For today’s episode, we’re thrilled to share the most recent episode of our friend Sam Harris’s podcast, Making Sense.
Moral confusion is plaguing this moment like never before. It’s everywhere: from college campuses to congress. Sam, better than almost anyone, is able to speak to that confusion, with facts, nuance and moral clarity. Importantly, he doesn’t just visit this topic with the narrow lens of this particular war between Hamas and Israel, but with a bird’s eye view of history. But according to Sam, it’s not the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that matters so much right now, but rather the history—and enduring global problem—of jihadism. And that’s what this episode is about.
The episode, aptly titled, The Bright Line Between Good and Evil, is sobering, illuminating and well worth your time. Please listen.
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Moral confusion to me is not being able to access highlighted excerpts of this monologue.
There is no political justification for Hamas. For Hamas there is no end beyond the exercise of power, like the SS, a death cult. jihad an end to itself.
Hamas is deeply embedded within the Palestinian people. Whether by consent or intimidation, as Mao put it, they, “move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.” Hamas came to power in 2007 through democratic election, and while there have been no elections since, and many Palestinians do not support Hamas, many others support its stated aims of the elimination of Jews and of the state of Israel, or see Hamas as the defender of the people’s interest against domination by Israel, and see armed conflict as the only available route to autonomy.
On the other side Israelis are divided between those who would seek accommodation in a two state solution and those whose ultimate goals are the permanent establishment of a greater Israel, 'between the river and the sea', in which Palestinians are supplanted or subjugated.
Of those on both sides who advocate mutual accommodation, their positions are weakened by their weakness within their own camps and the general perception on both sides of the absence of faithful interlocutors representative of the other, such that might actually produce viable compromise and who have the political will and standing to sustain a meaningful peace process.
Of the current conflict, and the suffering produced, proportionality cannot be measured in numbers alone where existential questions are concerned, that of civilization versus barbarity, or of autonomy and a people’s claim to self-determination. The issues here are not of Palestinians and Israelis alone, but of the history of the proximate moment and of the global conflict between liberal ideas and those of theocracy and autocracy; of the axis of perversity that runs through Hamas and Hezbollah, from Iran through Russia, with China on the near horizon.
Solution of conflicts may often best devalue arguments based on false premises, or that they not be inordinately respectful of intransigent positions that bar the way to understanding. It is also true that synthesis requires that all relevant perspectives be analytically held in common, that to the extent that all positions hold truths, or a part of the truth, that those truths be honored.