What's at Stake in Israel?
with John McWhorter & Coleman Hughes
The shock of Hamas’s brutal, inhuman October 7 attacks has not worn off, nor do we yet know how extensive Israel’s retaliation will turn out to be. We are still very much in the midst of the opening stages of what seems likely to be the most consequential open conflict between Hamas and Israel in many years. John, Coleman Hughes, and I had planned on discussing the controversy that has greeted Coleman’s TED Talk. While we spent the first part of our conversation on that topic, none of us felt like we could ignore what was happening in Israel, even if we were not sure exactly what to say.
Certainly, none of us has a solution. Hamas must be stopped. An organization with genocidal ambitions that savagely murders civilians in the streets cannot be allowed to operate with impunity. But with the long, complex history of the region and with the lives of still more innocent Palestinians and Israelis at risk, a more comprehensive analysis of the situation demands more than simple condemnation of bad actors. In this clip, you’ll see John, Coleman, and me attempting to find a way forward in a difficult conversation. More destruction will come with time, but perhaps so too will more clarity.
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GLENN LOURY: We're here on October 14th, 2023, exactly one week after October 7th, which was the day, just a week ago, on which the Hamas terrorist organization launched a historically unprecedented massive assault against civilian targets in the south of Israel, killing many hundreds, kidnapping, mutilating, desecrating, slaughtering men, women, children, elderly, et cetera.
I could go on. I think everybody in earshot knows what I'm talking about. And I just feel like we probably ought to close our conversation out here today. None of us are necessarily experts on this particular topic, subject matter, and foreign policy. But we are citizens of this country and of the world with some commentary about these events.
JOHN MCWHORTER: The idea that Hamas was justified in the extent of what they did. Not just a few missiles, I hate to say not just a few people murdered, but this. That that was justifiable because they are the oppressed rather than the oppressor in this situation. What I see is a laziness among a certain kind of thinker on the hard left, and that's basically that the world is about white people and black people. White of various kinds and black of various kinds. And Hamas and the Palestinians, in this case, are seen as the black people and the Jews are seen as the white people. And the idea is that you can do anything, that anything is justified in order to get the “white person's” boots off of your neck, including what Hamas has done here.
And I completely understand that Israel has blood on its hands as well. But Hamas started this one, and in such an extreme way. And yet there are people who would actually sit there and applaud that kind of butchery, including people who Hamas themselves have nothing but disgust for and might even consider interfering with their being living people. For anybody who's gay to cheer on Hamas because they're coming from the left, for example. How long would they last in in Gaza? What kind of life would they have led? And that goes for a lot of other people, including people who are not men. Just the idea that they are heroes, I find it lazy.
I find it lazy as—Glenn, you'll get this one—cheering the rioters on in 2020 because people tearing down their own neighborhoods because of George Floyd, because they're black. It's okay to tear down your own neighborhood. And you see this sort of thing again and again, this idea that if the person is oppressed, then it's okay for them to do things that would chill you to your socks if you saw the oppressor doing it, even if the oppressor was doing it much, much less.
And it's disturbing because it's condescending. Basically, you're saying that Hamas, having no responsibility for their actions, oppression has made them less than fully human and beyond responsibility. And because Black Americans are seen that way so often in so many situations, it irritates me. The idea that an educated person in particular would look at what happened, would look at what happened even with the rave and think, “Yay! Hooray!” I'm utterly disgusted, because those people think they're ahead of the curve. They think that they're the enlightened ones. No, they're in the dark. It's awful.
COLEMAN HUGHES: Now this gets to one of the deepest and I think most important questions when you're looking at this conflict or any conflict, which is what are the actual end goals of each side? I was thinking about this the other day. When we think about World War Two, nobody says, “What a horrible war. I'm thinking about the innocent loss of life on both sides.”
And that would be an appropriate reaction, but it's not how we tend to think about World War Two. We tend to think, “Thank God the Allies beat the Nazis and prevented them from building a genocidal empire.” In other words, we think about the goals on each side of the conflict, knowing that waging war entails terrible, terrible things in general.
If you ask what really are the end goals of Hamas and what are the end goals of Israel, I think you come to two very different visions. I think that Hamas wants to do what it did on October 7th, ideally, to every Jew in Israel, eradicate them by any means necessary, and then establish a Palestinian Islamic state over the whole land.
JOHN MCWHORTER: And one clue that you're correct is that they say so.
COLEMAN HUGHES: Yes, they're quite explicit about that in their charter. It makes sense of all their behavior, including their behavior towards their own people.
Now, on the other hand, what does Israel want? I'm sure if you ask the settlers in the West Bank, they want something different and more religious-sounding than secular Israelis on the whole. We pretty much know what Israel wants, because they have the power in the situation. If they wanted what Hamas wanted, but in reverse, if they wanted to eliminate every Palestinian, every Arab, they could do that tomorrow.
JOHN MCWHORTER: If Israel goes in there and levels the whole northern half of Gaza, which it looks like, as we record this, that's what they're thinking about doing—telling people to leave, and then they're just going to run it down flat—it's painfully clear that what that's going to create is another generation of bored, angry, undereducated young men who hate Israel and keep on doing the same sort of thing. I don't see how it could be different, and I wonder if Israel could consider not doing that because I'm not sure what would be gained, except for a temporary reprieve, by bulldozing where most people in Gaza live and also inevitably killing a whole lot of people while they're doing it. I certainly understand the emotional appeal, but I don't see why that is a useful tactic. And I'm afraid that's what is coming up. Israel needs to talk about having the power. I wish they could exhibit a certain forbearance, which is maybe too much to ask. I'm not running Israel, but still.
One thing that occurs to me right away is Hamas is not the Palestinian people. It is Hamas. It's a terror organization. It's an Islamist organization. It is what it is. Those people here in the United States who have sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians--and I'm one of them--need to be very clear about the nature of that organization and the moral clarity to be able to see barbarism and terror for what it is, need not come at the expense of being able to sympathize with the historical disaster for Palestinian Arabs, which the creation of the state of Israel for many of them has led to. It seems to me, no need to choose between those two things.
And here, let me go one step further. Civilization versus barbarism. The West—order, enlightenment, human rights, abolition, freedom—versus the Dark Ages. Are we seeing, graphically being played out before our eyes, the necessity to make a choice? Where do you stand? Do you stand with the forces who would undermine and tear down the achievements of the last 300 years, where Israel stands with those achievements? Or do you take your postmodern, post-critical theory, postcolonial, ideological views to the point of being able to look askance at the murder of hundreds of people in the name of fascist ideas? You choose.
JOHN MCWHORTER: The barbarism point, Glenn. See, there's so many people among us who would say that the barbarism is okay if it's the oppressed, that there's nothing else they could do, and at least the barbarism is striking against the colonization coming from a whiteness that needs to be questioned. And so for them, it's that paradigm. So it's not barbarism, it's a necessary kind of authenticity and a punch against predatory imperial whiteness. For them, that's the paradigm, and so they would choose the barbarism. And you know, they say things, they cluck cluck, “You know, well, it's unfortunate,” etc. For them, it's almost a Hegelian thing, I get the feeling. That's the way history has to proceed.
That's a hard thing to cut through. I mean, maybe I'm just getting too upset about a certain kind of person who is in the commentariat. What really matters is the lives of the people on that little piece of land.
The Gulag Archipelago: Stalin. Kampuchea: Pol Pot. How many starved to death in China? I mean, liberal values actually have something going for them in terms of the creation of political circumstances that allow for human flourishing. And the opposite of liberal values have consequences that can be measured in millions of lives. This is not nothing. This is, as they say, a moment of truth.
COLEMAN HUGHES: And the last thing I'll say is I think the direction Israeli politics is going in, more and more to the right, not just because of this incident but prior to it, partly as a result of just the demographics of the country. The ultra-Orthodox used to be a tiny minority, and now it's like a third of Israeli children under a certain age are ultra-Orthodox, tend to be pro settling the West Bank, pro expanding those settlements for religious reasons.
It appears to be a very, very grim situation to me because a huge opportunity was missed in 2000. That's the closest they ever came to a two-state solution. The Israeli public has only gone more to the right since then. The Palestinian public has been rejectionist throughout. And so I think the opportunities for a real durable political solution, it's possible that they've just they've just passed us by permanently. And this is something that will only be resolved through violence for the foreseeable future. It could get worse. Sad to contemplate.
Before we dive into Gaze, there are many people who worry about what we did to both German and Japanese civilians during World War II. "Slaughterhouse 5" anyone? And that is just one, popular example.
There is a lot of ignorance in this short discussion. Israel pulled out of Gaza. Israel sent in their army and forcefully removed Israelis but left all the infrastructure they'd built intact. Hamas razed anything the Israelis left behind.
Then came the terror campaign known as the First Intifada. Hamas revealed their innovation, the suicide bomber, which is what led Israel to built their fence.
Even with the fence Israel has tried to send food and medicine into Gaza for years. Hamas has deliberately limited what is allowed in to keep their boot on the neck of the people of Gaza.
As there were limited opportunities for employment Israel opened their border and allowed Palestinians to cross and work. This allowed Palestinians to gather information about where and when to strike.
Look at a map. Gaza has miles of beaches on the Mediterranean. Any other country in the world - Egypt, Israel, France, Italy, Greece, etc. would build resorts and become a fantastic tourist destination. But Hamas spent all their time and energy and hundreds of millions of dollars on wiping out all the Jews in Israel.
And then there is Egypt... but I'm tired of writing.
It's disappointing how little you seem to have prepared for this discussion.
From my perspective, I can only see this conflict, historically, in the context of the international balance of powers. Locally, between Israel and the Palestinians, it is a matter of actual rights and wrongs, of the aspirations of two peoples who come into conflict. But since the start, Palestine has become a symbol of the much broader conflicts of powers in the region and in the world. This is why it is so hard for people to disengage from ideology about it and see the actual people involved.
Israel is a very complex society. The Palestinian society is -- has been, in many respects, much more complex than what it seems as well, even if the state of conflict has flattened it into uniformity at least at surface level.
But nothing of this matters because, in the eyes of the world, the Palestine question has become a symbol that completely overshadows the parties actually involved, their human motivations.
Since the very start... a peculiar strand of antisemitism that never existed in the same cultural terms in Islam was planted among Palestinian Arabs by a kind of antisemitism of European descent -- there was opposition to the immigration of Jews and their buying lands in Mandatory Palestine, there was a nationalist Arab movement born as a consequence of the fall of the Ottoman empire after WWI, when a concept of nation states began to take shape in the Middle East also under the influences of Western culture -- but Nazi ideology played a huge part in fomenting antisemitic hatred in Palestine, as is evidenced by any study of the many declarations of the Grand Mufti al-Husseini, of al-Qassam of the Black Hand, and of al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; all these declarations make reference to global Jewish domination conspiracy theories that draw directly from the Protocols of Zion.
The dream of the early Zionists on the other hand was of an Eretz Yisrael that included the whole of Palestine.
The partition into two states was proposed first a few years before the start of WWII by the Peel Commission and rejected by the Arab leaders, while the Zionist leaders accepted it (though we know, by internal documents, that they did not accept it without reservation of further action).
After WWII, the Soviet Union and the entirety of the Western Left strongly supported the State of Israel in the beginning. But it happened that the Communist parties in Israel did not seize power, but rather a labour coalition, which positioned Israel in alignment with the West -- and the Soviet Union dropped its support for what could not become a satellite state, and looked elsewhere.
Since then, the conflict in Palestine became one of the theatres of confrontation of the Cold War, and the actual issues on the table took backstage relevance. I have a strong perception that the entire problem of Islamism has grown and festered in consequence of bad choices of both main actors in the Cold War. How things could have developed if the allies of the Palestinians and the allies of Israel had pushed towards reason and compromise rather than using the conflict for their own propaganda, we will never know.
But things are as they are. The conflict has wrought havoc on Palestinian society, pushing Palestinian Arabs to support more and more fundamentalist positions. And it has soured and twisted Israeli society to a much lesser but still painful extent.
How it will end it is difficult to say now. I see more hope among the Israeli Left than what is expressed by Mr Hugues. What I see in the country, what I hear from the part of my family that is there and from my son who was visiting when this horror happened and flew back to fight, is a strong determination to destroy the perpetrators of this crime and extirpate them from among the Palestinian people -- which will be far from bloodless (it was far from bloodless to extirpate the Nazis from among the German people, after all) -- after which, to turn around and try to solve this decades old conflict in a reasonable way, because to continue like this is impossible (like Ami Ayalon says, like Ehud Olmert, like say so many of the kibbutznikim who were attacked and survived on the Gaza border and are now fighting in the IDF or civil support).
Yes, there are a number in Israel that do not feel like this. But they are not the majority and war, oddly, has always tended to unite the country towards more hope.
Will this succeed? I do not know. There are too many other players involved, too many other interests at play. But I do hope and so does the part of Israel that has learned from the experience of the Diaspora the values of democracy, tolerance, peace and compromise.
As for the unqualified hostility of a certain Left to Israel, a hostility that bleeds strongly into hostility towards the Jews, most of whom are Zionist in the sense of believing in the desirability of a state of the Jewish people (beyond which Zionism has many bents and denominations) -- there are deep and longstanding reasons for it. It goes far beyond the disturbing dogmas of Critical Social Justice about colonialism, it is rooted in the old, antisemitic identification of the Jews with money, with the rich and powerful, with capitalism, with oppression and privilege, and with a readiness to betray because irredeemably Other. The same kind of tropes come up every times Jews are attacked as dissenters from orthodoxy... be it in Stalinist Soviet Union or in social justice groups.
I suggest to you three gentlemen to read this article of a young writer who has focused his research on totalitarian thought. I, in my old age, have been deeply enlightened by it, because I never saw the connections so clearly.
https://forward.com/opinion/393107/how-anti-semitisms-true-origin-makes-it-invisible-to-the-left/