New Atheism's Holy Land: Sam Harris's Faith in Zion

“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.” —Sam Harris

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist by training, a philosopher by self-description, and, to a large online audience, the presiding rationalist of our age—host of the Making Sense podcast, author of bestsellers on religion and ethics, and among the founding figures of the movement that came to be called “New Atheism." Why, then, does Harris refuse to engage with critics of Israel? After all, our presiding rationalist must surely offer a rational explanation.

In “Why I Won’t Debate Critics of Israel,” Harris offers a comprehensive formulation of his position on the State of Israel. The impetus for this defense is to justify Harris’s refusal to debate critics of Israel—a neglect his audience is increasingly disgruntled by. What forms the primary presuppositions behind Harris’s staunch support of Israel? A response to this question reveals the idealism that undergirds Harris's New Atheism: a mode of thought that replaces historical analysis with essentialist narratives of civilization and barbarism.

At the outset of his piece, Harris emphatically states his lack of desire to “debate the history of the Middle East,” which is “irrelevant to solving the [Israel-Palestine] conflict.” This anti-historicism manifests itself in a major aspect of Harris’s worldview, namely the Clash of Civilizations thesis. If not history, what explains the “problem in the Middle East”? Harris’s answer is “jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism, militant Islam,” which manifests as the “belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.” Palestinian violence, which Harris deems “worse than Nazis,” stems from “Jew-hatred” and “religious fanaticism.” If the role of history is “irrelevant,” the range of causal factors that contribute to the Israel-Palestine conflict becomes confined to reference to religious mythology.

Harris’s defense of Israel rests on two points. First, there exists a fundamental difference between Israelis and Palestinians, which manifests itself "culturally, psychologically, ethically, spiritually—in every way that matters.” Second, the “global preoccupation” with Israel—a “contemptible” product of “perennial lies and delusions”—is a display of an antisemitic double standard. Compounding these presumptions, Harris asserts that he is “not interested in exploring all the ways Israel has missed the mark,” since they are irrelevant to Israel’s “ethical” supremacy.

This point demands careful attention. Harris reduces Israel’s “failings” to the following: “Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corrupt alliance with the far right,” “the many crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank,” and “the deaths of innocent noncombatants in several wars.” The sanitization of the gravest of Israel’s crimes—namely, genocide and apartheid—as mere “crimes” is presumably because they are instances of the “perennial lies and delusions” Harris alluded to. The charges of genocide and apartheid are, at this point, comprehensive and well-documented. Harris, who cut his intellectual teeth emphasizing the importance of rationality over religious fanaticism, sees little issue with refusing to seriously deal with the evidence of Israel’s genocide and apartheid. Delegating discussion of Israel's genocide to a footnote, Harris deems it "nothing short of a blood libel," seeing "no point in debating the specifics of what the IDF has done in Gaza on any given day.” The closest Harris comes to offering anything of substance regarding the genocide charge is to dismiss it through a strawman: that "Islamists" and "the Left" have redefined "'genocide' to mean that too many innocent people have been killed in an otherwise just war." While Harris readily ascribes antisemitism to "organizations like the U.N., Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch," the assertion fails to develop into an argument against the copious amounts of evidence their reports compile. Harris's engagement with the gravest of Israel's crimes reveals not rational inquiry but a refusal to deal with reality, one that regrettably mirrors religious dogmatism.

Harris’s central argument (Zionism’s ethical supremacy over its foes) becomes tenable only when one ignores the history of Israel-Palestine relations. Indeed, once one accepts that Israel is committing genocide and apartheid, by what metric does it retain any form of “ethical” supremacy, especially relative to its own victims? Harris avoids having to answer this question by, in a fashion not uncommon to Hasbara (Israeli propaganda), insisting upon his right to refuse to deal with the documentary record, thus ensuring the propagation of the New Atheist mythology of Israel’s ethical supremacy.

To “fundamentally change” his views on Israel, Harris requires “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.

Harris limits the language of the "death cult" for Israel's enemies. Still, if the evidence he dismisses is of any importance, the category is much more representative of the conduct of the Israel Defense Forces. The IDF employs sexual violence and starvation as weapons of war. There is extensive documentation of Israel’s use of Palestinians as human shields. Poll after poll has displayed the attitudes of the Israeli population towards Palestinians. A majority supports expelling all Gazans—nearly half support killing all Palestinians. A majority oppose prosecution for IDF soldiers accused of raping Palestinians. Members of the Israeli far-right stormed two military bases to dispute the trial of multiple IDF soldiers who were caught on camera engaging in violent sexual assault of a Palestinian prisoner. At the height of the genocide, two-thirds of Israelis either supported it or believed it did not go far enough. It is thus unclear where these overwhelmingly popular attitudes among the Israeli population fit in with what is for Harris “the only thing worth considering,” namely “what the current inhabitants of Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the surrounding Arab states want out of life now.” Harris's rationalism thus takes a curious form: he demands evidence of Israel's wrongdoings while simultaneously denigrating those who present it as a "growing cast of scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics who have made that beleaguered country [Israel] their professional or psychiatric obsession."

Sam Harris's criteria for withdrawing support for Israel are evidently met. Much like history, Israel’s conduct in the present, too, must be “irrelevant.” It appears that there is nothing that Israel can do that would fundamentally change Harris’s mind; his argument is entirely unfalsifiable, revealing the limits of the role ‘rationality’ plays in his defense of the Zionist project.

The contradiction at the heart of Harris’s Zionism thus requires a resolution. Harris presents the mythology of ‘Palestinian rejectionism,’ which he terms the primary cause of the conflict. Harris writes: “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.” Harris suddenly sees no problem discussing the history of the conflict. It ought to be clarified why the historical conditions that have characterized the Israel-Palestine conflict are “irrelevant,” except when the peace process is considered. Once the deficiency present in Harris's description of the peace process is revealed, the role history plays in his worldview becomes that much clearer.

Once again, the long-standing mythology of Palestinian rejectionism is merely asserted, requiring seemingly no amount of evidence to sustain it. The colonial nature of the peace process is well-documented. Even at its inception in the 1936 Peel Commission, the two-state solution contained within it a provision demanding forced expulsion of indigenous Palestinians. The most commonly cited case of Palestinian rejectionism, namely the Camp David offer, was derided by Israel’s own acting foreign minister as one that, were he a Palestinian, he too “would have rejected.” That the entirety of the negotiations consistently presumed violations of basic Palestinian rights according to international law must form part of the history that Harris deems “irrelevant.” Even so, none of this is relevant in the face of the most representative event in recent history that illuminates this issue: the peaceful Great March of Return in 2018, partly organized by Hamas, was met with targeted massacres at the hands of Israeli snipers. The argument that Palestinian intransigence is to blame for the conflict, thus, is quite untenable.

A hallmark of the New Atheist movement, the substitution of material analysis with pointing to elements in ancient religious mythology persists in Harris’s analysis. If the cause of Palestinian violence lies in some form of perennial anti-Semitism with religious origins, the following facts produce a serious conundrum. Why did Muslims, Jews, and Christians largely co-exist on peaceful terms in historic Palestine before the advent of Zionism? How is the secular nature of the most consequential Palestinian resistance movements throughout history explained through “religious fanaticism”? The dispossession and occupation of Palestinians began long before Palestinian resistance acquired its Islamist character in 1987 with the creation of Hamas, the raison d'être of which remains opposition to Zionism.

If victims of colonialism, across religious lines, so often turn to violence, what makes Palestinian resistance unique? Unlike "Nat Turner, the Mau Mau, and the Algerian FLN," Harris argues that "[Palestinian resistance] kills civilians, as well as its own members, as a religious sacrament, [which] is something else entirely." The savagery of the FLN aside, "it didn’t declare the killing of every French person on earth a religious obligation." True, the FLN was a secular, Marxist organization; it is well-documented, however, that it used religious language to rally the largely religious Algerian masses over to its cause. As the historian Natalya Vince writes, "The war was often referred to as a jihad, combatants were called mujahideen, and those killed in the struggle were shuhadā (martyrs)." While Harris alludes to the violence of the abolitionists, he fails to develop it further, presumably because such an endeavor would quickly undermine his own argument. Nat Turner called for the indiscriminate killing of all white people and explicitly cited the divine as the motivating factor for the rebellion. Indeed, John Brown explicitly cited the example of Christ to justify self-sacrifice and martyrdom resulting from violent resistance against slavery: "Did not my Master Jesus Christ come down from Heaven and sacrifice Himself upon the altar for the salvation of the race, and should I, a worm, not worthy to crawl under His feet, refuse to sacrifice myself?" Harris denies this history and holds religion as the determinative factor exclusively for Palestinian resistance.

Harris’s anti-historicism allows him to mount a 'rational' intellectual justification for colonialism. His moral defense of Israel eschews any reference to historical or material reality and instead relies on orientalizing the colonized and asserting their cultural inferiority. His analysis devolves into an almost obsessive infatuation with the abstract and the hypothetical. As Harris writes, “If Hamas had the power, it would perpetrate a real genocide in Israel.” Does imagining a future, hypothetical genocide to justify an actual, existing one constitute a rational exercise?

Harris’s predilection toward the abstract has led him to employ similar arguments to support torture, racial profiling, and nuking Iran.

In another example of the Harrisian hypothetical, he writes:

… 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.

The most immediate issue related to this is that it entirely inverts the material dynamic. Not only does Israel exist, but it is also by far the most territorially secure country in the region, not least due to the unchecked support it receives from the United States, the global imperial superpower. On the other hand, Israel and the U.S. have for decades imposed faits accomplis that violate the Palestinians’ “right to exist,” not least being the present genocide.

Harris blames anti-Semitism for the difference in response to the crimes of other countries, listing North Korea, Iran, Russia, China, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen as examples. Iran is at present the victim of a joint American-Israeli war of aggression; three of the countries Harris mentions are designated official enemies of the U.S. government (DPRK, Russia, and China) against which the Washington-led imperial bloc has been waging a persistent cold war. Harris ought to demystify the value of protests in such cases. The crises in Syria, Sudan, and Yemen all represent, at least in part, manifestations of U.S. imperial power, either directly or through its client states; it is worth pointing out that there exists an almost one-to-one parallel between the political forces that oppose Israel and those that oppose the U.S. role in Syria, Sudan, and Yemen. Ironically, Saudi Arabia, being an essential arm of U.S. hegemony in the Middle East alongside Israel, receives little criticism from Zionists.

Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. Over the course of this “special relationship,” the U.S. has vetoed over 50 UN resolutions that attempt to criticize Israel. Over thirty-five U.S. states have enacted anti-BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) legislation, and the present genocide has only intensified the long-standing precedent of cracking down on U.S. academics for criticizing Israel. The charge of anti-Semitism is constantly used as a cudgel against anti-Zionism. The specific focus on Israel is, instead, explained by the confluence of a livestreamed extermination campaign — which Harris describes as “the pornography of misery and death that has been steadily manufactured by supporters of Hamas” — alongside a totalitarian regime that stifles attempts to prevent it.

Harris and the religious fanatics he criticizes both share a fundamental intellectual tendency. Both are staunch opponents of historical analysis, favoring references to eternal, unchanging metaphysical claims. Their shared goal is to defend a faith-based ideological claim, and any engagement with history is secondary. History rarely makes an appearance in Harris’s analysis, and only when its distortion produces an effective justification for colonial violence.

We can now engage with the question posed at the outset, namely the reason for Harris’s opposition to debating critics of Israel. A serious conversation about Israel entails a discussion of Israel’s conduct, past and present. Harris’s New Atheism is little more than a project of ideological legitimation for U.S. imperialism, and it relies on a palpable indifference towards the material realities of colonial projects such as Israel. What Zionism is in the concrete eludes Harris’s project, the basis of which is the a priori designation of Israel as a moral society in the abstract. It is out of this faith claim that all of Harris's ‘rational’ conclusions emanate. Harris can not engage rationally with the history and materiality of Israel and Zionism in practice because to do so would be incongruous with the fundamentally religious nature of New Atheist Zionism.