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.
Professor Loury,
I – like many others – began listening to you regularly in early 2020. Your voice was one of reason, clarity, honesty, and sanity during that troubling time. While the country and the culture spun out of control, and while elite institutions threw themselves at the feet of “empty suits” peddling bankrupt ideas, you, together with Professor McWhorter, were an anchor to reality.
It is against this backdrop that I am disappointed with your rather blinkered, and dare I say superficial, analysis of Israel’s response to the events of October 7. Below, I provide a brief response to the points you have made during The Glenn Show on this subject.
First, in your initial comments after October 7, you suggested that Israel extend a “historic gesture” by dramatically curtailing its military response, or perhaps even foregoing a forceful response altogether. More recently, you seemed to double-down on this position by signing a Brown University demand for ceasefire. Yet, in its traditional sense, “ceasefire” implies and presumes a degree reciprocity – a willingness and commitment by both sides to halt hostilities. Here, in stark contrast, there is not, nor could there be, a true ceasefire with Hamas, because, by its own repeated admission, Hamas exists to violently extirpate Israel and the Jews within it. Indeed, following October 7, Hamas leadership has explicitly and publicly re-confirmed its commitment to perpetrating further atrocities, even if doing so will inevitably lead to more death and suffering in Gaza. And, of course, it was Hamas that violated the short-lived ceasefire a few weeks ago, knowing full well that by reigniting hostilities, and continuing to hold hostages, it will only deepen the plight of Palestinians. Hamas is not, nor will it ever be, a partner in peace.
Thus, in substance, what you have called for is not a “ceasefire” but rather Israel’s unilateral abandonment of legitimate war aims following an unprovoked attack against civilians, during which thousands of Hamas fighters infiltrated Israeli territory to indiscriminately rape and murder. What you suggest would, indeed, be “historic”, in that it would signal an unprecedented abdication of Israel’s political and moral mandate to protect its citizens. It may be true that in its current form, Hamas does not literally threaten Israel’s existence. But, it is equally clear that, by failing to eliminate Hamas in response to October 7, Israel would inflict on itself an existential wound. An Israeli state that cannot credibly ensure the safety of its civilian population against large-scale rape and murder has no raison d’etre; it has no legitimacy; it is a failed project that cannot, and ultimately will not, continue to exist.
Second, in your most recent Q&A session, you declared that likening Hamas to Nazi Germany is “divorced from reality,” insofar as Israel enjoys overwhelming military superiority over Hamas, as well as diplomatic and military support from the U.S. But, this too betrays a crabbed view of the situation.
Indeed:
Hamas reportedly has 30,000 fighters, and, despite the Israeli and Egyptian blockade on military imports, it has managed to amass an arsenal of sophisticated weaponry, due primarily to its client relationship with Iran. For its part, Iran has more than 600,000 active-duty military personnel, a nuclear weapons program, and sophisticated ballistic missile and drone technology, as well as advanced cyberwarfare capabilities. As a proxy of Iran, Hamas is not simply a low-tech force of ragtag fighters hiding in tunnels, but rather the tip of the spear for an Islamic extremist state hostile to Israel’s existence.
In addition to Hamas, Israel also is threatened by tens of thousands of Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters on the Lebanon border with perhaps more than 100,000 rockets at their disposal; Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen who now regularly launch ballistic missile and drone attacks and are seeking to impose a shipping blockade against Israel; and Iran and Russian-backed Syrian forces with access to, among other things, chemical weapons.
Whereas Israel’s Jewish population is approximately 7 million, the populations of Iran, Yemen and Syria alone exceed 100 million. The collective populations of the word’s 40+ Muslim majority countries – which are largely sympathetic to the Palestinians, and yes, even to Hamas post-October 7 – exceed 1 billion.
While critical and real, U.S. support for Israel is also remote and conditional. It is remote in that Israelis are, and always will be, on the front line. The U.S. provides munitions, but Israelis are on the ground positioning and firing them. The U.S. provides Iron Dome, but Israelis must run to bomb shelters hoping a rocket doesn’t sneak through. The U.S. attempts to deter Iran’s nuclear program, but Tel Aviv – not New York or Los Angeles – is the target if deterrence fails. Moreover, U.S. support is not constant. It will ebb and flow based on U.S. domestic dynamics. It depends on American politics, demographics, economic power, and countless other variables that change with time. Israel’s support in Europe is even less secure, given, among other things, the impact of mass immigration to the continent from the Middle East and North Africa.
In sum, the IDF can certainly outgun Hamas – but, this narrow fact should not obscure the broader realities Israel faces, including that: (i) it is smaller than Massachusetts; (ii) it is surrounded by hostile military forces committed to its destruction; (iii) it is vastly outnumbered in absolute terms; and (iv) if Israel’s enemies collectively and simultaneously attack the country in a coordinated way, as they have multiple times since 1948, it will likely result in the catastrophic loss of Israeli life, and Israel’s existence will depend on America’s appetite for significant military intervention
Moreover, even assuming, for the sake of argument, that a country is under a moral obligation to exercise restraint in war in proportion to the military advantage it enjoys over an adversary, it is not obvious that this alleged principle applies to Israel under the circumstances, much less demands that Israel act with “historic” restraint vis-à-vis Hamas. And, while Israel’s military response will continue to bring death and destruction to Gaza, there is, sadly, nothing remarkable about a civilian population bearing the consequences of a war started by its professed leaders. What is remarkable, by contrast, is the degree to which Israel tries to avoid civilian casualties, including at the expense of the IDF’s safety.
Third, and generally speaking, the professed concern for Palestinian life is – to use a
Glenn-ism – a “pose”. There is no shortage of tragedy in the world that makes the body count of the Israeli-Arab conflict look like a rounding error. Hundreds of thousands of Muslim Arabs killed in Syria; Chinese erasure of Uyghur Muslims; mass killings of black Africans in Sudan; etc. These horrors are met with indifference or small-scale handwringing in the West. What’s more, there is no cognizable pressure on Jordan, Egypt, or the fantastically rich oil-rich Arab states, to accept Palestinian refugees. Nor is there any demand that these countries use their collective resources and political/cultural/religious capital to push the Palestinians in a more constructive direction. Israel – and Israel alone – is deemed to have agency.
One can speculate about the forces at play: is it true anti-Semitism; is it American-style wokeism superimposed on a foreign conflict, with Israel representing the bastion of “white European settler colonialism”; is it that the world implicitly expect more from the Jews? Whatever the reasons, they are political and ideological – not humanitarian.
I close by noting a heartfelt thanks and appreciation for your work as a public intellectual, particularly these last few years. I hope this brief message encourages you to reconsider the positions you have taken, or at least to dig deeper and contend with the implications of those positions.
Best,
Matthew L.
“When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.”
-Golda Meir