One can say that, on October 7, Hamas effectively declared war on Israel, and innocent victims are a reality of war. One can say that Hamas’s use of human shields renders it culpable for some of the civilian deaths in Gaza. One can even say that Hamas attacked Israel knowing—as it surely did know—that Israel would invade Gaza in response and kill many, many of the people that Hamas has the responsibility to protect.
I would not deny any of that. Hamas has much blood on its hands, and some of it is Palestinian. But understanding the strategy of war is one thing, and grappling with the moral consequences of war is another. The former does not negate the latter, and pointing out the obvious fact that Israel had to do something in response does not excuse us from asking questions about the things it is actually doing. We cannot simply survey the incomprehensible destruction still underway in Gaza, dolefully shake our heads, chalk it all up to unfortunate necessity, and then move on without any further attempt to understand the consequences of what the State of Israel, with the support of the United States, is doing to a civilian population that has nowhere to go and very few resources at its disposal.
One way or another, this phase of the Gaza War will end. But that will only mark the beginning of our attempt to understand what Israel, with the US’s support, has done. As John says in this clip from our most recent subscriber-only Q&A episode, he hopes that Palestinians can get past this, just as, after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ended World War II, the Japanese people eventually got past it. They don’t hate Americans. And yet, almost 80 years after the bombs fell, with everyone who had a hand in building and dropping them long dead, we are not nearly through trying to understand the hell we unleashed on the residents of those cities.
Perhaps bombing Hiroshima was necessary. Perhaps invading Gaza was necessary. But the necessities of war can entail the doing of monstrous deeds. The logic of necessity does not absolve us from responsibility for a moral accounting of what is undertaken in its name. That accounting should reflect our humanity. And I, for one, am not ready to sacrifice my humanity on the altar of necessity.
This clip is taken from a subscriber-only Q&A session. For access to Q&As, comments, early episodes, and a host of other benefits, click below and subscribe.
GLENN LOURY: What do you make of this poll? This is from Carolyn A. “How can you justify signing the Brown letter calling for a ceasefire in light of this?”
JOHN MCWHORTER: Oh no.
It's a question to me, you do not have to respond to it, John, I'll be brief. “What do you expect to have come of that given this reality?” And here's a poll of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank since October 7th, the date of the attack by Hamas, a vicious attack on civilians in southern Israel. Seventy-five percent support the 10/7 massacre, 76% have a positive view of Hamas, 98.2% have a negative view of America, and 77. 7% support of Palestine “from the river to the sea.” That is, not a two-state solution where Israel exists. And she then gives a link to the source for this polling result. And she wants to know how I could possibly call for a ceasefire in light of that.
And I'll respond. I mean, I'm not sure that I was right to sign the letter calling for a ceasefire. There are many factors involved. I did so out of a desire to express regret and concern about the loss of life that I saw that was coming in the hope—perhaps unrealistic or idealistic hope—that there were paths forward that could avoid the many, many thousands of deaths that have ensued.
But I must say in response to the question, let me take everything that's given there at face value, that the Palestinian people in the West Bank and in the Gaza have a lot of sympathy and support for Hamas. She wants to know how could I call for a ceasefire given that. And the logic of that claim is that if they hate us, we have to kill them. I am not taking their side. I'm simply pointing out, yes, there is enormous anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish enmity in the Palestinian population. That's a problem. I agree with you. That's a problem. Would that it were otherwise. How is it that the solution to that problem is to bomb?
You say, “Rooting out Hamas.” Well, okay, good luck with that. Good luck with that project. Given the statistics that you've just called to my attention, good luck with the project of, in a sanitized antiseptic way, ridding the Palestinian people of Hamas when they have 98%, 76% or 75% support. Good luck with that. That's my response.
It's such a hard thing. And I try to be open, week by week, to what informed people think about this issue. I personally have no visceral sense of, oh, go fuck them all up. It's just, how do you stop Hamas from doing that again? And if it's true that there is a way that you can go into Gaza—and unfortunately there will be a tragic number of collateral deaths—but if the idea is to, as surgically as possible, stop Hamas—specifically Hamas fighters and the Hamas leadership, [to] take them out—it seems to me that despite that that would create another two generations of fiercely anti-Israel sentiment, that maybe if you got rid of Hamas today, you could keep that sentiment as just sentiment and do constructive things that would prevent their arising more Hamas. My impression was that that was the idea.
If that cannot be done, if somebody can tell me why that would be impossible, then I would change my sense of it. If you don't get rid of Hamas, it seems to me that they're going to do that again. And that can't be. That's the hardest calculus I have ever faced on a war, but they can't do that again.
How do you make it so that they can't? That's horrible. It's absolutely horrible.
Okay. We have to talk about human shields and weapons stores and command controls on the hospitals and all that. We have to acknowledge that the antiseptic and surgical removal of Hamas with “as few civilian casualties as possible” is kind of a dodge. This is more like, you got to bomb the city. Or it's more like you got to do the Hiroshima thing to get the Japanese to surrender at the end of the Second World War.
And then you have to reckon with the moral problem. Isn't it a problem? You're going to tell me this is straightforward? I'm going to kill tens of thousands of people, but I'm going to accomplish my goal. Those people, most of them, are innocent. Unless I'm supposed to read that polling data to say, you see, they support Hamas, they're not innocent after all. They are deserving of the rain of bombardment that's falling on them. And I have a hard time doing that. Try actually being born in Gaza. You didn't get a choice about that.
So World War II, the bombing of Dresden, what had to be done to defeat the Japanese. That's the way you want to talk about managing the conflict between Israeli and Palestinian? You have a nuclear armed state with a massive modern military and with the support of the largest military and most powerful nation on the planet? And you have people crammed into this strip of land who are what they are with the history that they have. And you're talking about the opposition between those two forces in the same way that you talk about the West alliance of Britain and France and so forth against the Nazis? Or about the way that the Americans had to confront the expansionist ambitions of the Japanese in the Pacific?
You have lost touch with reality. Those are not anywhere near close to being the same things, morally. People are not confronting, it seems to me, the horrific, moral, tragic dilemma that they're caught in. They think it's a clean cut thing. No more Hamas.
But Hamas can't do that again, under no sense of morality, under no sense of the evolution of the human species. They can't do that again. And they insist that they will keep doing that until Israel doesn't exist. If that's how they feel--and I don't think that's a performance, that's how Hamas specifically really feels-- they can't do that again. What else could Israel do there? They don't want to negotiate. Isn't that horrible? And yeah, yes. What is it? 15,000 Gazans now? That's a huge number of innocent people.
These numbers have to have large standard errors around them because the sources are problematic.
Tens of thousands. It's horrible.
But we know, a lot of people. And they're being displaced. Their lives are being completely turned upside down.
And they're just people buying groceries and raising their kids.
They live in fear, and their enmity is being earned. They will double down.
Glenn, do you think Israel should have turned the other cheek?
No. That would have been irresponsible. I think there had to be some reprisal, just out of deterrence logic and just out of a political compulsion. Those families had to be reckoned with. Not just the families of the dead, but also the families of the hostages. It would have been a surrender to not have some kind of response.
I'm saying, as someone I read recently has said about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Truman might've been right. You remember that scene in Oppenheimer—you saw the film—where at the end, and the bombs have been successfully constructed and executed, and the Japanese have surrendered, and Oppenheimer is having his own political problems after the war because people are questioning his loyalty et cetera, et cetera.
But in any case, he has an audience with the president. He was the guy, the executive manager of the Manhattan Project, and the war was over. And he's in Truman's office, and he tries to give voice to his equivocation, to his ambivalence, to his insecurity about being the father of a weapon that had wrought so much horror. Many, many, many tens of thousands incinerated in an instant. And Truman scoffs. Truman says, in so many words, “You lily-livered, pantywaist, intellectual egghead motherfucker. Don't you know this is war? I had to make the call. I made the call, goddammit. I made the call. And you're up here wringing your hands? I don't have the luxury of hand-wringing. I was the commander in chief. I made the call. What?”
You could say that. He had to make the call. That doesn't change the fact that it was a crime against humanity to incinerate hundreds of thousands of people in the blink of an eye. That was a horrific deed. There's just no way around it. Necessary? Okay. You could persuade me of that. But that would not detract from the fact that it was a horrific deed. Your hands are drenched with blood.
Notice that the Japanese, they got past it. The essence of Japaneseness is not hating America for what it did. It would be good if Palestinians could approach it that way, too. To move on. To allow that things happened that were not fair. Things happened that were even quite brutal. But that to be a Palestinian is to be many things, many wonderful things, but the essence of being Palestinian is not hating what Israel did. I don't see that. And I pity them for that. That's all.
Wow. Those polling numbers you cited, if they are accurate, erase any legitimacy for a cease-fire. If Gazans are so upset by the consequences of what Hamas did, they could point out the Hamas soldiers among the population. They could show where the tunnels are, where ammunition is stored. They do none of this. They support the butchers that started all this. If they could pick up a rifle and shoot an Israeli (or an American for that matter-) most would do it in a heartbeat. Maybe they should have thought of this before they decided to butcher, torture, rape and murder civilians, from babies to the elderly. From where I sit, Israel can stop hostilities when they damn well please.
I have to say I think this is the first time I have strongly disagreed with Glenn's conclusions. it's not due to the polling numbers, inflated now but nothing surprising, but it's due to the fact that on October 7th, relative morality ended.. at least for me.
The comparison to Hiroshima does not work for me---and here is why. October 7th was personal and barbaric whereas Israel's response is calculated and strategic. That matters here.
On. October 7 evil entered Israel, then proceeded to personally and jubiliantly rape, brutalize, and dismember innocent Israelis. Israel's strategic response, after warning Palestinians to flee, was to clear the way so they could get to the tunnels. There's no moral equivalency here.
On one side you say Israel has a right too defend itself but on another you add "up to a point." Further, "the point' gets to be determined by Hamas and their brilliant PR campaign that got even you, Glenn, to point the finger in the wrong dimension.
So your ultimate conclusion is that Israel does not have a right to self defend. Period.
Further, a ceasefire means Israeli defense effectiveness is predicatedad on Hamas" brilliant PR campaign designed to keep the finger pointed at Israel, the oppressor.
John spoke the truth when he said "Hamas can't do that again, under no sense of morality, under no sense of the evolution of the human species."
Yes, the situation in Gaza is horrific and unacceptable. Who is responsible for that? The brutal fact that Gazans have no place to go isn't on Israel. It's own neighbors refuse them entry but somehow Israel is solely responsible for their post October 7 reality? Glenn, man, c'mon!!