As the war with Hamas nears its anniversary on October 7th, the killing of six hostages, including the American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, has produced a crisis of confusion and recrimination within Israel. In this, these murders have served their intended purpose.
However, understanding the larger goals of a jihadist organization like Hamas can offer moral and strategic clarity. In addition to spreading death and chaos, jihadists seek to destroy open societies by subverting their core values. Since October 7th, 2023, Hamas has used our civilized (and civilizing) concern for innocent human life—which it does not share—to divide Israel from the rest of the world and against itself. It has done this defensively, by deploying its own noncombatants as human shields, and offensively, by taking hundreds of Israeli and international hostages. The result has been to drive decent people in opposing directions—turning some brutal in their willingness to sacrifice innocent Palestinian lives, while making others desperate to trade their own future security to win the release of men, women, and children who have been held captive in tunnels for nearly a year. Sadism or masochism, take your pick.1
The destruction of Gaza has been horrific. But the responsibility for all this misery and death rests with Hamas and those who support them. Yes, there is much to condemn on the margins: Israeli settlers and far-right ideologues are guilty of crimes and provocations; Benjamin Netanyahu is politically toxic; the IDF has made some spectacular errors of judgment; the Biden administration is spellbound by domestic politics and has become an unreliable ally; and the theocratic belligerence of Iran casts a shadow over everything. There is much blame to share and many fertile sources of bad luck on the landscape, but we cannot lose sight of two facts that have always been at the center of this conflict:
1. Hamas wants to destroy Israel as a state and the Jews as a people. Consequently, any ceasefire or peace process negotiated with this jihadist regime will be temporary, by definition. For Hamas, the purpose of peace is to gather the strength necessary to commit a future genocide.
2. Hamas remains popular among the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. (Precisely how popular remains an open question.)
Given these facts, the phrase “two-state solution” has no rational application to the current crisis. There will be no lasting peace until the Palestinians themselves repudiate jihadism. The real question is, what can be done to effect such a profound cultural change?
Among all the values and forms of knowledge humanity imparts to its children, many Palestinians teach theirs to aspire to martyrdom above all. Stated this way, the reader can be forgiven for not fully grasping the implications. Another way of putting it, is that many Palestinian children understand that their parents’ and teachers’ greatest hope for them, as well as their true value as human beings, consists in subordinating every good thing—self-knowledge, compassion, scientific insight, artistic expression, love and laughter—to future acts of suicidal terrorism, for the purpose of murdering infidels, apostates, or Jews. If there is a more profane angle at which to set the initial trajectory of a human life, no one has found it.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Sam Harris to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.