Letter to Sam Harris: Don't Go Partisan

Open letter to Sam Harris pointing out bias in his take on the Palestine-Israel issue. 

Key Points:

• The Power of Thought Experiments: Analyzing the claim that "if Palestinians put down weapons, there would be peace; if Israelis put down weapons, there would be a genocide."
• The Comparison Trap: How we inadvertently judge one side by its worst actors and the other by its best.
• Double Standards in Disarmament: Looking at the historical test cases in Gaza and the West Bank, and the metrics of accountability.
• The Antidote to Outrage: Why empathy, historical context, and Stoic philosophy must guide us toward persuasion instead of condemnation.

The New Frontier Post. Venturing forth into new realms of knowledge. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Open letter to Sam Harris: Why the Public Intellectual is Wrong on the Israel-Palestine Conflict by T. A. Ahmed. Dear Sam, I have been a longtime fan of your rationalist thinking, Sam. Through your books and your ongoing essays on Substack, you have deeply influenced my perspective on everything from morality to consciousness and psychedelics. Your waking up app has been instrumental in my meditative journey over the past many years, exposing me to diverse spiritual traditions, from Buddhism to Sufism. Politically, your willingness to criticize both America's left and right has always resonated with me. During the post-George Floyd woke moral panic, when the left gave rioters a pass while casting police nationwide as villains, you asked the hard questions. I appreciated that in such a partisan environment, you did not simply pick a side. That is why your stance on Israel-Palestine feels so uncharacteristic. Not only have you picked a side without sufficient evidence, but you refuse to even debate anyone critical of Israel. To your credit, you've given reasons for your position and have continued to engage in debate with the community. So, I thought I'd take the time to write to you and see if I can't influence you to change your thinking. To keep it short, I'll focus on the one claim you make repeatedly as a reason for picking Israel's side. It's a claim you've made since 2023, most recently in this post, where you say, if the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace. If the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be a genocide. You conflate Hamas with Palestinians, falling into the comparison trap. It's telling that the sentence doesn't actually say who is committing the genocide. One could assume you mean Palestinians, since you refer to them in the sentence. But given the broader context, a reader could just as easily assume that you mean Hamas, whom you spend much of the essay rightly lambasting. For you to leave such a critical detail vague, who are you accusing of wanting to commit genocide? Suggests to me that the detail is either unimportant to you, or that you conflate or equate Hamas and Palestinians. Elsewhere in your post, you finally clarify that. If Hamas had the power, it would perpetrate a real genocide in Israel. While equating Hamas with all Palestinians, the worst of one side represents the whole, you do the opposite for Israel. Israel's represented by its best, those who would be willing to put down their weapons, and those who don't believe in killing Palestinians for their land. The depolarization group, Braver Angels, calls this kind of thinking the comparison trap. Your side is represented by its best, the other side by its worst. By imagining disarmament in a contextless thought experiment, you give Israelis the benefit of the doubt that they put down their weapons, but don't extend the same benefit of the doubt to Palestinians. If we contextualize the thought experiment, it disintegrates. Imagine that the context of the thought experiment is that Israel dropped their weapons as part of a process in which the two sides had meaningful dialogue, built trust, and healed wounds. Peace is possible, even with Hamas, given the right conditions, process, and leadership. To deny this possibility is to claim a people as irredeemable. It leads to morally ugly conclusions, such as perpetual incarceration or genocide. Why not perpetrate genocide on those who would perpetrate it, no matter what? Disregarding history should make you humble, not judgmental. You dismiss the land question because it gets into the history of the conflict, which, according to you, is a fool's errand, since there are two irreconcilable narratives about what happened. While I agree that the two narratives are irreconcilable, your dismissing the history should then make you morally humble, not judgmental. After all, most moral judgments are based on what happened. Facts of the matter, e.g., evidence of a thief stealing, not hypotheticals about future actions. If you can't untangle the history, then don't claim moral certainty. America also fails your moral litmus test, but there's no moral clarity here. According to your thought experiment, only two things need to be true to reach moral clarity. A statement of genocidal intent and actions that suggest intent is real and actionable. Donald Trump has made genocidal statements about Iran. A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. He has blown up schools and killed civilians. Have we reached moral clarity on the Iran-US conflict? No, we contextualize. We say Trump is reacting to his circumstances, blustering because of falling poll numbers, and a victim of his own personality. Can we contextualize Palestinians? Even if we assume Palestinians generally support Hamas, it doesn't mean Palestinians agree with all of that organization's beliefs. We don't dehumanize millions of MAGA simply because they support Trump. The thought experiment reveals a pro-Israel bias. While you use the term peace in your thought experiment, if Palestinians dropped their weapons there would be peace, I think what you really mean is that then there would be security. Peace implies that the two sides get something they've been fighting for. Israel wants security, and Palestinians want land. In other words, your thought experiment considers only Israel's most important need, security, and deems relevant the Palestinian need, land. Reaching moral clarity on a dispute without even considering what one side is fighting for cannot be the basis for moral clarity. And certainly not peace. You've been proven wrong in the West Bank. We have run your experiment in the West Bank. Fatah has mostly renounced violence and engaged in extensive security coordination with the IDF. Contrary to your claim, Fatah didn't achieve peace by dropping its weapons. They got the entrenchment of the occupation, a massive expansion of Israeli settlements, accelerated land seizures, and a deepening of military administration over Palestinian daily life. Disarmament without a viable diplomatic process only resulted in the loss of their land and autonomy. Your counter. In your article, footnote number six, you argue that the PA slash Fatah renouncing violence isn't a fair test of your premise, because Hamas continues to fire rockets, insisting instead that all armed actors, including Hezbollah and Iran, must put down their weapons for my counter-argument about Fatah to hold. Let's call this the acting as one condition. Palestinians must all be acting as one for you to accept their acts as proof of their behavior. Only if they all drop their weapons do you consider it dropping their weapons. The double standard. You point to Israel's 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza as proof that ending the occupation won't produce peace. They gave up land and got terror. This claim is a central pillar of your thesis. That land for peace doesn't work. But Israel did not uniformly give up all the land everywhere. It did not meet your acting as one condition. It was expanding settlements in the West Bank. And yet, you deem the withdrawal of Gaza as proof of Israel's behavior. Is this not a double standard? If we want peace, we empathize and not dehumanize. Before I end, I want to hold up a mirror. If you look at the extremes of Israeli public opinion right now, you see a mirror to Hamas. Polls show a significant percentage of Israelis support devastating civilian areas in Gaza, and one survey found that a majority of Jewish respondents believe there are no innocents in the territory. These are some pretty barbaric views, mirroring the rhetoric of Islamic extremism. A bad faith actor could look at this data, ignore the context, and conclude that Israelis are an inherently bloodthirsty lunatic society. But that would be a failure of empathy. Israelis are not a lunatic society. They're regular humans going through something extraordinary. Pointing at those poles without acknowledging the context dehumanizes them. We must recognize that those surveys were conducted after Hamas's brutality on October 7th, an event that resurrected the ghosts of the Holocaust and centuries of violent antisemitism, touching the deepest nerve of Jewish historical trauma. In addition, Israelis are in their own media bubble. Their screens are dominated by the faces of hostages and the funerals of their soldiers. They saw very little of the starvation in Gaza because they are trapped in an echo chamber that relentlessly reinforces their own existential fears and prejudices. We must not dehumanize them, nor decontextualize their fears. That said, we must speak up against Israel, holding such inhumane beliefs. We must argue with empathy. Try to persuade Israel out of its existential fears, which are understandable, but which are also making it see things less clearly. The Palestinians are, like them, regular humans going through something extraordinary. Peace is always possible. I have more to say about how you need to speak with more nuance about Islam and what a role model might be for us all in dealing with religious conflicts. But I'll leave that for another time. Among the many great philosophies I've imbibed from the Walking Up app is stoicism, which argues that humans are generally good, but are often misguided. It's our job to persuade and not to condemn, partly as a recognition of our own flaws. I've come to believe in this axiom deeply, and I extend this grace to both Palestinians and Israelis, and to you. Warm wishes, T.A. Ahmed. Find more of Timer Ahmed's work on Substack, Spotify, and Apple podcasts, and follow his latest updates on Twitter.