I enjoy the Making Sense podcast by Sam Harris – it’s often challenging and regularly thought provoking. However Harris’s repeated smearing and gaslighting of his own audience vis-a-vis the conflict in Israeli Gaza has irked thousands of his listeners. I’m one of them.

The issue for me isn’t that Harris supports Israel’s right to defend itself. The issue is how Harris conflates principled concern for Palestinians with support for Hamas, dismissing all nuanced positions. He implies that anything less than full-throated pro-Israel sentiment, regardless of Israeli actions, makes one an antisemite or a naive fool who has been sucked in by phoney Palestinian propaganda.

Sam has faced listener pushback on this issue since the conflict reignited on 7th October. He addressed a fraction of these criticisms in episode 416 and again in a blog post “What Whataboutery?” published on the 26th May. However he choose to avoid much of the real pushback. I’ll summarise it as best I can below:

Painting all Protestors with One Brush:
Harris frequently suggests that students involved in the campus protests are “effectively supporting Hamas”. He implies that those who protest Israel’s actions are aware of and downplay Hamas’s genocidal aims. These are sweeping claim given the number of US American Jews who attended various protests there and around the world. Yet he continues by asking, “you mean to tell me that students at Harvard and Princeton and Stanford don’t know that Palestinian intifadas entail a fair amount of suicidal terrorism and the deliberate murder of noncombatants?” This rhetorical question suggests that if they do know, their protest is complicit with Hamas. It’s weak and intellectually lazy to taint all protestors in this light and below the standards Sam demands of others elsewhere be it in coverage of Trump, Woke-ism and more recently Biden’s decline and cover up. Seeking to quash freedom of speech and right to protest by blanket criticism is anti American and out of Trump’s rulebook.

“Moral Confusion” as a Proxy for Hamas Sympathy:
Sam uses the term “moral confusion” to describe those who criticize Israel in any way that challenges his worldview. He asserts that “the fact that millions of people can’t do the moral arithmetic here…. is itself an enormous problem.”
Sam seems incapable and unwilling to acknowledge that many listeners hold several positions at once. That a) Hamas are manaical lunatics and their attacks are and were egregious but that b) the Israeli state has been acting inappropriately for decades and in a way that increases tensions. And most importantly that c) an inadequate peace is infinitely better than the mindless slaughter we are witnessing. The logical progression of Harris’s position on the other hand seems to be that if every citizen of Gaza need to die to ensure the destruction of Hamas then that is a regrettable price worth paying.

Harris Attributes All Palestinian Suffering to Hamas:
Harris attributes all Palestinian suffering solely to Hamas, citing their use of human shields and instigation of conflict implying that humanitarian concerns for innocent non combatants inherently overlook Hamas’s culpability. However Harris exhibits a striking double standard: while condemning Hamas for depriving Gazans of resources, he applies no similar moral judgment when Israel imposes identical restrictions, particularly regarding humanitarian aid. This silence undermines his assertions that Israel is attempting to minimize civilian suffering, suggesting instead their willingness to match its enemy’s brutality to destroy Hamas regardless of ‘collateral damage’.

Generalizing Anti-Zionism to Antisemitism and Hamas Support:
Harris has stated, “I will grant that most people who claim to be anti-Zionist at this point are probably also antisemitic.” Another sweeping attack on historians or critics who might dare to revisit the historic turmoil in the region or suggest that other paths may have led to better outcomes in the now. Strangely Sam has no mention of the strange contradiction inherent in that idea that anti-zionists are de facto antisemites yet anyone who dares even moot a Palestinian state (as a tentative step towards peace) is attempting to reward Hamas for it’s actions on 7th October. Again it’s simply a scurrilous misrepresentation of the motives of those who might suggest it – many of whom are in the centre rather than the extreme left or extreme right on this issue.

Relax, It’s Still Ok to Criticize Israel:
Despite everything so far Harris has the chutzpah to state that “it really is possible to be critical of Israel, and to be committed to the political rights of the Palestinian people, without being confused about the reality of Islamic religious fanaticism—or the threat that it poses not just to Israel, but to open societies everywhere.” In reality Harris’s rhetoric everywhere else makes it difficult to discern how such criticism can be expressed without falling into what he deems “moral confusion” or “effectively supporting Hamas.”

Beware of Religious Fanatics (but don’t mention the settlements):
Sam likes to expound on the risk to “open societies everywhere” posed by Islamic religious fanaticism. This position certainly sells books and feeds into the moral imperative and urgency for Hamas to be obliterated at any cost in order to protect the West. Most centrists acknowledge the danger of Islamic fanaticism but it seems (correct me if I’m wrong) to be largely limited to those nations with a history of misadventure in the Middle East. Yes, there are challenges when people with different cultures live together but the 4.5 million muslims (2020 figures) in the USA seem to fitting in fairly well – they certainly weren’t among the hordes attacking the Capital on January 6th.

Hamas aside, the religious fanatics to worry about are the radical Christians in the MAGA movement who’d happily abandon centuries of US democracy in favour of an end to many basic women’s rights and destruction of the legal system and due process. Indeed some of this cohort are funding the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank in order to expedite the rapture. But Sam and others like him, would scream outrage if you had the audacity to suggest that these settlements are feeding the latent extremism that already exists in Gaza and the West Bank.
Even if that were true it’s clear that on a purely practical level the settlements have overstretched the IDF for years and were a key factor in compromising Israels ability to defend it’s own border on October 7th. The Israeli Policy Forum say that settlements are a massive burden on the security of Israel itself as “over one half of active IDF troops are stationed in the West Bank.” A very inconvenient truth indeed.

Honestly, Sam Loves Counter Points:
Sam invited bestselling author and academic Yuval Noah Harari onto the show for what promised to be a great two-way conversation. It wasn’t. Harris choose to downplay the Israeli expert in his midst and to look away from the troubling rise of fanaticism in Israel. Sam acted disingenuously in regard to the the relentless expansion of settlements in the West Bank and then played dumb on the discrimination against Arabs in Israeli culture or any other myriad of issues raised by Harari.

No one, it seems, is better equipped to understand the actions of Israel and expound on the many many failings of the Palestinian people than the man living in a high security mansion in California.
It figures. I for one will continue to seek balanced perspectives elsewhere because I don’t expect to hear them from Sam Harris.

Sources of Quotes from transcripts and blog posts on Sam’s Substack.