Why I Won’t Debate Critics of Israel

A note to the Making Sense Community

Note (6/12/26): The response to this essay has been quite colorful. I’ve added a few footnotes to clarify points that seem easily misunderstood.

Many readers and podcast listeners have been dismayed by my enduring support for Israel and now urge me to debate someone—really anyone—drawn from a growing cast of scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics who have made that beleaguered country their professional or psychiatric obsession. The Making Sense Community seems to have inherited this infatuation, leading to some heated exchanges in recent days. I’ve explained my position on Israel across several podcasts and in my public talks, but it might help to summarize it here.

First, my general attitude: I’m not interested in exploring all the ways that Israel has missed the mark—from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corrupt alliance with the far right, to the many crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank, to the deaths of innocent noncombatants in several wars—because none of these failings, however grave, will alter my sense that (1) the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast, and (2) the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions.¹

Next, a simple heuristic: As I suggested in at least one Community thread already, if my intransigence on these matters mystifies you, it might help to understand that, for whatever reason, I think militant Islam is ten times worse than you think it is. When I talk about “jihadists” and their various groups—Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the IRGC, etc.—I’m talking about people who I consider to be worse than Nazis (jihadists being, essentially, Nazis who are certain of Paradise).² My views about the conflict in the Middle East will not fundamentally change unless my critics produce evidence that Israel has become as evil as her enemies.

However, you can rest assured that if the IDF morphs into a death cult that uses its own civilian population as human shields (and yet somehow remains widely popular), if ordinary Israelis begin to celebrate martyrdom above every earthly priority, producing generations of bright-eyed, suicidal fanatics, if the residents of Tel Aviv condone the taking of Palestinian infants, old women, and other noncombatants as hostages and then gather in crowds of thousands, baying for their blood—if, in other words, the Israelis begin to resemble the Palestinians, then I won’t care who wins this war. Short of this, there remains a world of difference between the two sides,³ and I believe that we should focus on how brutalizing it is for any free society to confront enemies that can sincerely claim to “love death” more than everyone else loves life—for this has been Israel’s predicament for the better part of a century.⁴

The problem in the Middle East is not, and has never been, the existence of the state of Israel. The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism, militant Islam—or whatever words you want to use to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.⁵

I won’t debate the history of the Middle East because it is irrelevant to resolving the conflict there. Of course, many people insist that we must disentangle and reconsider every strand of this history, going back at least a century. The reason I’m convinced that this is a fool’s errand is simple: Palestinians and Israelis have discrepant accounts of the past, and no amount of study or debate will reconcile them.

What’s far more important to understand—and I think it really is the only thing worth considering—is what the current inhabitants of Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the surrounding Arab states want out of life now. (Not what they pretend to want or what a handful of royal families want, while their populations want something quite different.) What do the Jews and Muslims in the region really yearn to accomplish? What are they willing to sacrifice for? What are they willing to die for? And what are they willing to let their children die for?

When we focus on the present this way, if we’re being honest, we must concede that there are two very different realities on either side of this conflict: culturally, psychologically, ethically, spiritually—in every way that matters. Yes, Israel has its religious fanatics too. But they aren’t the same sort of fanatics we find in Hamas or Hezbollah, and they’re far less representative of the surrounding culture. Notwithstanding everything that can be said against Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Israeli far right, and the settlers in the West Bank—and there is much to condemn—I believe the following remains true:

If the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace.⁶ There could be a two-state solution; there could even be a one-state solution; it wouldn’t matter. If the Palestinians simply stopped killing Jews and stopped building a culture that celebrates pointless murder and martyrdom as its highest values, there could be a diverse, tolerant, and prosperous society between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. There could have been one eighty years ago. But if the Israelis laid down their weapons, there would be a genocide. This was obviously true on October 7th, 2023. And for anyone who has been paying attention, it has been true on every other day since the founding of the state of Israel.

The truth is, I have never known how Israel should have responded to the events of October 7th. I only know that they, along with every other free society, must ultimately defeat militant Islam. How we should do this is genuinely debatable. But that’s not the point of contention among Israel’s critics, especially on the left. To them, worrying about militant Islam—even in Israel, even in the aftermath of the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust—is just more “Islamophobia.” It’s just more “colonialism” and “racism” (as though that last charge made any sense in the Middle East).

If you want to understand my view of this conflict, simply ask the one question that clarifies everything in the present:

What would each side do if it had the power to do whatever it wanted?

Though many pretend otherwise, everyone knows the answer to this question to a moral certainty.

If Hamas had the power, it would perpetrate a real genocide in Israel. The group has affirmed its commitment to this project on countless occasions, both before and after October 7th. And while it is true that Jew-hatred throughout the Muslim world has been made immensely worse by a century-long fascination with Nazi propaganda and conspiracy theories, this animus isn’t merely a modern phenomenon. For instance, there is a famous hadith which predicts that the End Times will not come until the very stones and trees cry out “Oh Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come kill him.” Unsurprisingly, Hamas cited this hadith in its founding charter.

Most Palestinians know this, and yet Hamas remains popular. For over a decade, Hamas diverted foreign aid that was meant to improve life in Gaza and used it to build the largest bomb shelter our species has ever constructed—hundreds of miles of tunnels—and yet no Palestinian civilians were allowed to shelter there during the war. Why not? Because Hamas was using these men, women, and children as human shields. And when Israel made phone calls and sent millions of text messages urging civilians to evacuate, the loudspeakers in the nearest mosques warned them to stay in place. And Hamas snipers murdered many who tried to move to safety. The Palestinians know all this, and yet Hamas remains popular. Even after all the devastation that Hamas has brought down on its own people, it remains the most popular Palestinian faction, well ahead of its rival, Fatah. This is why there is no peace in the Middle East.

The suffering in Gaza is terrible, and I’ve never pretended otherwise. But the suffering elsewhere—suffering you aren’t thinking about—is just as real. You should ask yourself why you don’t care more about it. This difference, emotionally and politically, is what it looks like to lose an information war.

We haven’t seen all the dead children in Yemen, Syria, or Sudan, where the numbers are far worse than in Gaza, but everyone has witnessed the pornography of misery and death that has been steadily manufactured by supporters of Hamas. You might think that your special concern over Israel is due to the fact that we (Americans) supply many of the weapons the IDF uses to kill Palestinians. But we supplied arms to Saudi Arabia and the UAE for a war in Yemen that has killed an estimated 377,000 people. Where were those protests? Where was the celebrity sanctimony over Yemeni dead? Why didn’t Zohran Mamdani trumpet his opposition to this evil while campaigning to become Mayor of New York? Yemen was the world’s worst humanitarian crisis for years, with American weaponry and logistical support fully implicated, and yet it never became the organizing moral obsession of universities, media institutions, activist networks, or leftwing politics the way Gaza has.

To point this out isn’t to commit the rhetorical sin of “whataboutism.” Rather, it exposes a glaring moral disparity: The world simply does not care when Muslims kill other Muslims—amazingly, it doesn’t much care when they kill Christians either—but it does care, enormously, when Jews do it. The General Assembly of the UN and its Human Rights Council have passed more resolutions against Israel than against all other nations combined, including North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen. A few of these countries have committed actual genocides. None of this makes sense. But this is the world we are living in.

Of the world’s 193 nations, two-thirds were created by map makers who merely imagined their frontiers into being, without much regard for the tribal interests of the people living within them. In fact, more than half were created since 1948, the year that Israel was founded. And yet there is only one whose legitimacy is still debated everywhere. There is only one nation on Earth that must continually argue for its right to exist, even when the very survival of its people is threatened by avowedly genocidal enemies.

This obsession with Israel, and the double standards to which its people are held, now forms the center of mass of that shapeshifting moral affliction widely known as “antisemitism.”

I’ve lived most of my life believing that dangerous antisemitism was behind us, at least in the West. Unfortunately, the response to October 7th has put that assumption very much in doubt. The atrocities committed by Hamas revealed a level of Jew hatred, globally, that shocked even those of us who have been students of antisemitism for much of our lives. Crucially, this hatred showed itself before Israel invaded Gaza. When the corpses of the young people mutilated and murdered at the Nova Music Festival were still being identified, we had students at Harvard and professors at Columbia—and demonstrators in New York, London, Sydney, and Toronto—celebrating their killers.

Why does antisemitism matter? Well, for the Jews, it’s obvious why it matters, but why should it matter to everyone else? It matters because when you look at what antisemites also hate, you find they hate everything that makes culturally rich, diverse, open societies possible. Real antisemites bring with them more than just their hatred of Jews: they bring censorship, political repression, conspiracy thinking, and the politics of dehumanization and scapegoating. So decrying antisemitism is not an act of special pleading. It is a defense of the moral and institutional architecture that free societies require.

Let me close with another general point to members of the Making Sense Community: Many of you have written to tell me that you’ve lost respect for me over this issue (or that you still value my work and are giving me “a pass” on Israel). I reject this framing, and you should too. No one should be a part of Community just because they agree with me. I’m not running a political party, and there is no line for me, or for anyone else, to toe. If I’ve fallen off a pedestal because I said something you don’t agree with, the pedestal was the problem, not the disagreement. Of course, if you think I am lying to you, or that I otherwise lack integrity, you should leave and never look back. But if you just think I happen to be wrong, even about something important—especially about something important—I encourage you to keep showing up with better evidence and arguments. This, after all, is what a real intellectual and moral community is for.

1. One common objection here, which is just a point of confusion, holds that I am giving Israel a blank check to commit war crimes. Obviously, whether a war is defensive (and just) and whether it is being fought within moral limits are different questions. When insisting that the ethical difference between Israel and its enemies remains vast, I’m making a claim about their respective aims, not issuing a blanket approval of everything Israel might do in its defense. Any focus on Israel’s conduct in this war tends to be misleading, because activists and critics routinely lie about it, inflating the ordinary horrors of urban combat into a false charge of “genocide.” This specific claim is nothing short of a blood libel, and it is often intended as such. The fact that organizations like the U.N., Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch endorse it doesn’t make it true. One can condemn everything that Israel has done wrong without denying that Hamas is a death cult bent on genocide—but, crucially, Israel’s critics can’t seem to manage this. This is why I see no point in debating the specifics of what the IDF has done in Gaza on any given day. War crimes are war crimes, and they should be prosecuted. And Israel is precisely the sort of society that we expect to prosecute such crimes—unlike its enemies, which revel in them.

2. Many people believe in God, and if they don’t, they readily accept that others do. However, when Islamic extremists assert that they “love death more than infidels (or Jews, Americans, etc.) love life,” ordinary people, whether religious or not, tend to assume that they are bluffing. Strangely, this assumption can survive contact with that most convincing of all rhetorical displays—an endless series of suicidal atrocities.

For years, whenever I have linked Islam to suicide bombing, I’ve been told to read Robert Pape, whose book Dying to Win argues that such attacks are a strategic response to foreign occupation rather than a product of religious belief. In 2012 Pape agreed to publicly debate this with me in writing, but when I sent him my opening statement, he mysteriously vanished. Let me briefly make the case he declined to answer.

I’ve never claimed that all suicidal terrorism is Islamic. The example always produced against me, that of the Tamil Tigers, reveals that it’s possible for a group of jungle-dwelling maniacs to create a cult of martyrdom without believing in a scheme of divine reward after death. So what? Pape is essentially arguing that cigarettes don’t cause lung cancer because asbestos does too. One sufficient condition simply doesn’t refute another.

Pape’s thesis about the primacy of political variables (nationalism, occupation, etc.) is also the product of methodological bias—a point that was brought to my attention by the biologist Jerry Coyne years ago. Present a secular scholar like Pape with an example of a religious motive—a man who threatens to blow himself up to win virgins in Paradise—and he will refuse to accept it, seeking a “deeper” cause beneath the words. Present him with a terrestrial motive, however—grievances about stolen land and humiliation, for instance—and he will take this testimony at face value. The religious reason is always a pretense; the worldly one never is. The game is rigged.

The logical cost of this bias shows most plainly when Pape insists upon calling the concerns of a group like al-Qaeda “nationalistic.” Al-Qaeda’s stated aim has always been a global caliphate, and Osama bin Laden’s grievance over the American “occupation” of Saudi Arabia was really a concern about the proximity of infidels to the holiest shrines of Islam. It didn’t matter that U.S. troops and contractors were there at the invitation of the regime, because bin Laden considered its leaders insufficiently Islamic. To describe these theocratic concerns as “nationalistic” is merely to ignore the plain meaning of words. Pape’s thesis became even more embarrassing with the rise of the Islamic State, whose abominations had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with Islamic eschatology. Anyone who denied that was, quite simply, a dangerous moron.

There are also numerous control cases that Pape’s theory can’t explain. The Tibetans, for instance, have endured an occupation as crushing as any imposed on a Muslim country, and yet they don’t practice suicidal terrorism against Chinese noncombatants. Instead, they set themselves on fire. The difference between suicidal terrorism and suicidal protest isn’t a matter of degree, and it cannot be explained by anything apart from what Islam and Vajrayana Buddhism teach their adherents. One teaches jihad and martyrdom as its highest virtues; the other teaches compassion and self-transcendence. It turns out that the core beliefs around which people organize their lives seem to matter. Go figure.

3. A few readers have raised the more nuanced concern (following 1, above): The moral gulf between Israel and her enemies isn’t a stable feature of the world and might erode under pressure. When I say that this gulf is currently so wide that scrutiny of Israel can wait, I appear to be exonerating (and might even be encouraging) a descent into barbarism. At a minimum, I seem to have abdicated moral responsibility when it could matter most, because the gulf I’m insisting upon may well be closing. Who knows when it will be too late to protect it?

I think this is a valid worry, and it forces me to state my position more carefully than I did above. The bar for changing my mind about which side deserves to win this war is indeed very high, but as I’ve already said, I never meant to suggest that Israel’s conduct is above concern. Holding the IDF to a high standard doesn’t logically entail a denial of the claim that it is better than Hamas. My point is merely that in practice it usually does, given the hysteria and dishonesty that surrounds this topic. I’m not interested in debating Israel’s (granted, real) missteps, because there is little to debate: I fully agree that war crimes are war crimes and should be prosecuted.

As for the allegation that Israel has committed “genocide” in Gaza, I also see nothing to debate, apart from semantics. Whatever one thinks about Israeli politics and the war—again, there is much to criticize here—the claim reflects serious confusion, or just frank dishonesty, about what the word “genocide” means. “Genocide” is not a synonym for a war you don’t happen to support, or even for one that produces an unacceptable level of civilian casualties. “Genocide” entails intent: the intent to destroy a people as such. That is what distinguishes the Holocaust, and what happened in Rwanda over the course of 100 days in 1994, from the long list of wars in which enormous numbers of innocent people were killed.

The United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 100,000 people instantly, and another 100,000 gradually—by fire, infection, and radiation poisoning. Most of those people were civilians who were just minding their own business at the time. Whatever you think about that as means of bringing World War 2 to an end—and the ethics here are certainly debatable—no serious person calls it “a genocide.” Why not? Because despite the vast numbers of innocent men, women, and children that we killed, we were obviously not trying to annihilate the Japanese people—as witnessed by the fact that once they surrendered, we helped rebuild their society, and by the time our occupation ended in 1952, Japan had moved from being a defeated enemy to being an ally.

So groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch do not consider the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be acts of genocide, and yet they pretend to believe that this term applies to Israel’s conduct in Gaza.

I’ll just point out a few things that are obvious to everyone, whatever they pretend: If the Israelis wanted to eradicate the Palestinians as a people, the way the Nazis wanted to eradicate the Jews and the Hutus wanted to eradicate the Tutsis, they wouldn’t send millions of text messages warning civilians to evacuate before their neighborhoods were bombed; they wouldn’t pause their military operations to create humanitarian corridors; and they wouldn’t send their own sons and daughters to clear booby-trapped buildings when they could just obliterate everything from the air. For decades, Israel has had the power to kill all the Palestinians. And yet, in the meantime, the Palestinian population has grown at a rate that is nearly twice the global average. That is a very strange genocide. As I said above, whatever your criticism of Israel, calling what they’ve done in response to October 7^th a “genocide” is nothing less than a modern a blood libel.

Of course, Islamists and many of their apologists on the Left know that they are lying about all this. However, some of the people they are lying to appear sincerely confused. Many seem to think that collapsing the distinction between genocide and the sheer awfulness of war increases our sensitivity to the latter—and therefore constitutes some form of moral progress. But it doesn’t. It is just a way forfeiting our capacity to make crucial moral distinctions. If we redefine “genocide” to mean that too many innocent people have been killed in an otherwise just war, or that war itself is intolerable, we’ll need to invent a new name for the furthest reaches of human evil.

4. A reader objects that I call Israel “a free society” while millions of Palestinians in the West Bank live under martial law—without the vote, needing a permit to travel and permission to gather, etc. The facts are not in dispute, and I have consistently said that the West Bank occupation is wrong. But the objection trades on an ambiguity. The question is not whether Israel governs the West Bank the way it governs itself. The question is what kind of society Israel is. Israel has competitive elections that turn out sitting prime ministers, a supreme court that overrules its own government, a press that savages it daily, and Arab citizens in its parliament and judiciary. Hamas murders its dissidents. That a free society is also running an unjust occupation is a damning fact about the occupation. It isn’t evidence that the society itself is unfree.

5. A common objection here is that I could just as easily consider this an anti-colonial movement that happens to wear a religious costume. Nat Turner, the Mau Mau, and the Algerian FLN are offered as proof that religion merely colors a resistance that would have occurred anyway.

Still, crucial differences remain. The FLN fought a savage war to drive France out of Algeria, but it didn’t declare the killing of every French person on earth a religious obligation—nor did it teach its children that dying in that cause was their life’s ultimate purpose. A movement that kills civilians as a regrettable cost is something you can eventually negotiate with. A movement that kills civilians, as well as its own members, as a religious sacrament, is something else entirely.

A related concern: Palestinian resistance had some secular (generally Marxist) and Christian roots: George Habash of the PFLP, Edward Said, Hanan Ashrawi—none were jihadists. The PLO, as the umbrella organization (dominated by Fatah after Arafat took the chairmanship in 1969), also had a secular-nationalist character, in sharp contrast to the Islamist vision that Hamas would later articulate in its 1988 charter. It is true that Palestinian nationalism gave us a wave of hijackings and the murder of the Israeli athletes at Munich. This was vile, but it was the kind of vile that wanted a state—so it could, in principle, be negotiated with. What changed when Hamas eclipsed Fatah was not the removal of any and all political grievances; it was the arrival of a faction that sacralizes every grievance, wrote the hadith of the stones and the trees into its founding charter, and made the refusal of any Jewish state a religious precept, rather than a bargaining position. The secular tradition of Palestinian resistance is evidence that this could have stayed a fight over borders; the rise of the jihadist one explains why it didn’t.

It also worth noting that even though suicide bombing in the Second Intifada wasn’t confined to Islamist groups—Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and the Marxist PFLP both used it—the actual bombers, across all factions, were Muslim. Critics of Robert Pape have pointed out that his theory doesn’t explain why there have been no Christian suicide bombers, despite the fact that Palestinian Christians suffer the same brutal occupation. (I am not saying, of course, that Christianity couldn’t become a modern source of martyrology and be weaponized in this way. It’s just that this would require a fairly strenuous reading between the lines of scripture. Unfortunately, with Islam—given the actual contents of the Qur’an, hadith, and biography of the Prophet—one need only read the lines themselves.)

6. Many point out that the Palestinian Authority largely renounced violence, cooperated with the IDF on security, and got no state for it, while the settlements kept expanding. If nonviolence was repaid with more occupation, why believe my counterfactual? Obviously, the PA renouncing violence while Hamas fires rockets is not a test of my premise. All the armed actors would have to put down their weapons—Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and their patron in Tehran included.

It’s also clear that merely ending the occupation won’t suffice to produce peace. In 2005, Israel left Gaza completely. It withdrew every soldier, dismantled the settlements, and dragged 9,000 of its own citizens out by force, in some cases digging up their graves. This was the thing the world says it wants, done unilaterally, with nothing asked in return. What developed across the border in Gaza was not the Singapore of the Middle East. It was Hamas, a decade of rocket attacks, hundreds of miles of terror tunnels, and October 7th.

Here’s another counterfactual: If Israel disappeared entirely, what would happen? Let’s say the Jews abandon the Holy Land, either by walking willingly into the sea or by fading away in another diaspora, and Jerusalem becomes a Muslim city. Israel’s critics seem to imagine that Islamic extremism would magically disappear, or at least be considerably reduced. On the contrary, jihadists would have achieved their greatest triumph in a thousand years, and their ranks would only grow. Life for free people in London, Paris, Sydney, and New York would be worse, not better, if Israel ceased to exist. Anyway, that is my claim, and I hope we never live to see that I’m right.