of the Enlightenment, there might be certain advantages but also risks. Our Enlightened European may be in the process of developing a notion of human rights that is unconnected to being part of a political system. Under the influence of Rousseau, our European might look to you as a model of innate human goodness untainted by civilization or Christianity. On the flip side though, unmooring our European from Natural Law and its emphasis on personal relationships is going to limit their sense of obligation to those they have power over. If Native Americans are suffering it must be because they are "unenlightened savages," something that Europeans bear no responsibility for. Prioritizing natives as economic assets or, worse, bodies occupying useful land over souls in need of salvation is going to limit any incentive to treat Native Americans with decency. Most importantly, the Enlightenment had not yet solved the epidemiological problem that turned first contacts into death traps for Native Americans.   

 

Fighting for Peace in Gaza

As a follow-up to the previous post, I hope it is obvious to my readers that there is a profound distinction between pursuing justice/revenge and self-defense. Israel’s actions in Gaza are defensible to the extent that they make it less likely that an attack like October 7 will ever happen again. If it were not possible to eliminate Hamas as a military force (distinct from a political ideology) or at least degrade them as a fighting force so that it would take them years to rebuild then fighting this war would be immoral. Obviously, one cannot justify killing Palestinian civilians simply in retaliation for Hamas’ actions. (As opposed to accepting their deaths as tragic collateral damage brought about by Hamas’ decision to use their own people as human shields.) But even the death of Hamas leaders by themselves could not be justified if it were simply a matter of giving them what they deserve.

If Yahya Sinwar would release the hostages and decide to live in peace with Israel, then Israel should accept a ceasefire with Hamas. Granted, I have a hard time imagining what Sinwar could say at this point that could convince me that he was serious about peace. He may deserve death many times over but that is not our job. I do not care about giving members of Hamas what they deserve. All that matters is protecting the lives of the people living in Israel.

The Oslo Accords made sense in theory. If Yassir Arafat was willing to live in peace with Israel, then the right thing to do was to give him control over the West Bank and Gaza. It was not that Arafat suddenly became a good person whose terrorism should be forgiven. In truth, Israel was relying on his lack of virtue, to be willing to sell out his principles in exchange for political power and respectability. It turned out in the end that Arafat had no intention of pursuing peace and Israel paid the price for trusting him. Similarly, I supported Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 on the logic that, even if it would not lead to peace, it would place Israeli soldiers out of immediate harm’s way as well as grant Israel the moral credibility on the international stage to respond to Palestinian terrorism.

My fundamental mistake regarding the peace process was that I assumed that there was a significant element of the opposition to Israel, at least in the West, that was rational and moral and could, therefore, be satisfied with good faith efforts on the part of Israel to compromise and demonstrate that it took what its critics said to heart. Furthermore, I assumed that the threat of alienating the “decent” opponents of Israel would keep the radicals in line. For example, one would have imagined that Hamas would tell its fighters not to murder children because if pictures of dead Israeli babies showed up on TV that would undermine support for the Palestinian cause among American college students. I was wrong in these assumptions. As such, more than feeling betrayed by the Palestinians for turning down every chance they had for a State of their own, I feel betrayed by the Western Left and no longer trust them to make any pretense of living up to their own stated values when it comes to Israel.

Under the present circumstances, the foundation of my approach to Israel is that I do not see how there can be any concessions on the part of Israel that would not lead directly to dead Israelis and likely even dead Jews around the world. As such, there are no concessions that Israel can make in good faith. Even the concessions that Israel offers the United States, such as allowing aid to Gaza that will go straight to Hamas, should be seen as making a Faustian bargain of sacrificing Israeli lives in exchange for weapons and a veto at the United Nations. Perhaps, it is necessary but certainly not something that I can ever be comfortable with.         

Avenging Noam: Why Oppression Does Not Create Terrorists

 

It is commonly argued that oppression leads to violence. This argument can take the form of outright apologetics for terrorism. It is “understandable” that Hamas launched the attacks of October 7th as they are responding to 75 years of oppression. There is a more subtle version of this argument that grants that what Hamas did was wrong but suggests that Israel’s response is only going to create more terrorists. Every Palestinian killed in Gaza is going to cause their relatives to become terrorists. This argument seems contrary to practical experience. Everyone is oppressed to some degree. Most people do not turn to violence unless pushed by some propaganda effort.

My middle name comes from my half-second cousin, Noam Yehuda. (His grandmother, Sarah Wachtfogel, was my grandmother’s older half-sister from their father’s first marriage.) Noam was killed in Lebanon the year before I was born. As I understand it, he was hit by the shrapnel of an exploding tank caused by a Syrian missile. Presumably, the Syrian soldier who fired that missile is still alive somewhere. How would I respond if given his name and address? Would I seek “justice” for Noam and kill this Syrian? One thinks of the scene in the show Gotham where the young Bruce Wayne confronts his parents' killer.

 

I was not raised to kill people. For that matter, I was not raised to pursue justice, but rather peace. As such, I would introduce myself to the soldier and explain how we are connected through this person Noam. I would assure him that I mean him no harm, recognizing that he was a soldier who did his duty just as Noam was a soldier doing his duty. Perhaps I would invite him to join me at Noam’s grave to pray. Is this what Noam’s killer deserves? I am not trying to achieve justice. The best way to honor Noam is to bring peace and that means shaking hands with murderers (assuming that they are not using the peace treaty as cover to plan more attacks) and letting them live their lives without getting the justice they deserve. Noam's killer needs to make his own peace with God. It is not my job to hasten that appointment or to help him atone through his death.  

If I were to shoot this man and claim that I was avenging Noam, perhaps you might believe me that I was pursuing justice, however misguided my actions might be. If I were to torture the man before proceeding to murder his family and then shoot up a Syrian kindergarten, it would be obvious that, whatever my claims for striking back against oppression, I was doing this because I was a murderous psychopath using idealistic rhetoric as a moral fig leaf. What if I were aided in my killing spree by several thousand American Orthodox Jews? If such an atrocity were possible, it would show that the American Orthodox educational system was not just raising kids with a giant oppression complex but was brainwashing kids and raising a generation of killers.

Note that this is a distinct issue from whether such actions could be justified. Even if defensible, such an atrocity could only be carried out by moral monsters. Decent people the world over would, therefore, be justified in protecting themselves against this menace and would not have to worry about creating more "Jewish terrorists." The terrorists are being created no matter what anyone does. All that is left is to eliminate those terrorists in the short run. In the long run, it will be necessary to go after the larger system that manufactures these terrorists. This would mean taking out political leaders who arm and finance these “justice warriors” as well as the “educators,” who gave them the idea that they had any business pursuing justice through violence. 

One can believe that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is unjust and that Palestinians have the right to violently resist. But, even if Israel was the moral equivalent of Nazi Germany, that would not explain what happened on October 7th. The Hamas fighters would not have raped women and murdered babies, even if those women and babies deserved to be raped and murdered, unless they were raised within a system that actively encouraged them to do so. We have no reason to assume that the Hamas propaganda machine would suddenly stop even if Israel agreed to a ceasefire or even surrendered. As such, Israel has no reason to worry about creating more terrorists. Those terrorists are being created no matter what Israel does so Israel can do nothing but try to kill as many terrorists as possible and prepare to do the same to the next generation.          

Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism? My Response to Mehdi Hasan

Here is a recent Intelligence Squared debate about Israel in which the pro-Israel side loses badly. The problem here is that the motion on the floor is whether anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism. Clearly, it is at least hypothetically possible to sincerely oppose Israel without being an anti-Semite. The pro-Israel speakers, Melanie Phillips and Einat Wilf, never adequately address this issue. What they try to do is argue that anti-Zionism itself, as an ideology, is anti-Semitic even if not all anti-Zionists are themselves anti-Semites; such people simply fail to fully understand their own beliefs.

To make things worse, we have Mehdi Hasan in the opposition. Hassan’s chief strength is that he is a Muslim who is clearly not an Anti-Semite despite being opposed to Israel. He understands that there are lines not to cross and he acknowledges that many people on his side cross this line. Paired with Ilan Pappe, whose Jewish identity allows him to be the rabid one, Hasan gets to sit back and be the "moderate," assuring the audience that opposing the Israeli government and even wanting to replace it with a secular Jewish-Palestinian State does not make someone an anti-Semite. Perhaps I am too easy on Hasan due to my dismally low expectations for Muslims when it comes to anti-Semitism. The fact that he does not foam at the mouth is so surprising as to make him a model of reasonableness.

And this leads to one of the reasons why anti-Zionism, in practice, is anti-Semitism. What I never cease to find so shocking about the anti-Zionist movement is the extent that they do not even bother to seriously pretend that they are about anything other than killing Jews. This is different from the contemporary liberal discourse on hate speech where anything said by anyone who is not part of the "woke" set will be interpreted as hateful through a series of increasingly arcane hermeneutics even if it was perfectly acceptable even for Democratic politicians to say the exact same thing just a few years ago.

I am not asking anyone to be on board with Netanyahu or like Zionism. You do not even have to be an expert on Jewish thought or what bothers Jewish activists. All I am asking is that you do not say things that used to be obvious, only a few years ago, that you should not say. I am reminded of the Simpson's episode in which Sideshow Bob is able to be released from prison despite having tattooed "Die Bart Die" onto his chest.

 

This also is a reason to focus on leftist anti-Semitism, which tends to operate under the banner of anti-Zionism, as opposed to right-wing anti-Semitism even though both are legitimate threats. I expect people on the left to have absorbed political correctness and with it a certain caution with how their words might be interpreted by others. With conservatives, there is much more room to interpret them charitably as speaking in anger. If someone from the left says something that implies murder, they should be taken with complete literalness.

Let us acknowledge two non-contradictory truths. Palestinians have good reasons to not be happy with Israel and even have plausible justifications to use violence. That being said, anti-Zionism, despite its theoretical merits, has come to serve as cover for killing Jews. To be clear, our concern is not people who dislike Jews or say politically incorrect things but people who are actively trying to get Jews killed.

One might argue that when we are dealing with plots to kill Jews we should only focus on those who are literally firing rockets at us or trying to stab us. The reality is that the justification for mass murder is part of the action itself. For this reason, not even J. S. Mill thought speakers egging on angry mobs were protected by free speech. We have the example of Julius Streicher, the editor of the Nazi tabloid Der Sturmer. He was hanged at Nuremberg as a conspirator in Nazi crimes despite the fact that he never was in a position to order anyone killed. The Holocaust required the propaganda efforts of people like Streicher. Thus, he was not a martyr to free speech but a mass murderer as guilty as the people who ran concentration camps.

By this logic, we should not treat apologists for Palestinian terrorism as morally any different from the terrorists themselves. If you call for "Zionists" to be murdered and people kill Jews, you have entered into a conspiracy to murder Jews. It does not matter if you are not a Hamas officer and have never been in contact with them. You have helped to create an environment in which terrorists have reason to believe that their actions will not harm their cause. This makes it more likely that attacks will happen. Thus, you are an enabler of terrorism. If we allow either the enabler or the terrorist to operate freely Jews will die.

So what about the honest anti-Zionists out there like Mahdi Hasan? Ideas do not exist in a vacuum. There can be ideas tainted by their historical associations and the people who use them. For example, I believe that making voters pass a civics test could be a positive reform and would support it in any country besides the United States. In this country, literacy tests for voting played an important role in segregation. That history cannot be pushed under the rug. This thinking extends to conservatives and libertarians who wish to talk about state rights. It can be done but you have to be careful.

Let us be clear, this is not the genetic fallacy. I am not saying that tests for voting are bad because of their racist past nor am I suggesting that all people who support them are racists. (Again, I think, in theory, they might be a good idea.) That being said, it is reasonable for blacks to be on the lookout for people who wish to kill them. If the only way you can think to reform elections is through voter tests then it is a signal that you are not a friend of the black community. It does not matter if this is true or not. Blacks would still be justified, as a practical matter of self-defense, in treating you as if you had entered into a plot to lynch them.

Similarly, I would argue that, once we admit that there are anti-Zionists who wish to kill Jews and that these people are more than just a fringe element of the movement, at a certain point the whole concept of anti-Zionism becomes tainted. It reaches the point where, even though a person accepts the essential argument of anti-Zionism as a theory, operating a non anti-Semitic anti-Zionist movement becomes almost impossible.

Every movement, whether libertarianism or anti-Zionism, had its share of deplorables. The key issue is whether it is possible to disassociate oneself from them. This means that you do not praise them, you do not share a platform and do not act in a way that benefits them. For example, as a libertarian, I have disassociated myself from Ron Paul and the Rothbardian wing of the movement because they are tainted by racism and anti-Semitism. This is the case even though I mostly agree with them in terms of policies. It is not even that I think such people are necessarily bigots. Defending them, even though intellectually doable, simply distracts from the legitimate libertarian message of transcending the right and left partisan divide to open our borders and cut government spending on the drug war at home and nation-building abroad.

We might imagine our non anti-Semitic anti-Zionist spending months organizing a rally to denounce Israel’s blockade of Gaza. You better screen the speakers. It is ok if some of them have made inappropriate remarks in the past as long as no one has been party to murder either directly or rhetorically. You want to memorialize Palestinians killed by Israel; fine, just as long as you make sure those people were not members of terrorist organizations. And if Hamas or Islamic Jihad start launching rockets the day before the rally, you need to cancel it. Anything less and you can no longer Pontius Pilate yourself. You are a party to a conspiracy to kill Jews.

In a similar fashion, terms that may be innocuous by themselves can become tainted. Take the terms, for example, "intifada," "jihad," and "from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free."

While it is possible to use these terms in ways that do not imply violence. Since they have become code words for violence, you do not get to claim your own particular understanding of the term. You use these terms and I have the right to assume, as a matter of self-defense, that you are plotting to kill Jews. 

In this matter, it is important to bend over backward to demonstrate non-hostile intent. Remember that it is your enemies judging you. As a Jew and the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I am not obligated to wait until I am completely sure that you are plotting to kill me. If you choose to call me a Nazi and cooperate with people who are trying to kill me I will assume that you are trying to kill me and wash my hands of any responsibility for your blood.

Not Advocating for Vaccination - And Will Still Not Love Rav Shmuel

My good friend Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein has written a piece "Why I Love Rav Shmuel - And Will Advocate Vaccination Nonetheless" in which he attempts to distinguish between his personal respect for Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky and his opposition to his recent comments opposing vaccinations. According to Rabbi Kamenetsky: “There is a doctor in Chicago who doesn’t vaccinate any of his patients and they have no problem at all. ... I see vaccinations as the problem. It’s a hoax. Even the Salk vaccine [against polio] is a hoax. It is just big business.” While I accept Rabbi Adlerstein's general premise of distinguishing between opposing specific ideas advocated by a person and rejecting the person as a whole, the serious problems raised by Rabbi Kamenetsky's position force the thoughtful person to take a harsher line and view his "sin" as not merely venial, but mortal.

An essential part of living in a society (particularly a liberal one that values diversity) is the ability to create two circles of opposition. One implies a narrow rejection of a particular belief or action while valuing the person's many other worthwhile attributes; the other places the person completely beyond the pale. For example, I recognize that many intelligent people of goodwill support the expansion of government health care. I may oppose such a position, but my opposition, in no way, takes anything away from the positive opinion I hold of them in other fields. Thus, I would defend them to my fellow libertarians by saying: "you should ignore what they believe in regard to health care and just focus on the worthwhile things they have to say." Similarly, members of Hamas engage in social support programs within their community in addition to being terrorists. That being said, a critical part of recognizing Hamas as a terrorist organization is precisely that willingness to not draw a line between Hamas the social welfare organization and Hamas the terrorist organization. This would even apply to members of Hamas, who are solely involved with the social side. All must be condemned as terrorists without any account for any positive aspects. Hamas' "good" work does not lessen its evil. On the contrary, its evil is such that it makes it as if the good never happened. It is even possible that, under such circumstances, the good itself is transformed into evil as it serves to render the entire enterprise all the more perverse.

I must confess that I have yet to come up with an intellectually rigorous method for deciding who belongs in which circle. A step in the right direction would be to ask whether the problematic position directly affects other areas. For example, support for government does not directly connect to a person's personal charity. By contrast, Hamas' social welfare programs are all part of an ideology that seeks to destroy Israel. Furthermore, one should take into account the possibility of the positive being used as cover for their more problematic agenda. I am not worried that supporters of health care will use their personal charity as moral cover for their government agenda. By contrast, I do worry about Hamas using their social programs as moral cover.

Even if we lack clear lines, it is important that we recognize the existence of both people who must be tolerated despite their errors and those who must be rejected for them. There is not another person in the world that I agree with about everything. As my opinions on many issues have changed over the years, I do not even agree with my past selves. Thus, if I am going to live with other people and even with myself, I must be willing to tolerate the existence of at least certain types of errors. That being said, we live in a world in which there are truly dangerous people who mean us very real harm. Others possess radically different values and seek to build a society in their own image on the ruin of our society. Clearly, tolerance as a blank check that does not insist on something in return will quickly turn into a suicide pact that benefits only the least tolerant in our midst.     

In what circle should we classify Rabbi Kamenetsky? Let me admit that I take his comments personally on two accounts. As an Asperger, I have no wish for autism to be used in any campaign against the medical establishment. Why did Rav Shmuel have to walk shomer negiah arm in arm with Jenny McCarthy? Also, a number of years ago, I challenged Rabbi Kamenetsky on his willingness to offer approbations for works on Jewish history considering that he has no professional training in the field. I asked him if he would be willing to write an approbation to a medical book. He responded that he would not as he had no expertise in medicine. I tried to press him on why he did not hold himself to a similar standard regarding history. He did not give me a clear answer; I assume that, unlike medicine, he did not see history as a field operating based on clear rules to be mastered before wading into any discussions on the topic. The fact that Rabbi Kamenetsky has now placed himself in the middle of a medical debate means that he lied to me regarding his belief as to his lack of qualification.

All that aside, there are good reasons to reject Rabbi Kamenetsky across the board simply for his comments as they directly relate to larger issues of scientific methodology and ultimately raise questions regarding his commitment to a halachic process. If you read Rabbi Kamenetsky carefully, you will see that he does not merely reject vaccinations, but the scientific method as well. I recognize that more knowledgeable people than me worry about the health risks of vaccines and that, in theory at least, one might be able to make a scientifically rigorous case against them. Like most people in the anti-vaccination movement, though, Rabbi Kamenetsky foregoes this debate in favor of claiming that the scientific establishment is not only wrong but that they are engaged in a hoax; in essence that they are conspiring against the public. To claim a conspiracy implies a rejection of the scientific method as anyone who accepts this method must also accept that it borders on the impossible for there ever to be a sustained conspiracy in science. Instead of science, Rabbi Kamenetsky turns to the anecdotal evidence of an unnamed doctor in Chicago. Anecdotal evidence is among the most worthless kinds of evidence in existence. Scientific medicine requires double-blind trials. Rabbi Kamenetsky clearly does not believe this and, if placed in charge of a scientific establishment, would operate it in a very different fashion.

For the sake of clarity, let me say that I take no scientific position regarding vaccines. I am not a scientist and, therefore, am not qualified to have an opinion. As a non-scientist, who accepts the scientific method, though, I am forced to operate with the current scientific consensus on the assumption that it is the product of the scientific method. This is the case even though, as a historian, I am aware that any scientific consensus is subject to change. Even if I thought that vaccines were a bad idea, I would still be willing to sacrifice the lives of thousands of children for the sake of defending the scientific method by upholding scientific consensus even when it is wrong.

If we accept my argument so far then we should reject Rabbi Kamenetsky's authority on all scientific issues. This would mean, not only evolution but also anything regarding medicine. No religious believer in the scientific method can accept him as an impartial arbitrator as he operates under a clearly very different set of premises.

Let me take this a step further to argue that even those Jews with no particular allegiance to the scientific method should reject Rabbi Kamenetsky as a halachic authority as there is good reason to be suspicious of his allegiance to any consistent halachic methodology. We already know that Rabbi Kamenetsky has, at the very least, been passively tolerant of a trend within the Haredi world toward charismatic authority that certain specific individuals are subject to direct personal divine inspiration and should, therefore, be listened to. For one thing, this position makes a mockery of Rabbi Adlerstein's claim of the non-absolute nature of religious authority within the non-Hasidic Haredi world. Charismatic authority is as absolute as that of the Almighty. Furthermore, charismatic authority is ultimately contrary to halachic authority (even if believers in charismatic authority might be observant in their day-to-day lives). The moment you grant the merest hint of legitimacy to charismatic authority then you open a Pandora's Box in which any illiterate child can trump the most learned rabbis and every line in the Talmud merely by claiming to have received divine inspiration.

Rabbi Kamenetsky's comments regarding vaccines are relevant here because they strongly suggest that, at least when it comes to science, he does not believe in following any clear principled method, but relies on charismatic authority. Where else does he get the idea to take it upon his shoulders to contradict mainstream science relying simply upon his own authority? (This would be consistent with the common Haredi acceptance of charismatic authority when applied to medicine. For example, the Chazon Ish is widely claimed to have been a great expert in medicine without ever having studied medicine.) Normally, the further one goes from one's field of professional expertise, the more important it is to consciously rely on clear methodology. The reason for this is that, without professional training, the field's methods will not have sunk to an unconscious level to allow a person to operate on their instincts. If Rabbi Kamenetsky is so contemptuous of any methodology as a matter of principle that he would forego them when it came to a field outside of his professional expertise then we should assume that he has written himself a large blank check to do whatever he wants and ignores methodology when it comes to halacha.

Consistency demands that Rabbi Adlerstein make a choice between defending not only the scientific method but also the halachic process and sacrificing Rabbi Kamenetsky. Even though I believe that Rabbi Adlerstein is mistaken in not rejecting Rabbi Kamenetsky, I still respect him. For one thing, the food and conversation at his house are simply too good. He is a wise man and worth listening to. One can even gain some valuable insights from analyzing his apologetics on behalf of Haredi religious authority figures.

The Goldstone Retraction: What was He Thinking in the First Place?

Recently Judge Richard Goldstone has came out with the stunning retraction of his earlier report on potential war crimes during Israel's invasion of Gaza. According to Goldstone:

If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.


...



Our report found evidence of potential war crimes and “possibly crimes against humanity” by both Israel and Hamas. That the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying — its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.


The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion. While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.


This is the type of apology that one rarely sees in today's spin politics and Judge Goldstone deserves to be commended for his willingness to own up to his own mistakes. That being said, I must admit to being bothered by this whole piece in that it fails to confront the basic problem of the entire enterprise of the Goldstone report to begin with.

When I first heard about Goldstone's investigation my reaction was that it was flawed from its very conception in that it placed Israel on par with Hamas in terms of both sides being subjected to this investigation. Hamas is an institution devoted to the delegitimization of the Jewish people and ultimately the violent destruction of the State of Israel. As such, it is impossible for Israel to ever engage in any form of official dialogue with Hamas. To do so would be to admit that there is some validity to their claims to the extent that these claims deserve to be placed before the forum of polite society for consideration. If such a discussion were ever to occur Israel would automatically come out the loser simply in terms of the fact that it would mean that Israel, unlike other countries, would be placed in the subservient position of having to defend its own legitimacy. This would be the case even of Israel actually were to win this debate.

Goldstone, by inviting both Israel and Hamas to participate in his investigation was essentially asking Israel to participate in a discussion with Hamas and accept Hamas as a legitimate member of the brotherhood of civilized people with legitimate opinions to be discussed such as the State of Israel is a criminal enterprise to be put down. Whether or not any Israeli official ever officially sat down with a member of Hamas, Israel would still be accepting that Hamas was a legitimate discussion partner that other legitimate forces might wish to talk to. Thus Goldstone placed Israel in the bind of either accepting the legitimacy of Hamas, the equivalent of Israel putting a gun to its head and pulling the trigger, or of not accepting the legitimacy of the entire Goldstone investigation and not cooperating. Israel obviously chose the latter option and waged a campaign to delegitimize Goldstone, a response that for some reason seems to have caught Goldstone by surprise.

If Goldstone had come back with the most pro-Israel report in the world, nominating the entire country for sainthood, it would not have changed this basic fact and Israel would have needed to reject Goldstone and his investigation. Even now that Goldstone is saying all the right things, I cannot bring myself to support him even though, in terms of content, I agree with him.

Goldstone's retraction reminds me a lot of the comments made by President Lee Bollinger of Columbia University (formally of Michigan, a school that as an Ohio State person can never accept as legitimate) in introducing President Ahmadinejad of Iran when he came to speak at Columbia.

When I first heard that Ahmadinejad was going to speak at a university like Columbia I was horrified. After seeing Bollinger's performance I was even more disturbed. Not that I disagreed with anything Bollinger said, on the contrary, he said everything I would have wanted to say in such a situation. Bollinger clearly had his mind in the right place. So why did he agree to grant Ahmadinejad the forum and the legitimacy in the first place? Either there not being gays in Iran and Israel should be destroyed are legitimate opinions to be discussed in polite society or Ahmadinejad is a rogue thug to be hunted down and shot like a rabid dog, not invited to speak at universities. Obviously, Bollinger did not believe the former, but because he could not support the latter position, for all intents and purposes, it was the former that he was agreeing to invite into our public discourse.

I do not see either Goldstone or Bollinger as anti-Semites who wish to see Israel destroyed. I see them as simply modern liberals unable to resist granting legitimacy to radical Islam even as this means asking first Israel and eventually the rest of western civilization to write its suicide note. If we in the West, including liberals, are going to survive it will because we understand the difference between those ideas which we can respectfully disagree with and tolerate and those ideas which, by definition, are declarations of war to be fought at all costs.

Making Peace With God's Liberal Warriors

From the perspective of international opinion, one of the biggest weaknesses in Israel’s case is the existence of the settlements. Since 1967, the Israeli government has placed or has allowed over 250,000 of its own citizens to move into the West Bank and Gaza, which it had captured from Egypt and Jordon during the Six-Day War. The United Nations and the international community have dubbed these areas as occupied territory and have insisted that Israel withdraw from them. Even worse we repeatedly see, within the western media, subtle and not so subtle attempts to equate the Israeli occupation of these lands with Arab terrorism. Witness, for example, the recent CNN program, God’s Warriors. (If you have not seen the program you can find it in its entirety on Youtube.)

 
It is easy to deal with the direct moral equation. Anyone who claims to not be able to see the difference between living on disputed territory, or even illegally living on land that belongs to others, and blowing up civilians is wicked, insane, or lying. The difficult thing is to deal with this moral equivocation when it is done through innuendo. How many times have we seen this: Both the Israelis and the Palestinians are being pushed by radicals in their own camps or that the radicals on both sides do not want peace. As if words like hawkish, extreme, fundamentalist, or radical meant the same thing in both the Israeli and Arab contexts. Now, of course, Christina Amanpour has enriched our political vocabulary with the terms God’s Jewish Warriors, God’s Muslim Warriors, and God’s Christian Warriors. God’s warriors you know those crazy people, who are responsible for all the trouble in the world. Those people who take their religion more seriously than one should in polite company. They want to enforce their views on others, (i.e. do things that make more civilized people uncomfortable) and even resort to violence. Whether or not this is fair, the settler movement is a weapon with which serves to muddy the moral waters.

This brings us to the essential weakness of the settler’s case, one that it has ignored. In justifying their continued presence in the territories, they have focused on defending their actions on biblical, moral, and security grounds. They step around the diplomatic and public relations issues. When confronted with these issues, defenders of the settler movement argue that the negative view of the settler movement is simply due to anti-Semitism and that it is simply an excuse to attack Israel; if it was not the settlements, it would be something else. To me, this simply becomes a Jewish version of the leftist a tyrant is someone who checks up on what library books people check out argument. In both cases, the line of thinking demonstrates a failure of the imagination. If the Devil is anyone who disagrees with you then what word do you use to describe a man with goat hooves, horns, and a trident? It is bad enough when liberals seem to be unable to see a moral difference between President George W. Bush and Osama bin Ladin. Jews, in this case, have even less of an excuse. The anti-Semites really are at our gate. Hamas is in power in the Palestinian authority. Ahmadinejad, that lunatic whose name I cannot pronounce for the life of me, is in power in Iran, free to host Holocaust denial conferences. Amanpour may be a lot of things, including an incompetent liberal (I do believe that there is such a thing as competent liberals) and absolutely ignorant about religion. I do not think she is an anti-Semite. She sees the world through the framework of modern-day liberalism. She accepts its models and tries to fit everything into its narrative. In the liberal narrative, religious fundamentalists are intolerant and seek to impose their beliefs on others even through the use of violence. Wars are fought because both sides failed to understand each other; hence both sides are automatically guilty. All that is needed for peace is for all sides in a conflict to embrace tolerance. I may reject this way of thinking, you might also. The fact remains that this is the narrative through which the vast majority of the West sees the world. Until there is major intellectual sift we are going to be stuck with this worldview. I am trying to do my part to bring about such an intellectual sift, it is one of the reasons why I write this blog, but I do not expect things to change anytime soon. This means that if we want to get public opinion on our side then we are going to have to make our case within the context of the liberal narrative. If this means dismantling settlements then so be it.

I admit that there are people who are going to hate us no matter what we do. I accept that no matter what we will be faced with a full-scale Arab propaganda assault that will attempt to demonize us. That should not blind us to the fact that there are millions of well-meaning liberals out there who would be willing to support us if we played by their rules. That means paying a price, such as the painful pullout from Gaza. Even today, I am not sure if Israel made the right decision or not but this action has benefited Israel. Do you think that it is a coincidence that even the European Union is not supporting Hamas and that Israel was allowed to wage its war in Lebanon for as long as it did without the world jumping in? Israel gained a level of moral credibility from its actions. The world saw Israel make an incredible sacrifice and that Palestinians responded by electing Hamas. Israel was willing to play by the liberal rulebook. It went after its own “extremists” and embraced the “path of peace.” Hamas has refused to even pretend to play by the liberal playbook. It refused to even acknowledge Israel. This type of moral reasoning may make me sick and it may not be fair, but this is the world that we live in and these are the rules that we have to play by.