Can’t we all just get along? I admit it. I’m a people pleaser. I want everyone to be happy, just like my mom. Abigail sometimes makes fun of me for thinking that the world is a generally happy place. She thinks this is a “Pollyanna” point of view. She’s frustrated by the way that I think that things will work out.
I want to believe that people are generally good and that if we could all just understand each other better, we things would be OK. It’s a bit of “The truth will set you free” because if we’re all more educated, we’d all be smarter and make better decisions. The problem is that I’m realizing that the world doesn’t really work that way.
While I still don’t think that anyone intends to be a bad person, they can still do horrible and evil things. Dale Carnegie says and how to win friends and influence people, that even John Dillinger thought he was a good guy. Here are some of the problems in getting along:
- They really are better and worse ways of looking at things. There is a fundamental better truth. There is a human ground truth that we all should believe, like murder is bad.
- It’s good for people to have different opinions, my opinion might be “Let’s talk about this and find a solution” if that conflicts with someone else’s opinion of.” You are sub-human, and should die,” I can’t support that opinion. We can use Osama bin Laden and Al Queda as a case study here.
- Facts are looked at through a filter of belief. Many times those beliefs are so strong that the facts don’t matter. Or even if the facts are incontrovertible one way, it only sways people a little bit.
- People have different beliefs. We project those beliefs onto others as that’s all we know.
- The news is not here to make moral judgements, it’s here to keep you up to date with what’s going on. However, it’s always going to do that through its own set of “what’s right” even on the news section. The framing of this is important. Are we fighting terrorism and freeing hostages or is this a conflict of oppressed people looking to free themselves. How you position the news is based on how you view the world.
All of this comes down to the fact that I have been trying to reconcile all of the opinions about the war in Israel to try to make sense of it. Everyone has a point of view but some points really are more correct than others. I’ll call these “ground truths.”
Unfortunately for me as a Liberal, the Converitives seem to do a better job of highlighting these ground truths. Here are some key ones from Sam Harris from his podcast episode The Bright Line Between Good and Evil. It’s a great podcast and I’ve pulled the key bits that were most meaningful to me.
Why would Hamas kill innocent people?
Sam Harris: We imagine that people everywhere, at bottom, want the same things: They want to live safe and prosperous lives. They want clean drinking water and good schools for their kids. And we imagine that if whole groups of people start behaving in extraordinarily destructive ways—practicing suicidal terrorism against noncombatants, for instance—they must have been pushed into extremis by others. What could turn ordinary human beings into suicide bombers, and what could get vast numbers of their neighbors to celebrate them as martyrs, other than their entire society being oppressed and humiliated to the point of madness by some malign power? So, in the case of Israel, many people imagine that the ghoulish history Palestinian terrorism simply indicates how profound the injustice has been on the Israeli side.
Now, there are many things to be said in criticism of Israel, in particular its expansion of settlements on contested land. But Israel’s behavior is not what explains the suicidal and genocidal inclinations of a group like Hamas. The Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad do.
These are religious beliefs, sincerely held. They are beliefs about the moral structure of the universe. And they explain how normal people—even good ones—can commit horrific acts of violence against innocent civilians—on purpose, not as collateral damage—and still consider themselves good. When you believe that life in this world has no value, apart from deciding who goes to hell and who goes to Paradise, it becomes possible to feel perfectly at ease killing noncombatants, or even using your own women and children as human shields, because you know that any Muslims who get killed will go to Paradise for eternity.
If you don’t understand that jihadists sincerely believe these things, you don’t understand the problem Israel faces. The problem isn’t merely Palestinian nationalism, or resource competition, or any other normal terrestrial grievance. In fact, the problem isn’t even hatred, though there is enough of that to go around. The problem is religious certainty.
What is the moral difference between what Israel and Hamas?
Sam Harris: In a previous podcast, I argued that the bright line, ethically, between Israel and her enemies can be seen on the question of human shields. There are people who use them, and there are people who are deterred by them, however imperfectly. Hamas put its headquarters in Gaza under a hospital. Let me say that again: Hamas put its headquarters in Gaza under a hospital. Again, imagine the Jews of Israel doing that, and imagine how little it would matter to Hamas if they did. Hamas is telling people to stay in Gaza, and has even physically prevented them from leaving, so that they will be killed by Israeli bombs. They are using their own people as human shields—in addition to more than 200 hostages they took for this purpose. No one cares less about Palestinian women and children than Hamas does. However horrible the images coming out of Gaza, it is Hamas that should be blamed for the loss of life there. You’re calling for a ceasefire now? There was a ceasefire on October 6th. Hamas broke it by deliberately murdering more than 1400 hundred innocent people.
Are the Israeli’s “Colonists”?
Sam Harris: There’s no sorting this out by reference to history, because any group can arbitrarily decide where to set the dial on its time machine. In any case, the Jews in Israel are “indigenous people.” The British were colonialists. Colonialists have some place to go back to. Where could the Jews go back to? There has been a continuous presence of Jews in what is now Israel for thousands of years. Most of the recent immigrants—Jews from Iraq, and Syria, and Yemen, and Libya, and other Muslim-majority countries were driven from their homes by their Muslim neighbors after 1948, in collective punishment for the founding of Israel. Is anyone talking about their right of return? There are displaced people everywhere on Earth, but only the Palestinians have been turned into a global fetish, for their right of return.
Does Israel have the right to exist as a Jewish state?
Sam Harris: As many of you know, I’ve always had a paradoxical position on Israel. I’ve said that I don’t think it should exist as a Jewish state—because, in my view, organizing a state around a religion is irrational and divisive. This follows directly from my views about organized religion in general. So, obviously, I don’t think there should be Muslim states either—or Christian ones, for that matter. However, there are over 20 countries in which Islam is the official state religion, and over 50 in which Muslims are the majority—and there is exactly one Jewish state. Given the history of genocidal anti-Semitism, which persists even now, mostly in the Muslim world, given that the Jews have been run out of every other country in the Middle East and North Africa where they lived for centuries, if any people deserve a state of their own, organized on any premise they want, it’s the Jews.
In 1939, the SS St. Louis, a ship carrying over 900 Jews seeking to escape the Holocaust was denied entry into Cuba, and the United States, and Canada, and then forced to return to Europe, where many of those Jews ended up in the ovens of Auschwitz. In my view, that’s all the justification for Israel one needs. Never again should Jews have to beg to stand on some dry patch of earth, only to be denied one, and then systematically murdered.