A year ago, when thousands of Hamas militants crossed Israel s border to engage in an orgy of medieval violence, I knew little about Israel and had no opinion about the long-running conflict there. I read, watched, and listened to endless commentary, debates, and discussions to understand what people on both sides were saying. Having gathered those perspectives, I then did my best to apply First Principles thinking to the arguments I heard.
00:00:00.080I'm off the fence about Israel's war. Here's why.
00:00:07.240Exactly a year ago, when thousands of Hamas militants crossed Israel's border to engage in an orgy of medieval violence,
00:00:13.960I knew little about Israel and had no opinion about the long-running conflict there.
00:00:18.560I've never been to Israel. I've never been to Gaza. I've never been to the West Bank.
00:00:22.980It's not a conflict I studied at university or read about extensively.
00:00:26.380People on both sides who care passionately about this issue find it hard to believe, but in truth, most people are like this.
00:00:33.780That's why, for many months after the October 7th attacks, I avoided commenting on the war or even discussing it on our show.
00:00:40.900Instead, I read, watched, and listened to the endless commentary, debates, and discussions to understand what people on various sides were saying.
00:00:48.920Having gathered those perspectives, I then did my best to apply First Principle's thinking to the arguments I heard.
00:00:54.480Thinking from First Principles means stripping whatever you're trying to analyze down to its core and working back from there.
00:01:01.680Context is extremely important to understanding, but when it comes to highly emotive situations like this one,
00:01:07.960people often flood you with emotional context, which does not support the argument they're actually making.
00:01:13.580There are some obvious examples in this debate, which we will address shortly.
00:01:17.200First Principles thinking helps you see the structure of arguments.
00:01:20.060The logic of an argument is like the skeleton of a body.
00:01:23.540You cannot see it from the outside, but it is usually the cause of why the body moves the way that it does.
00:01:29.200Getting to the skeleton of an argument is essential to understanding it.
00:01:32.760This was my approach when we had prominent pro-Palestine guests like Bassem Yusuf and Norman Finkelstein on trigonometry,
00:01:39.920as well as pro-Israel guests like Ben Shapiro and Natasha Hausdorff.
00:01:43.180It was also my approach when I hosted a fiery debate on the subject of dissident dialogues,
00:01:48.220and when Safety Namus invited me to discuss this issue on his podcast.
00:01:52.340So what does First Principle thinking tell us about the conflict?
00:01:55.280First, the easiest way to understand a complicated problem is to find a comparable situation about which you already know what to think.
00:02:02.920For example, if we accept that October 7th was a terrorist attack, as I believe most people do,
00:02:07.680the obvious approach would be to compare it to other terrorist attacks in recent history.
00:02:12.540That, as it happens, is impossible, because on a proportionate basis,
00:02:16.260the Western world has never experienced an attack on this scale.
00:02:19.280If we take 9-11, the most impactful terrorist attack in living memory,
00:02:23.120which shook the world's dominant superpower to its very core,
00:02:26.440we see that 2,977 people were killed in a country of 285 million people.
00:02:32.160On October 7th, approximately 1,200 people were killed in a country of just 9 million people.
00:02:38.160Some keep calling October 7th Israel's 9-11.
00:05:21.640Again, let's think from first principles.
00:05:23.760If we believe every pro-Palestinian claim and accept that Israel was created through the forced placement of European Jews in a foreign land by Western powers,
00:05:32.320we must look for a comparable situation in which a country was created through some form of displacement of the native population.
00:05:57.060The idea that they would, could or should accept the destruction of what is now their country is absurd.
00:06:02.020The United States government would not tolerate missile strikes and terrorist rampages from Native American reservations.
00:06:08.680Neither would any government of any country under any circumstances.
00:06:13.200Peace in the Middle East will not be achieved by attempting to undo many decades of history.
00:06:17.360The second argument centers on the idea that October 7th was a response to Israeli occupation and brutality.
00:06:23.760This, again, seems reasonable to many people.
00:06:26.920After all, what would it take for you to behave the way Hamas did on October 7th?
00:06:31.660The problem with this argument is that what happened on October 7th was not an attempt to weaken Israel militarily.
00:06:37.200It was not an attempt to break Hamas militants out of Israeli jails.
00:06:40.820It was not an attack on the Israeli Defense Force.
00:06:42.940It was not a prison breakout, as some people like to describe it.
00:06:46.660Because when people break out of a prison, they don't normally head to the nearest town and start massacring women and children.
00:06:52.200October 7th was, by design and implementation, a terrorist attack whose purpose was to slaughter civilians, terrify Israeli society, and nothing else.
00:07:24.460The question is not whether they are being killed, but who bears responsibility for their deaths, and who can stop the killing.
00:07:30.600Again, applying first principles thinking, we must reach for a comparable example.
00:07:34.940There is no exact equivalent that comes to mind, but there is some useful context we can consider.
00:07:39.700Hamas has repeatedly stated that given the opportunity, they will repeat the October 7th attacks again, and again, and again.
00:07:47.600While this may seem shocking to us in the West, it makes perfect sense given that Hamas believes Israel is illegitimate and would like to see her gone.
00:07:55.520This means that unless Israel destroys or degrades their ability to carry out their threats, it is likely to experience more terrorist attacks again, and again.
00:08:04.360Does anyone seriously believe that any government of any country anywhere in the world would or could react to something like 12 9-11s in one day,
00:08:14.360and the threat of more to follow as many times as possible, with anything other than all-out war?
00:08:44.880It's something Hamas are themselves proud of.
00:08:47.060A senior spokesman for the group, Sami Abu-Zukhari, gave an interview on Palestinian station Al-Aqsa TV the last time this conflict flared up.
00:08:55.620The policy of people confronting Israeli warplanes with their bare chests in order to protect their homes has proven effective against the occupation, he said.
00:09:04.600We in Hamas call upon our people to adopt this policy in order to protect Palestinian homes.
00:09:10.080So yes, the deaths of civilians are tragic, and in a modern world where you can fill your social media feed with gruesome footage, that tragedy can be broadcast straight into your home 24-7.
00:09:21.380But the responsibility for their deaths is entirely with Hamas, and the failure to put a stop to the killing is theirs and theirs alone.
00:09:28.820Which brings us to the final argument.
00:09:30.880Israel's attacks are indiscriminate and designed to inflict civilian casualties.
00:09:35.320This is actually the simplest argument of the four to address, because it is an empirical matter.
00:09:41.620The war in Gaza is not the first conflict in human history.
00:09:44.800We can compare the ratio of combatant to civilian deaths in this war to others.
00:10:00.140In other words, despite the deliberate attempts by Hamas to increase the number of civilian casualties, Israel has been extraordinarily successful in reducing them.
00:10:09.900This doesn't mean that there won't be incidents in which innocent Palestinians are killed, and, as in any war, there will likely be war crimes committed by both sides.
00:10:20.160If you need further evidence that claims of Israel's indiscriminate attacks are nonsense, just look at the way various commentators reacted to what has been dubbed Operation Grim Beeper.
00:10:30.540Thousands of Hezbollah pages were rigged with explosives and then detonated simultaneously, killing and injuring thousands of terrorists and a small number of bystanders.
00:10:39.580The pages in question were not picked at random.
00:10:42.580Israel specifically selected a batch of senior Hezbollah operatives.
00:10:45.800And still, people like Hamza Youssef, Scotland's former first minister, complain about Israel's indiscriminate attacks.
00:10:53.560This was, definitionally, the most precise, targeted and surgical large-scale anti-terrorist operation in human history.
00:11:00.640In summary, I've engaged with an open mind and in good faith with all the anti-Israel arguments presented to me over the last year.
00:11:07.600On balance, I regard them as disingenuous, irrelevant, and designed to pull at my heartstrings in order to obscure the harsh reality of this conflict.
00:11:16.800We would respond exactly the way that Israel has.
00:11:20.300The only difference is we would do so with the support of every member of the international community.
00:11:25.300While Israel has to fight not only the terrorists who want to wipe them off the map, but Western apologists for those terrorists as well.
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