Making Sense with Sam Harris - #339 — The Infernal Logic of Jihad

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

Sam Harris speaks with Graeme Wood about the October 7th atrocities in Israel, the unfolding war in Gaza, and the ongoing problem of global jihadism. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.  

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Okay. Well, this is the first of two podcasts I'm going to be releasing in the coming days on the topic of jihad. Early next week, I'll release a solo podcast on all that we've seen in recent weeks in response to the unfolding war in Gaza, the global eruption of anti-Semitism and support for Hamas, and all the moral confusion suggested by that response. But first, I want to bring you a conversation I had with the Atlantic writer Graham Wood. Graham has been in Israel since a few days after the October 7th attacks. He is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of The Way of the Strangers, Encounters with the Islamic State, which is well worth reading. He joined The Atlantic in 2006 and has since reported from every continent except Antarctica and on a very wide variety of topics.

every continent except Antarctica, and on a very wide variety of topics. He's also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and he teaches at Yale University. Graham has been on the podcast several times before. He really has been my go-to resource on the topic of jihad, and the way these ancient ideas of martyrdom and holy war have been playing out in the modern world. So we speak in some detail about what happened on October 7th. And these details are fairly gruesome, so be aware of that. This is definitely not an episode of the podcast you want to be listening to with your kids in the car. But I think it's necessary to talk about the details because so much of the reaction to what happened on October 7th, and in particular the reaction to Israel's response to it, is not making contact with the specific differences in the acts of violence perpetrated by the two sides. The moral logic

of what happened on October 7th and the logic of its support in the Muslim world, to the degree that it is supported, is quite a bit different than the logic of Israel's response. So Graham and I discussed that, as well as a wide variety of geopolitical concerns that follow from the current conflict. Once again, a reminder, subscribers to the podcast can share links to full episodes now. You can share them one-to-one or post them on social media. Needless to say, the way to support the podcast is to subscribe at SamHarris.org. And if you can't afford a subscription,

you need only send an email to support at SamHarris.org and you will be given one. And now I bring you Graham Wood. I am here with Graham Wood. Graham, thanks for joining me. Sam, it's good to be back. So when October 7th happened, you and I, I had a shared response on many points, but one stark difference is that given your job description, you were quickly booking an airline flight to Israel. say that there's some amazement on the part of a bystander like myself that you can do that with such alacrity. Remind people the kinds of topics you have focused on as a journalist that would make sense of this behavior. Yeah, so I was booking tickets to Israel, and I'll say a bit

more about the complications of that in a second. But yeah, I've been reporting on this region for a long time, reporting on the Iraq war when that was going on, the Afghanistan War as well. And then for years, I was reporting on ISIS, which has become sadly relevant with this conflict. There's been a lot of discussion, especially from the Israeli side, saying Hamas is ISIS. And that's a really complicated thing for me, given that if you look at ISIS for as long as I did, you can start to see some salient, interesting differences there. But yeah, as soon as the 7th of October happened, it was like hearing an old song that you heard all the time at some point, and you just couldn't get it out of your head. For me, it was like hearing the old ISIS rhythms coming back. And first thing I did was try to get a ticket, which was difficult because airlines were canceling flights left and right. It took two or three tries before I finally got into Israel a few days after the attack.

It took two or three tries before I finally got into Israel a few days after the attack. Yes, I want to get into the point you just indicated about jihadism not being a unified front, and there are interesting differences there. And I just want to talk about jihadism in general and how I think that's the appropriate lens to throw over current events, unlike terrorism and other terms that we tend to use. But let's just start with just what your experience has been in Israel. I think you were there not that long ago. What is it like? I mean, I got to imagine the analogy that we've heard used so often, that this is their September 11th, immediately struck me as wrong in several respects. And I think this is quite a bit worse than what September 11th was for American society.

What is it like in Israel, and what has your experience been so far? So I've been here almost continuously since a few days after the attack. And I have seen things change. On arrival, there was an atmosphere of mourning, but more than anything else, people were just stunned. I mean, it had been a while since, say, the second Intifada, when the last time it really felt like in one's daily life in this country, that you'd wonder whether when you left the house, you'd come back to the house, whether the bus you were on was going to explode, that kind of thing. And this really did reach into the daily life of Israelis, and you could just feel it. I mean, there's an atmosphere of mourning, also an atmosphere of fury that I don't think

really pertained in the time immediately after September 11 in the United States. There was this sense, I think, of a lot of Israelis that they were betrayed, like deeply betrayed. By their own government and by the idea. Exactly. They expected that Hamas would do this if it could. What they didn't expect was that their own government would allow it to happen, especially a government like the government led by the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who the reason he was in power was because he said, I have taken a hard line against terrorism, against Palestinians, and I have delivered security. And that's going to allow us to consolidate gains. And so to come back to Israel after watching the

internecine political squabbles in Israel earlier this year, and then to see even the people who loved Netanyahu saying, you are scum of the earth. You're just horrible. The idea that you would leave us defenseless like this is the deepest betrayal of a leader of this country. What do we make of the fact that they were murdered in the South so defenseless? I mean, have you interviewed anyone who's in a position to actually describe what broke down there as far as intelligence failures or just, I mean, there've been reports or rumors that there was hacking of the actual monitoring system and what actually happened that explains not only the fact that Hamas was able to get across the border in that way, but that it took so long

for the IDF to respond. Yeah. The actual tactics that they used, we don't know the full story. And I guarantee there's going to be a commission that the Israelis have to discover exactly what happened. But on other parts of the border, I've had people tell me that a bird cannot fly across that border without the Israelis knowing. So for them to be so blind that there can be upwards of a thousand armed men who go across the border and then have the run of the place in several different Israeli communities for hours and hours and hours afterward. It was just an incredible failure. And it's not just a failure in the sort of everyday sense of, wow, that was a security breach.

It reaches, as you may know, really deep into the Israeli psyche because what happened resembles pogroms that people might have heard about from 100, 130 years ago. It really taps an ancestral horror of stories of great-great-great-grandma being raped by Cossacks or massacres in Kishinev in 1903. This is just utterly horrifying in precisely the way that Israelis thought they were immune to because they were in Israel. How it happened, it's still unclear, but the fact that it happened in this way at this scale has horrified the country. I think one of the other aspects of the surprise on October 7th probably had something to do with the attention that the IDF was paying to the West Bank. The West Bank, of course, is separate from the Gaza Strip.

And the reason they weren't paying as much attention as they might otherwise have been paying to the Gaza Strip was because over the last year, settlers have been pushing Palestinians off of land in the West Bank, and they've had to do that with the help of the IDF. So you find that there's a growing number of resources that were devoted to the settler project, that is, Israelis who have tried to create outposts on the West Bank and grab land there, usually at the expense of Palestinian communities. And to do that without violence breaking out, you have to have a military that oversees the whole thing and is often present at the very moment of the dispossession. So if that happens more and more,

there's only finite resources, and those resources were probably taken away from Gaza, and that probably meant that the communities on the edge of Gaza were more vulnerable than they otherwise might have been. Yeah, I saw the article you wrote about your encounter with settlers. There's not a neuron in my brain that is supportive of Jewish religious extremism, much less its claims upon real estate. Is it your understanding that Netanyahu has covertly encouraged that, or what culpability is there for the current government for that behavior? Enormous culpability. Many Israelis, when they look at the failure of their government to protect

them on October 7th, they notice that these resources were diverted to the West Bank by Netanyahu's government. They also notice that members of his government have been explicit about all this, that they want to take that land, they want to seize it by force if necessary, that land. They want to seize it by force if necessary, and they're going to, for ideological purposes, expand onto that land. So yeah, it's been a major part of his coalition to take a very, very strong pro-settler stance. I think many people expect there to be a massive political reckoning at some point based on this failure to keep Israelis safe. Do you think that reckoning is going to come before the unfolding war in Gaza is over? I mean, is it going to come faster than anyone wants, or is it going to be safely shelved until the more immediate

existential concerns are dealt with? I think Netanyahu personally is toast. His political future is sealed. So is the political future of most of the people in his government, but not yet. There's a belief that the heads of the IDF and the political leadership, they stay until the moment is right for them to move. But the main proposition that Netanyahu offered Israelis was, I will keep you safe. We, the right, built a wall. We have kept there from being another intifada. We've had the Iron Dome intercepting rockets coming in. And now they've presided over the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, which is clear evidence that whatever they offered before, they've utterly failed at,

which is why you see Jews in Israel saying things like, I came to Israel because the whole point of Israel is to avoid having massacres of Jews, which could have happened in anywhere else where you find Jews except for possibly the United States. And you can't do that. If that's the case, I'm just going to go back to Morocco. I'm just going to go back to the lands of my grandparents or parents, because if you can't provide that, then what good are you? So Netanyahu and his government will bear the full brunt of that anger from across the spectrum. And it's impossible for me to imagine that they could survive politically after that. Hmm. So let's talk about what actually happened. I mean, there's been obviously a lot of reporting on this. One thing that has changed recently, and you wrote a piece in The Atlantic about this, is that the IDF felt the need to actually bring journalists and perhaps others into an auditorium and show them some of the body cam footage and the nanny cam footage and the dash cam footage that they had acquired of what actually happened.

that they had acquired of what actually happened. First, before we talk about the details, this was not only Hamas. I think you saw footage from, like GoPro footage that Hamas themselves shot to document their atrocities. But there were other ordinary Gazans who came across the border and participated. Was that captured in the footage you saw, or is that just something that we know of based on other reporting? It's not captured in the footage that I saw in the IDF's screening. So the IDF's screening was truly raw footage. I mean, it was just images that were captured, as you say, by nanny cams, by security cams, by GoPros. But there was no indication of which faction from Gaza was doing what. But there's lots of other footage too. I've seen lots of

footage of people stealing TVs, solar panels, and ordinary Gazans crossing over the border simply to loot. So that's a big part of what people have seen. And also they also participated in taking of hostages. It seemed that it wasn't just Hamas that was gathering people to be brought back to Gaza, but there were other just Gazans doing it. Yeah. I mean, there's every indication that people were just streaming across the border and taking what and whom they could. And I believe Hamas has even suggested as much that some of the time since then has been spent just figuring out who they got. They don't know what they have to bargain with because different groups have taken different

people to different places. So this was disorganized in a way. I mean, it's almost that they succeeded. It seems at least that they may have succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings. And they encountered much less resistance than they were imagining. So they just they had this kind of embarrassment of sadistic riches where they they had all the time in the world to kill people and torture people and desecrate their bodies and then decide what they wanted to do next, whether that was bringing hostages back to Gaza or standing and fighting a final battle that would end in their martyrdom. But that was so slow in coming that it seems like they were surprised by their own success. Yeah, I think that's a really important point that explains a lot of why we're at where we're at,

that they did not know how successful they were going to be. They did some things that are just standard military practice. You attack an outpost, you succeed, and then you create a perimeter around it. You sort of expand that perimeter so it's as defensible as possible. And that perimeter in the different places where they attacked expanded and expanded and expanded to include whole civilian areas where I think they were, I'm certain that they were expecting to attack civilians, to take them hostage. But the idea that they would take 200 plus civilians hostage, that they would not encounter significant resistance for several hours, that doesn't

seem to be even in their plans. So you often hear people asking, hey, well, what did Hamas think was going to happen? Did they think that the Israelis weren't going to go into Gaza and destroy Gaza as a result of this? How crazy must they have been? I think they actually didn't think that this would happen because they didn't think they'd kill and kidnap so many Israelis. And that's what actually happened. So we're in a state where neither Israel nor Hamas

thought they would be in at the beginning of October. There's this misconception that Israel is a heavily armed society because everyone does their stint in the army. But if I'm not mistaken, people return their guns to the army when they leave the army, right? So this is not like Texas where most homes have guns in them. Am I correct in thinking that? Yeah, that's right. So it's very common to see people with handguns in Israel. It's very uncommon to see people who are, or it was uncommon a month ago to see people who were out of uniform carrying around assault rifles. So I think if Hamas fighters came into a kibbutz and encountered resistance, they were likely to

be encountering a few people with handguns against their Kalashnikovs, their RPGs. So yeah, it's an armed society, but it's not like trying to take over a town in Texas. So what happened? I don't know how much detail you want to go into based on the footage you saw, but I think it's worth discussing something in detail just because I think, I mean, obviously we're in such a strange moment now where we have, we're literally witnessing demonstrations on the campuses of Ivy League universities, really in explicit support of what happened on October 7th, seemingly knowing the details of what happened. And, you know, there are photos of hostages that get ripped off of walls as though

that were some intelligible way of supporting the Palestinian people and making some sense of their immiseration in Gaza under Hamas's rule, as they are used on an hourly basis as human shields in this conflict. It feels like it's worth describing what actually happened, because I would argue it makes no sense in political terms, and it makes a lot of sense in jihadist ones. Which is to say, it's unsurprising. We'll get into a discussion of jihad proper and differences between Hamas and other groups. Hamas and other groups. But what happened was so, it really seemed like a kind of violence you would not expect in the modern world, certainly not in a normal modern military context. And yet, when you think of it in terms of jihad, it's not actually fundamentally surprising. So I think it is worth describing anything you are comfortable describing from what you've seen. Yeah. So here's what happened. On the morning of October 7th, there were multiple breaches of this wall between Gaza and Israeli communities on the other side of

the wall. And these communities, they tended to be kibbutzes. So basically, there were agricultural co-ops and these intentional communities filled with people who kind of lived together, in some cases ate together, and anyone on the other side could be susceptible to this irony, is that the people in these kibbutzes were not right-wing settlers. These were not fans of Netanyahu, I would imagine. Many of these people, most of these people, have been described as left-wing idealists of one form or another, and precisely the kinds of people who would volunteer to drive Gazans across the border to get medical treatment in Israel. Yeah, totally. I mean, these were peaceniks.

These were 60s throwbacks. These were labor Zionists. The Kibbutz movement goes back before I was born into a period when people were, they had a kind of utopian, peace-oriented view of the world. And a lot of these people who were like 85 years old who were taken hostage, they came from that. So what happened first was the Hamas and others breached the border wall, attacked a number of military outposts, and were just wildly successful in taking over these outposts. I remember seeing the footage the day that it happened. It came out that quick. They came

into those outposts seemingly unopposed. There wasn't really any preparation whatsoever. And they just massacred a large number of the soldiers, many of them conscripts who were there. So that's roughly what happened at the military outposts. In the communities, they would encounter not much more resistance than that. You can see in the videos, they show up at the gates of the communities. These gates, they're closed. You have to have a code to open them up. Not that much more complicated than a garage door opener. And so in some of the videos, you see them just waiting there, hiding almost in the bushes next to the gates, waiting for someone to drive up and shooting them, killing them. And then over and over in the security cameras' footage,

you can see there will be some sedan that rolls up. And you can just imagine what's going through the heads of these Israelis who notice that something's weird and then notice that what's weird is that there's a guy with a gun who's there. And then next thing they know, they're being shot. And there's no shortage of really disturbing footage, but the way that the life of these Israelis went from extremely normal to a little off to over is just horrifying. These were people who weren't even resisting in the slightest, and they're simply massacred. And then their bodies pulled out of the cars, the cars looted a bit, sometimes destroyed further. And then once they could finally get into the gates

of the communities, then things got quite grisly. I've been to a few of them since, then things got quite grisly. I've been to a few of them since, and they're totally evacuated. It's unclear whether they'll ever be repopulated. The former residents are in other cities in Israel now. But you see some houses that are completely intact, and then others that are piles of rubble and cinders, and then others that are just completely bullet riddled. And over the course of hours, we're talking between 12 and 24 hours, these houses were raided. The occupants were hunted down, shot, tortured. Israeli houses now, in order to be up to code, they have to, if you build a new house, it has to have a safe room that's meant to withstand missile attacks or rocket attacks, rather.

And so, of course, a lot of families went into these safe rooms. The safe rooms are not meant to withstand 24 hours of diabolical terrorists surrounding you and deciding to do whatever they want, such as just light your house on fire and having you burn to death within it. So a lot of people died that way. There are, from the GoPro videos, lots of images of old people who were presumably just confused about the noise outside. And through a screen door, you can see them just get shot. And then some of the other images or some of the other videos, they're just deeply disturbing. I mean, I've seen a lot of horrible stuff from covering ISIS. And this is horrible in a kind of different way. ISIS would have much

higher production values, and they would describe why they're doing this crucifixion or this beheading, and then pronounce the sentence. And you'd see from four different camera angles what they're doing. In this, it's more like we're entering everyday scenes of normal life and someone's kitchen, someone's living room, walking into their front porch, and then interrupting it as violently as possible. You see early in the morning, so you see people who are in their pajamas, half-dressed, who are scrambling, trying to figure out what's going on and how to stay safe. And within seconds, their family is destroyed. There was one in particular captured in a nanny cam where there's a father with two young sons who are clearly woken up, surprised,

but aware that they're being attacked. And they tentatively leave their house and then go to a little area in their backyard, I think thinking they might be able to hide there. And pretty quickly, the terrorists toss a grenade in and there's an explosion. You see the dad killed probably instantly. I mean, he's fallen over and at least unconscious and certainly never gets up again. And then the kid's covered in blood. One of them's lost an eye. And then you hear them as they run back into their house, sit in their kitchen, and you hear them talk about the fact that their lives are about to end, call for their mom, talk

about daddy, daddy. And then one of the children says to the other, I think we're about to die. And all of this happens while the terrorists are still there. The Hamas guy, presumably the same one who threw the grenade, walks into the scene and opens up their fridge. He says, water, water. I think he's trying to give them water, but there are other stories of Hamas fighters who go into people's houses and then eat the breakfast that the family had prepared. So it's the interruption of life that is, for me, just haunting. So there have been reports of decapitated babies and a baby put in an oven and there have been people who have doubted those reports

what do you know about the veracity of the most extreme imagery we've been told about? So what I have seen myself is rubble when you go to the actual places

at the time when I was able to go there, which was days, not weeks, after the events, already the scene had been tidied up a bit, but it was clear that there's a horrible cataclysm that happened. There were, though, on the very day that it happened, there were videos that were coming out showing the most awful, gruesome stuff. So there is no doubt that what happened on October 7th was an atrocity, that there was sadism, that there was an attempt to kill whoever could be killed, and to do it in a way that would be as painful for the victims as possible. So that much is a certainty. And then the things that the

videos show, even on those early days, was there decapitation? Yes, I know there was decapitation because the video showed a Thai worker who was clearly already dying. He had been gut shot, I think, and was lying on the floor. And you can hear the terrorists around him yelling, give me a knife, give me a knife, presumably to decapitate him because that's what they eventually tried to do. And not having a knife, they used a garden hoe. So I had seen part of this video where they hack it at his neck with a garden hoe. where they hack it at his neck with a garden hoe. And in the screening that the IDF did, I saw the rest of the video where they keep at it. It's not one swipe that it takes to do that.

So there's no doubt that the atrocities that were done were maximal. They were as bad as you can get. Now, there are some specific claims that have been made that I myself as a reporter can't confirm. I haven't seen the evidence for them. I've heard testimony and I've certainly heard secondhand testimony where someone's sister's friend was a first responder and observed this or that. What did Antony Blinken say that he had observed? Didn't he give some testimony that he was shown imagery that confirms whichever report was then current? And I've lost connection to what those details were. Yeah. Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State of the United States, he gave testimony that he had seen a family that was bound and then dismembered before being killed. So kids with fingers taken off, feet taken off, a father with his eye gouged out and then killed. So that's the standard here. At the margins, there are particular atrocities that have been described that I, as a reporter, I can't claim to have seen the videos

of this, so I can't confirm them. But the dozens of decapitated babies, the fetuses ripped from the mother's wombs. These are on the list of things that have been claimed. And from my perspective, what I know has happened is quite enough. And the particular atrocities beyond that don't really change my opinion of the situation. Yeah, I would agree. I mean, maximal is maximal. And the reason why I wanted you to go into some gruesome detail is not for the sake of the luxuriating in the horror of it, but I just think there are layers of moral confusion here that I'm noticing get deposited upon our public conversation about what's happening and what is right for Israel to do in light of what has happened. I just think we have to cut through. And so one species of of confusion is to imagine that really body count is all, right? So if Israel, if the IDF drops

bombs on Gaza and kills more than 1,400 innocent Palestinians, well then at a minimum, the balance is even with respect to the ethics of the situation. Their response has been proportional. And the moment they kill more than that, well, then the Israelis are the evil ones. And that's really, it's just, that's how you do the moral arithmetic. And that's just so obviously wrong. I mean, there are many, many smart people who would sign up for that kind of analysis. I imagine someone like Noam Chomsky would think that's how you have to think about it. And on his account, therefore, we are orders of magnitude worse than our enemies have been in quite a long time because of all the people we and the Israelis and Western powers generally have killed as collateral damage in recent wars.

But it just seems to me quite obvious that there is a difference between a group of people that would intend to murder non-combatants up close and personal in totally inefficient and painful ways and make a kind of sacrament of that violence. I'll get to what I mean by that later on. And people who would take fairly great pains to avoid killing non-combatants, all the while knowing that if they're going to wage any kind of war, non-combatants will be killed, right? So they'll drop leaflets telling people to get out of buildings they intend to destroy. They'll call cell phones to try to get people to leave those buildings. And, you know, as I've said in previous podcasts, you know, Hamas is consciously using those non-combatants as human shields in a way that would be completely unthinkable and just ridiculous

if you reverse the logic. I mean, just imagine these, imagine IDF soldiers using those non-combatants on those kibbutzes as human shields against the onrushing forces of Hamas. Killing non-combatants was the point, right? So there is no using Jewish human shields to deter them. But the reverse is not the case. And Israel, you know, if Israel wanted to kill non-combatants by the tens and hundreds of thousands, they could do that. The fact that they don't do that reveals that all the non-combatants they kill are, at worst, inadvertent, right? This is not, if they could kill only members of Hamas and not kill a single woman or child in Gaza, that's what the IDF would do.

So there's a moral equivalence there that I think really has to be cut through and the difference has to be reiterated. And so that some of the details you gave, I think, are necessary to do that. The other piece, which I think is going to be very hard for most rational secular people to understand, is that the kinds of people who would do what you just described are almost certainly, I mean, it's not to say it wasn't a psychopath or two among them, almost certainly these were psychologically normal people. It's not like jihadism functions as a pure bug light for the world's psychopaths. And, you know, these are people who would do horrible things anyway, but they're just doing these particular horrible

things under the aegis of jihad. This is something I believe you and I have spoken about when talking about the Islamic State in the past. It's not like all the people who were raping Yazidis and taking them as sex slaves and killing their husbands, even the people who were raping Yazidis and taking them as sex slaves and killing their husbands, even the people who had dropped out of medical school in the UK for the pleasure of doing that. It's not like they were all psychopaths who were destined for a life of rape and murder anyway, and they just decided to do it here. The deepest problem here that I think we have to talk about is that there are ideas that are so powerful and destructive that they create a kind of absolute evil that, to our horror, doesn't actually require the presence of many evil people. Normal people can be led to believe the requisite things that could justify precisely the kind of violence you described. And that I think is just for secular people, people who have never met anyone who has met anyone who

has been certain of paradise, I think it's very hard to understand. And so anyway, feel free to disagree with anything that I just said there, but I think that is something that I'm eager to disabuse our audience of. Yeah, I think we're about to start talking, I think, about Hamas and ISIS. And I'll introduce one difference after what you just said, which is ISIS worked very hard to make sure that everybody was on the same page ideologically. A lot of their project was an educational project. It was, you have to believe the following things. In fact, that's how we know that you're with us, is that you believe the

following things. And you don't deviate at all, because if you do deviate, then we're coming after you, even with that minor deviation. And from what I've seen of the guys who were coming in from Hamas, absolutely most of them seemed to have jihad on the brain. They go in and they use particular religious slogans that are familiar from jihadism elsewhere that indicate they're thinking about this and they're phrasing what they're doing in those terms. There's other people who are going in and, as we've noted, stealing kids' bikes and bike helmets. And I don't know how they're phrasing what they're doing to themselves. Clearly, they've dehumanized Israelis in their own minds so that they think it's a reasonable thing to loot a place where people are literally burning alive within a few dozen meters of them. So it's at least a sense of inhumanity and hatred of their

imagined enemy. But it's unclear what they all believe beyond that. And there's a whole range of things that people might have had going through their minds from, hey, I'm striking a blow against the ones who have dispossessed us, to I'm doing something that God is going to reward me for with the highest rewards of heaven. And then to add to that, even in Gaza, especially in Gaza, the approval rate of Hamas is very, very low. Gazans do not like Hamas in general. And so to see them doing these horrible things in the name of an organization that is known to be corrupt and incompetent is, again, it's very strange and different compared to ISIS, where with the fighters for ISIS, they thought that ISIS, for whatever faults it had,

represented the will of God, was preordained and prophesied as the standard bearer for Islam, bringing about the end of the world just as God desired. So in a way, it's more unsettling to see people doing these horrible things for an entity that they seem to know is defective, but they're doing it anyway and with the same amount of cruelty. Yeah, okay. Well, let me just pass over some of that terrain again because I think there's a few more distinctions and caveats to add. One is I've heard that while Hamas is very unpopular in Gaza, probably for their conscious immiseration of the Gazans by stealing all of the resources for the purpose of building terror tunnels, etc., they're actually still popular in the West Bank, and they probably would win an election today if held in the West Bank. Have you heard that discrepancy or not? Yeah, I think this actually illustrates things nicely. I mean, it's exactly crisscross,

where in the West Bank, which is governed by the Palestinian Authority on the Palestinian side, Hamas is relatively popular. And then in Gaza, which is governed by Hamas and where the Palestinian authority was kicked out, the Palestinian authority is more popular. So in both cases, they're misgoverned. I mean, these are terribly misgoverned statelets. And the one who's not misgoverning you is the one who's more popular. Yeah, and the other caveat I would introduce is that however unpopular Hamas might be, there's probably a distinction between hating them as a form of government and not supporting what they did on October 7th, right? It's conceptually coherent to me to believe that there's some people who thought October 7th was a great victory, and even knowing the details, they would fully support it, but

they also think Hamas is a terrible governing organization and they've ruined Gaza. Those are not incoherent. I agree. I think the thing to remember about Hamas is that it's had years in power, and the ideology that it stands for is rather well laid out. It's in favor of an eventual worldwide Muslim government. It is in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood's view of government and of how Islamism should work. It is not, though, ISIS. ISIS operated with crystalline clarity,

extreme simplicity, where you could describe the system of government that ISIS wanted on the back of a three-by-five card, whereas Hamas, as an entity that actually has to pick up trash and do a lot of things for years, not just briefly as ISIS did, is a pretty messy thing and not nearly as ideologically pure, clear, and simple as ISIS was. Yeah, well, let's talk about the fragmentation of the jihadist landscape for a moment, because I think it's interesting. I don't think it's as consequential as we would want it to be. I mean, we would want it to be totally internecine and self-canceling, right? It'd be great if the jihadists were just killing themselves and focused on their hair-splitting theological differences and really just let them have at it. But in their hatred of secular, pluralistic, i.e. Western values, I think they're united in their aspiration to triumphantly spread Islam, whatever form they favor, to the end of the earth.

They're ultimately united. Obviously, there's the split between Shia and Sunni. There's the infighting among Sunni jihadist groups. We've got the Islamic State that would more or less excommunicate everyone for their lack of purity. It was certainly, as you point out in a recent article in The Atlantic, they would consider Hamas more or less apostates because they're willing to play the political game, the nationalistic game, and above all, they're willing to collaborate with Shia in being backed by Iran and being allied with Hezbollah. I think that detail is confusing to people. What do you make of Hamas's Machiavellian adaptability to collaborating across the Shia-Sunni divide in

a way that the Islamic State would never countenance. Yeah, not just would never countenance, but order number one of business for ISIS would be whoever was doing that, kill them. Kill the Shia as quickly as possible. So they think that anybody who would collaborate with the Shia, including Hamas, need to be killed. Now, Hamas does not have a problem with that. You mentioned Hezbollah. You mentioned Iran, which supplies Hamas most of its military budget. There's also Syria. Syria is run by an Alawite Shia government and is a huge supporter of Hamas. Hamas has no problem with this. I think that there's a lot of Sunni jihadists who are deferers. They say, in the future, we'll hash this out. In the meantime,

we've got a shared enemy in the form of the Jewish state. So ISIS, one of the reasons it sped to popularity so fast was that it was uncompromising. Anybody could see that it was not going to take any shortcuts. And so if you were in this for Islamic purity, ISIS was the one to go for because it started off with absolute theological certainty and inflexibility, and that that appeal to a lot of people. And Hamas seems to be totally flexible theologically to the point where it'll accept people who are basically just nationalists. If you're waving the Palestinian flag and you're okay with Hamas being in charge, then Hamas is okay with you, whereas ISIS would want to kill you because

you're a nationalist and God does not split up humanity by nations, only by Islam and not Islam. So this is a huge difference. The other view that ISIS has of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is that in ISIS's timeline is way down the road. Israel is not going to be vanquished. The Jews are not going to be vanquished until pretty late, like 11.59 p.m. on the timeline of humanity. So they say if you're trying to do that right now, you've got things out of order. What you want to do now is purify your faith. And then once that's done, then Jesus will come back, the fight with the Jews will be won, and so forth. And so they say that Hamas's single-minded focus on creating a state in Palestine is borderline idolatrous because you shouldn't be thinking so

intensely about that when there's still a lot of theological matters to be cleaned up. So I guess I have a further question about Hezbollah and Iran. I don't know if this is the angle your reporting has taken at all, but looking at this from the vast distance of just being a consumer of news here in America, from the vast distance of just being a consumer of news here in America, it's hard for me to see how Israel doesn't decide, and probably in concert with American support, that Hezbollah currently constitutes a kind of existential threat and just needs to be preemptively destroyed. I don't see how they just sit with Hezbollah on their northern border with 150,000 rockets, as has been reported, and a much larger force than they just encountered coming from Gaza. So while they have to deal with

Gaza and they have to deal with Hamas, it sounds like they would have to deal with Hezbollah and maybe Iran too. So what's your sense of the looming specter of a much wider conflict being sort of inevitable at this point, however things play out in Gaza? Yeah, so in the early days after this attack, Yeah. So in the early days after this attack, one of the things that I know was on lots of Israelis' minds was, is there a next step where Hezbollah steps in? That changes everything. If there's a northern front with, as you say, 150,000 rockets being aimed at Israel, and an extremely battle-hardened force in Hezbollah. So that would, as I say, change everything to have two fronts open at the same time. I think it's simply a matter of priority and capability, where Israel thinks that it can obliterate Hamas as an operational entity. And Hezbollah, to do that, would initiate a war

that is not nearly so obviously winnable. So they would much prefer to take care of what they can now and then figure out how to deal with Hezbollah from there. You're not hearing anyone speculate that Israel would actually preemptively attack Hezbollah in the absence of that front opening up for Hezbollah? Thank you. you