Making Sense with Sam Harris - #341 — Gaza & Global Order

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

Sam Harris speaks with Yuval Noah Harari about the events of October 7th and the resulting war in Gaza. They discuss the unraveling of global order, the failure of the IDF, the incompetence of the Netanyahu government, the goals of Hamas, the Saudi peace treaty, the right of Israel to exist, the status of Palestinian and Jewish refugees, victim and perpetrator narratives, compromise vs justice, the Palestinian citizens of Israel, lessons from WW2, the danger of focusing on the past, the perverse significance of the al-Aqsa Mosque, the double standards to which Israel is held, false analogies to European colonialism, the rise of antisemitism, the future of politics in Israel, America’s role in preserving global order, the war in Ukraine, and other topics. 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, my last podcast seems to have made the rounds. This was one of those audio essays, essentially, where I took the time to figure out exactly what I wanted to say. I tend to do a few of those a year, I think. Most of them tend to be PSAs, as that one was. Invariably, my wife, Annika, comes off the bench for these, because she is the best editor I know. And this time was no exception.

The episode titled, The Bright Line Between Good and Evil, was considerably improved for her input. And I'm glad so many of you found it useful. I got an overwhelmingly positive response, I must say. I heard from lots of interesting people, CEOs and writers and scientists, and just a great response. And today's conversation is on the same topic, but here I'm bringing in Yuval Noah Harari, who I'm sure all of you know. He's been on the podcast, I think, four times

before. And as a joke at the end, we can never get to our topic of common interest, meditation and the nature of mind, because there are always so many pressing things in the world to talk about. Yvon is a historian and a world-famous public intellectual. He wrote Sapiens and Homo Deus, as well as other books. His books are in print in, I think, 65 languages, which is astounding. And he also happens to be an Israeli citizen, so I wanted to get his perspective on recent events. We talk about what it's like in Israel now, how people are making sense of the failure of the IDF on October 7th, Netanyahu's contributions to the current crisis, along with those of the settlers in the West Bank. We talk about the ethics and geopolitical implications of the ground war in Gaza, how vulnerable Israel may or may not be to world

opinion, the rise of global anti-Semitism, the state of Palestinian citizens in Israel, and the glimmers of hope to be seen there. We talk about the prospects of a two-state solution, to be seen there. We talk about the prospects of a two-state solution, how Israeli and American weakness remains provocative, the lessons learned from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, how we might avoid World War III while shoring up the failing global order, and other topics. As always, the way to support the podcast is to subscribe at samharris.org. And now I bring you Yuval Noah Harari. I am here with Yuval Noah Harari. Yuval, thanks for joining me. Thank you for inviting me. So, obviously, you are a person who has a relevant point of view on the current crisis in history, trying to understand how an ape from Africa took over the world and how now the future, the fate of perhaps all life depends on our species.

And I try to understand the long-term historical processes. At the present moment, however, long-term historical processes. At the present moment, however, I'm focused on the immediate historical disaster unfolding all around me. I know from my line of work that it's usually not a good thing to be in the middle of a big historical event, that when history comes knocking at your door, it's usually bad news. And history just didn't just come knocking at the door, it just broke the door. Yeah, yeah, this is really the first moment since 9-11 where the intrusion of history has been so stark. I mean, this is by definition, a very provincial view of things, because obviously,

history has been hammering people all the while in other countries. But do you share that? Is that, in terms of how it's punctuated your life? How many moments like this have there been? Actually, too many moments in recent years. It happened with the pandemic. It happened with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Russian invasion started on my birthday, the 24th of February. And it was like one of the worst days of my life. I don't live in Ukraine. I don't have relatives there. But I heard the news. Of course, I was following very closely what was happening there. And it really felt that history is taking a turn in the worst possible direction, and that we will feel the repercussions

all over the world. And I think to a large extent, the war that started there is now reaching my house. And if we don't change the direction that the world is going, then these kinds of events, they'll come knocking at the door of more and more people all over the world. You know, putting it very, very simply, we had a far from imperfect,

but nevertheless functional, functioning global order. And over the last few years, this order has been undermined and destroyed. And when order is destroyed, what you get is disorder. And this type of disorder and violence that we now experience here in Israel and in Palestine, I'm afraid that we will see it in more and more places all over the world. Well, I want to talk about that. I want to discuss just how fully the global liberal order has unraveled in recent years and where all this might be headed. But let's start with the

more proximate problem of the recent October 7th attacks in Israel and the resulting ground war in Gaza. Where were you on October 7th? Actually, I was in Turkey on vacation, and it was really almost surreal to hear the news and see the images that began streaming from Israel when I'm on this kind of idyllic beach in Turkey. And yeah, it hit very close to home. My uncle and aunt live in Kibbutz Beri, which is one of the communities that has been really obliterated by the Hamas terrorists. I have very good friends in another kibbutz in Kfar Aza, which was also obliterated by the Hamas. So it really felt extremely personal, everything that has been happening over the last few weeks. Were any of your friends or family killed or taken hostage?

Not in the immediate circle, but the moment you take one step outside the kind of immediate circle of friends and family. You have so many horrible stories about killing and kidnapping. My aunt and uncle, they were locked in their house. They hid in their house for hours as the terrorists were rampaging around and torturing and massacring their neighbors. and torturing and massacring their neighbors. I just met two friends who were hiding in the safe room inside their house in Kfar Aza for 30 hours, again, in the most horrible conditions. And every day you keep hearing more and more stories about it. I mean, it's already clear that this day,

which is the worst know, the worst day in the history of Israel since its foundation, it's already beyond just history. It's already becoming a mythic moment that the people know that they lived, they have been living inside a mythological moment. We don't know how people in the future will look back on it, but it is clear that it's going to be one of these moments that people keep going back to and retelling again and again for generations. Yeah, yeah, there's really no doubt of that. What is it like in Israel now? I'd love to get your sense of the national mood and where people are in their grappling toward an understanding of how this happened. Well, you know, I guess you can take any side

of this you want, but I'm interested in what people make of the failure of the IDF, what people make of how the chaos of Netanyahu's government might have contributed to this problem? What is the feeling in Israel? And can you give me a sense of just kind of the political situation? Yeah, it's very difficult to say. There is a mixture of so many different feelings, and it depends on who you talk to. But it's obvious that there is immense grief and pain. There is also immense rage at Netanyahu and at his coalition. It's clear to a lot of people that, yes, there were immediate failures of the military, but this was the result, really, of 14 years of being ruled by a populist strongman who divided the nation against itself and put his personal interests before the national interest, appointing people to key positions

on the basis of personal and political loyalties and not on the basis of competence, and not on the basis of competence, accusing the serving elites of the country of being these deep state traitors, you know, to the degree that the very word elite, which is supposed to be positive, you know, people who are foremost in giving service to their country, in the military, in the universities, in judicial system, or wherever, it became a pejorative term, as if there is something wrong with it. And especially over the last year, you know, trying to undermine Israeli democracy. And it was warned again and again and again by people in the army, in the intelligence, that this is weakening Israel at a very, very dangerous moment and distracting all the country

and the security forces from the main threats. And it simply ignored all these warnings. And now we are paying the price for it. And I think this is a lesson that people all over the world should take to heart, that if you vote for a populist strongman like that, then eventually there comes a day when the entire nations pay a very, very high price for it. Yeah, I think I could be forgiven for hearing a pretty spot-on description of Trump in your description of Netanyahu. I wasn't aware of what a Trumpian figure Netanyahu was, not having followed Israeli politics as closely as I might have. I mean, there is one big difference, that Israel is much weaker and more exposed than the United States. There are the kinds of political experiments that people in other

countries may have the luxury to try, that Israel just doesn't have this kind of buffer. And it was extremely reckless. And as I said, we are not paying the price for it. Just so that I'm clear about the causality here, is it that Netanyahu drew so much attention to his own political needs and the divisiveness of that whole project, just shoring up his government, that it was such a distraction from the very real concerns of security?

Or was it, it sounds like you're saying it was that, but in addition, it was also putting people in power who are actually not competent because they were just loyalists to his regime, essentially. It's much broader than just the destruction. I mean, what we've seen since October 7th is that even more than a month after the horrible attack, still many government departments are not functioning well. Civil society had to fill in for a lot of dysfunctioning state agencies and government departments because of the policies that undermined these state institutions for years. Another thing that we see is that Netanyahu based his career

for years on the idea that you cannot have any kind of peace process with the Palestinians. And he actually, and he said it openly, that he saw Hamas as a better partner of sorts than the Palestinian Authority, because with Hamas, there was no danger that there is going to be any kind of peace process. So he openly talked about it for years, that his policy is to weaken the moderate forces among the Palestinians and strengthen Hamas. And this all blew up in our face on the 7th of October. And similarly, because of pressures from within his coalition, if you look, for instance, at the way the Israeli defense forces distributed the military units, there were just about two battalions guarding

the entire border with Gaza, whereas something like 32 battalions were guarding settlements, including illegal outposts in the occupied territories, which explains why on the morning of the 7th of October, there just weren't enough soldiers to protect the civilians in Kibbutzim, like the one of my aunt and uncle. I mean, all the soldiers, or most of the soldiers, were in the occupied territories. Does it explain why it took so long for people to get to the south once the crisis began to unfold? I mean, how long does it take to drive from the West Bank to Gaza? I mean, you know, if you drive fast, you can get there in two hours or three

hours. But you know, to move a military unit is a bit more complicated than that. The army got there, but just not in time. The Hamas terrorists just needed a few hours in control of these villages to simply go from house to house and torture and murder and kidnap everybody they found. Right. But wasn't it a story of more like eight hours or 12 hours or 20 hours in some cases? I'm not sure. I mean, again, within 20 hours, definitely the army was there. But once Hamas was in control of the villages, then you had to conduct a military operation. And you had thousands of

Hamas terrorists. It wasn't just a few or 10 or 20. You have hundreds in some of the villages. So you had to conduct very difficult urban warfare, house-to-house warfare by the army, when you also have Israeli civilians and hostages there. So the army had to be extremely careful. So it takes time. Can you tell me more about this fairly cynical game that Netanyahu played with the Palestinians with respect to encouraging the Hamas, the far more extreme ruling party, and also just the support of the settlements as well? I mean, that's also been provocative and decidedly unhelpful if your goal were a two-state solution. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, Netanyahu's recent, certainly this government and also some of his previous governments

were based on an alliance, a political alliance with extremists who want indefinite Israeli control of the West Bank. So they saw any chance of a peace process with the Palestinians as a threat to their ambitions, which basically are, you know, coming from religious fanaticism. We also have our own messianic zealots, and they wanted full control of the territory far more than they wanted peace. And because of that, they saw the moderate forces among Palestinians as a potential danger. Whereas Hamas, that you can count on Hamas not to initiate and not to agree to any kind of peace process. not to agree to any kind of peace process. So for them, Hamas looked like an almost ideal partner that they thought you can let Hamas rule Gaza.

Okay, you have some occasional attacks, and every year or two you have a bigger military operation. But on the whole, for 15 years, they just let Hamas control Gaza, turn it into a terror base and an Islamic dictatorship, and no chance of any kind of peace process while they deepen their control of the West Bank. And this was all based on a completely mistaken view that the situation can be contained, that Hamas will continue to play by their rules. So what's the sense among Netanyahu's critics that he should step down now? And to what degree

do people think that it's more important to have the continuity of government now and to just wait until the immediate needs of the war are in the past before dealing with the political fallout for his failure. Because he's an extremely divisive figure, and the thing you need most in the country right now is unity. The ideal thing would have been for him to take responsibility for the catastrophe and step down. And you can do that in the middle of the war. You know, Chamberlain stepped down and let Churchill replace him in the middle of the war,

one of the worst moments of crisis in the Second World War. If he thinks this is impossible, that he can't do it, he could still have said, I take responsibility for the catastrophe. I will step down once the situation permits it. I'm declaring elections in six months, and I will not be running to these elections. So you can trust me now that no matter what I did in the past, now I'm fully committed only to the interests of the Israeli nation. And when this is over, I'm stepping down. This is the end of my political career, so you can trust me." And he is not doing it. Just the opposite. He tries constantly to shift the blame to other people, especially in the military and even in the protest movement. And there is no indication that he is going

to step down or to call an election or to take responsibility on himself. You mentioned the protest movement. This was in response to the attempted judicial coup prior to October 7th? Yeah, I mean, what we dealt with before, which now looks like ancient history, but it was just a few months ago, was an attempt by the Netanyahu coalition to not just change the judicial system and neutralize the Supreme Court. It was an attempt to take unlimited power to their own hands. In Israel, we don't have a constitution. We don't have any upper house in parliament or anything like that. The only institution that could limit the power of a governing coalition was the Supreme Court. And they tried to neutralize or to take over

the Supreme Court, which would have given them unlimited power to do anything they want, to rig the election, to disenfranchise, say, Arab Israelis, whatever. You name it, they could do it, with a minimal majority in the Israeli parliament. So for months, you had the biggest protest movement in Israeli history, with hundreds of thousands of people going week after week after week to protests and demonstrations to stop that. And when the war erupted,

something really remarkable happened, that while the government and many government agencies were completely paralyzed, the protest movement turned into the mainstay of much of the military effort, from going to the south, to the area around the Gaza Strip, to help people and look for survivors, to organizing places of refuge for Israelis. Israel now has more than 100,000 refugees, internal refugees, people who fled the border areas and lost their homes or had to leave their homes, and somebody needs to take care of them, and the government is not doing a very good job. So the protest movement stepped in. So yeah, many of these protesters were people who said that as reservists, they wouldn't respond

to the call in protest. And then after October 7th, everyone just put their political differences on ice and responded, correct? Absolutely. And even before, I mean, it's not that the people in the protest movement said they will not respond to a call. They said, if there is a war, we will respond, of course. But at the situation that existed back then, they said, we are not willing at the present moment to take orders from a government that is trying to assume dictatorial powers. So what is the view?

I don't know if there have been recent polls that you might recall, or if this would just be relying on intuition here, but what is the current state of public opinion around the settlers in the West Bank? I guess I have an additional question. What percentage of settlers do you think are actually religious extremists, and what are people just looking for cheap land? What is the picture of that movement, and how much patience is there for it in Israeli society? It seems that only a minority, I don't know how small, but a minority are these religious extremists. Most people got there for different reasons.

And also most of the settlements that are very close to the pre-1967 border. So in a potential future peace treaty, based on a two-state solutions, they should not be an impossible barrier to peace. But you do have this more extreme groups, who again, out of this messianic conviction, are not interested in peace at all. And they are dreaming about rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem and things like that.

And in many cases, they intentionally undermine relations between Israelis and Palestinians and try to do their utmost to foil any chance for future peace. Well, obviously, I've done previous podcasts on the contribution, as I see it, of religious extremism to this problem on both sides, obviously far more focused on the problem of jihadism, both locally to Israel and globally. of how vulnerable Israel is to public opinion internationally at this point. So the ground war has started. It has been a catastrophe of a sort that everyone would have expected, and certainly Hamas expected and even wanted. I mean, they've done their best to ensure that it would be a catastrophe. And I think many people wonder, and I'm certainly among these people, many wonder whether there was another way for Israel to have gone about destroying Hamas that would not have entailed seemingly doing exactly what Hamas wanted, which is create an intense amount of civilian

injury and death in the process of trying to root them out. So what's your view of the ground war just as a concept and as it has unfolded in recent weeks? I can't really comment on what are, what were the best operational plans to do this or that. I'm not an expert on that. What I can say is that anyone who is interested in peace

should also be in favor of disarming Hamas. And I'm not sure what is the best way to do it, but without disarming Hamas, there is not going to be any peace in the region. What people need to realize is that the immediate background to the horrific attack of the 7th of October, that is that we were very, very close to a historical peace deal. Israel and Saudi Arabia were in an advanced stage of negotiations mediated by the United States. And according to many credible sources, maybe we were just weeks away from signing an Israeli-Saudi treaty, which should have not just normalized relations between Israel and maybe the most important Arab

state, but also opened the door to normalize relations with much of the rest of the Arab world. As part of this treaty, Israel was also supposed to make significant concessions to the Palestinians, and it was hoped that it would be also possible to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Actually, Yuval, I just want to ask you about that point, because that's a point I hadn't heard. It's often described that this peace treaty with the Saudis was an instance of Israel simply moving on in complete disregard of the Palestinian situation and that Hamas could have been expected to have wanted to block that. But you're saying that there were concessions to the Palestinians built into those negotiations.

Absolutely. Because again, if it depended on the extremists in Netanyahu's government, that no, you would not have any concessions to the Palestinians. But of course, the treaty was negotiated not just by these extremists. It was very clear, not just from the Saudi side, but also from the Biden administration, that there would be no treaty unless it includes significant concessions to the Palestinians that were supposed to alleviate, at least to some degree, immediately the suffering of Palestinians in the occupied territories and reopen the peace process. And there was a lot of talk that Netanyahu would have probably to ditch his more extreme allies in the coalition in order to secure this treaty. But this was too big a prize. If this happened, this would have been Netanyahu's crowning achievement of his entire career. So again, we don't know because Hamas intervened that the possibility of this peace treaty was a deadly threat, both to Hamas and also to Iran, Hamas's sponsor.

So the immediate aim of the attack was to foil, to derail this chance for peace. And the long-term aim was to prevent any restart, any chance for an Israeli-Palestinian peace even in the future. And this is why, and this is not the first time this is happening. I mean, Hamas, since its very foundation, opposed any peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. And every time there was a significant advance in the direction of peace, Hamas intervened in order to stop it. So if we want to have some chance of peace in the future, we have to disarm Hamas. Of course, simultaneously, we also have to give the Palestinians a different future to give them the possibility that they can see that if they choose a different path, they could live dignified lives in their

homeland. And this should be, I think, Israel's war aim, to go back to the Saudi peace treaty and to restart the peace process with the Palestinians. Now, is the ground attack in the way it is conducted right now, is this the ideal way to disarm Hamas? And I just don't know. That's beyond my expertise. But without some kind of military measures, obviously, Hamas is not going to disarm voluntarily. And maybe I'll add to it something from, you know, the bigger historical perspective of what we are dealing with here. If you look at decades of this conflict, you see three big anomalies which are intertwined with one another and which make this conflict so complicated. I mean, at one and the same time, you have the anomalous situation of Israel,

which is one of the only countries in the world, which even though it's internationally recognized, most of its neighbors never recognized its right to exist. Most countries take their existence for granted. Israel doesn't. It's very right to exist. Forget about the exact borders. The very right of this country to exist has been denied from the moment it was created by most of its neighbors. Then you have another anomaly, which is the situation in the occupied territories, which is one of the only inhabited places in the world

which no country claims sovereignty over. This makes the conflict very different from, let's say, what's happening in Kashmir between India and Pakistan. There you have a piece of territory that two countries claim sovereignty over. In the occupied territories, there is really... I mean, Israel never annexed the occupied territories. Formally, it doesn't claim that this territory is mine. It once belonged to Jordan, but Jordan renounced it.

There is no Palestinian state. So it's really one of the, maybe the only inhabited place in the world that no country claims as its own. And then you have the third big anomaly, which is the situation of eternal refugees, that, you know, from all the tens of millions of refugees that were created, that existed in the world in the 1940s, only the Palestinians are still here. And not because the other refugees returned to the homes from which they were expelled, returned to the homes from which they were expelled, they were absorbed and resettled in whichever countries or territories they reached. And what people often don't realize

is that there were more Jewish refugees after 1948 than Muslim refugees, because Arab countries like Egypt, like Syria, like Yemen, like Iraq responded to the 1948 war by expelling Jewish communities that lived there for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. And most Jews in Israel, they are not what you know, this fantasy of colonialists from Europe. They're not even from Europe. Most Israelis, most Israeli Jews are indigenous Middle Eastern people who were expelled as refugees after

1948. So you have these three anomalies of that Israel's right to existence is not recognized, that the occupied territories, no country claims sovereignty over them, and this perpetual status of the Palestinian refugees, ideally, you could solve all these three anomalies at one stroke, which is what the two-state solution was always meant to achieve, that you get recognition for Israel's right to existence, that you get a Palestinian state in the occupied territories, and that you solve the refugee problem by some of them coming back to this new Palestinian state, and some of them getting citizenship in countries like Lebanon, where they lived for an hour for generations. Whether we can reach this solution or not, that's a very big question.

Whether we can reach this solution or not, that's a very big question. Yeah, and even that would be to, that best case scenario, which I want to ask you if you can see a path toward it, but even that would be to enshrine the very anomalies you've just described. Is there another case of a country that was attacked on all sides and won a defensive war, in fact, two defensive wars, and the security buffer claimed in those successful acts of self-defense was then perpetually denied them as, they were basically treated as aggressors even when they were, you know, fighting defensively and victoriously? Is there another historical example of that? If they simply give back the West Bank and Gaza and return to pre-67

borders, it's almost like they're not allowed to win a war of self-defense. I don't know, are there other examples of that kind of thing? I'm not sure. I mean, again, as a historian, I tend to be cautious about drawing historical analogies. What I can mean, again, as a historian, I tend to be cautious about drawing historical analogies. What I can say, again, from a broader perspective, is that in most ethnic conflicts around the world, both sides tend to be victims and perpetrators at the same time. And this is a very simple and banal fact that for some reason most people seem incapable of grasping. That it's very, very simple. You can be victim and perpetrator at one and the same time.

And so many people just refuse to accept this simple fact of history and think in binary terms that one side must be 100% evil and one side must be 100% pure and just, and we just need to pick a side. And this, of course, links to these fantasies of perfect justice, of absolute justice, which are, this I can say from a historical perspective, they are always destructive. The idea that you can achieve absolute justice in this world usually or almost always leads to destructive places, to more violence and war, because no peace treaty in the history of the world provided absolute justice. all peace treaties are based on compromise. You have to give up something. You won't get absolute justice the way you understand it. Well, there are examples of really nearly miraculous examples of profound injustice Profound injustice rectified through violence that lead to a peace and reconciliation and even friendship that would have seemed impossible. I mean, just look at the aftermath of World War II.

I mean, we, the Allies, dealt with the Nazis and the Japanese in the harshest conceivable way. I mean, killing civilians by the hundreds of thousands, the necessity of that certainly can be debated. But I mean, we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and rebuilt those societies and found in them enduring friendships. And even the Israelis, you know, and the Jews of Israel and the Jews elsewhere view Germany now as a totally benign or being a better than benign influence in the world. That kind of future seems impossible with respect to Israel and the Palestinians. And it really, it shouldn't be. Israel and the Palestinians, and it really, it shouldn't be. But the one wrinkle that, you know, as I think you know, I focus on a lot is the role that Islamic extremism,

specifically jihadism and the doctrines of martyrdom, play here. And it just seems, in terms of the kind of the ratchet of ideology and hatred and the destructive power of ideas, it is a kind of final turn to that diabolical machinery, which strikes me as worse than basically anything else that the human mind has produced. I mean, once you get a true otherworldliness, a true expectation of paradise, it seems to me that all rational negotiation about the state of the world and any terrestrial demand that any group might make upon it, all of that goes out the window and you just have a death cult. So one anomaly I see here is that in dealing with a group like Hamas, which is arguably not as extreme as the Islamic state, which is arguably not as extreme as the Islamic State, but extreme enough to be a death cult,

the logic that most people try to lay over this current conflict simply doesn't work. So most people think in terms of cycles of violence, right? And the point you just made certainly still stands, that you can be both a victim and a perpetrator. So you're a victim trying to defend yourself rationally, and yet, of course, you're going to create casualties and collateral damage and kill children on the other side. And when you do that, you're going to make nearly permanent enemies of that population and the cycle of violence will continue. Yes, we have that horrible dynamic also going. But in addition to that, we have people who simply do not care about the deaths of noncombatants. In fact, that's part of the plan. And in fact, their own deaths are also expected and part of the plan,

because martyrdom is sincerely believed in. And so I'm just wondering what you, I mean, I think you would certainly agree that that level of religious extremism is unhelpful. But I mean, can you imagine, I guess the only ray of hope I see here, and perhaps you can give me some perspective on this, is that there is a Palestinian population inside of Israel. They're Palestinian citizens of Israel. Presumably, most of them, nearly all of them, are integrated into the society such that you can see a possibility where the Jews and the Palestinians live in peace in the same region. Give me some sense of your optimism and pessimism about this whole gestalt. Okay. So a lot of things to say. First of all,

yeah, you know, on October 7th, Hamas murdered and kidnapped not only Jewish Israelis, also Muslim Israelis. Among the victims have been a significant number of Muslims who were murdered by Hamas, like an ambulance driver who tried to rescue people, and just Bedouin civilians who lived nearby and rushed to the place to try and save people and were murdered by Hamas. There are a couple of Muslim Israelis kidnapped right now in Gaza by Hamas. And what we saw was, you know, the unification of the Israeli nation in the face of this atrocity. Lots of people feared, and some people on the Israeli right claimed that we will

now see an uprising of Arab Israelis against the Israeli state. The exact opposite happened. There has been almost no incidence of physical violence by Arab Israelis. Instead, you saw people volunteering and helping to displaced communities, in hospitals, in so many places. If you want really to speak with somebody who I think is one of the most hopeful leaders on the scene, I warmly recommend you speak with Mansour Abbas. Mansour Abbas is the leader of an Islamist party here in Israel, who was a member of the short-lived previous government, the Bennett-Lapid government. I think it's the only case when an Islamist party was a member of a democratic government in a Western democracy. And it worked well. He's a very moderate leader. He made some of the sanest pronouncements that I've heard in recent weeks from almost anyone, anybody in the world about

the conflict. And if we have more people like Mansour Abbas, I think there is hope. He's often called the bravest person in the Middle East. Yeah, I got to imagine he has his own security concerns. He is the number one target of a lot of people here. I'd love to speak with him. I don't know if anyone on your side could help connect me with him, but I would love to speak with him.

Yeah, we'll be happy to afterwards to try and connect. With regard to extremism, I fully agree with you that religious extremism, I mean, the biggest reason for the horrendous cycle of violence in my region of the world is religious extremism. But as a historian, I would say that extremism of any kind is dangerous. And what the 20th century showed us, that not only paradise in some other world can lead to murderous extremism, paradise on earth, as the one imagined by Marxists and Stalinists, has equal dangerous potential. I never understood how Marxists think about what happens to you after you die.

And what's the point of dying for the revolution if you're dead and you can't witness the revolution? So you would think they would be less extreme than the jihadists. But if you look at the history of the 20th century in places like the Soviet Union, then they give them a hard fight, I would say that, to the jihadists in terms of what they are willing to do. And in terms of hope and justice and what we talked earlier about 1945 and the end of the Second World War. So the end of the Second World War did not bring absolute justice. If you think, for instance, about the fate of Poland.

So in many ways, the Second World War, at least in Europe, started over Poland, protecting Poland from Nazi totalitarianism. And it ended with the Allies giving control of Poland to Soviet totalitarianism, because they really had no choice. And looking back, most people, maybe not in Poland, but certainly in Britain or the US, would say, yes, this was the better option than to go to a third world war with the Soviets immediately over the fate of Poland and Eastern Europe. that most people don't know because in history, very often the hopeful stories get lost because they don't generate a lot of violence and bloodshed and death, so you don't hear about them. You know, when the Soviet bloc eventually collapsed in the late 80s, early 90s, everybody heard about the wars in Yugoslavia. And the impression of many people is that this was just inevitable because of the age-old ethnic hatreds and conflicts in the Balkans. And people explain to you about how

Croats and Serbs killed each other in the 1940s. And then when communism broke down, this frozen conflict was defrozenzen and they continued killing each other. What people don't talk about is the conflict between Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians. In the 1940s, there were ethnic cleansing and hundreds of thousands of people murdered, tortured, expelled from their homes in mutual conflicts between Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians. And the arrangements at the end of the Second World War, they took many territories which previously belonged to Poland and gave them to Lithuania, the city of Vilna, Vilnius, which is the capital of Lithuania, was part of

Poland. It was a Polish city to some extent before the war. And in Ukraine, you had the same thing with all the territory around Lviv or Lvov. Now, lots of people expected that with the end of the Cold War, the conflict between Poland, Lithuania, Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians will also be defrozen. And you would have this wave of wars as Poland tried to reclaim Vilnius and Lviv, and everybody goes back to the terrible memories from the 1940s. And it didn't happen. The Polish government had a very conscious policy. It wasn't an accident. It was a conscious policy. They came to the governments of Lithuania and Ukraine and to the people, to the nations themselves. And they told them, we don't want to go back to the past.

The past is gone, is done. It's over. We are focusing on the future. We do not want Vilnius back. It's yours. It's the capital of Lithuania. We do not want Lviv, Lvov back. It's part of Ukraine. That's over. We want to be good friends with you.

And it worked. And when you look at the conflict now in Ukraine, and despite some hiccups, the Poland and the Polish people have been maybe the greatest support or one of the greatest supporters of Ukraine, receiving millions of Ukrainian refugees. And in the 1940s, this would have sounded unthinkable. Yeah. And this was a choice. And I think this is a choice in every ethnic conflict,

whether you look to the past or you look to the future. And I will say one more thing about it. As a historian, I think the curse of history is the attempt to correct the past, to save the past. If we could only go back to the past and save these people, and we can't. We can't go back to the past and save the people who were massacred on the 7th of October in Israel, or go back to the Holocaust and say, no, it's impossible. And we can't go back to the past and try to do a different narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What we need to do is stop using the injuries of the past as an excuse for fresh injuries in the present, and instead think constructively about how we can heal the injuries and create peace, which will not give absolute justice to anybody, but will create a better

future for everybody. Well, one of the reasons why it's so untenable to continue trying to rectify the past is that, you know, by your description, every group has a partial but nonetheless accurate picture of the past, wherein they are the victim and the other group is the perpetrator. And it's impossible to reconcile those two visions because they're mutually canceling. And it should theoretically have been possible. This is what is known as theory of mind, that children beyond the age of, I'm not sure which age, but beyond a certain age, people should have the capacity to go into the mind of another person and understand that she or he or him, they see reality from a different perspective than me. And this is the basis for all social relations.

But unfortunately, there are many cases like the current conflict when theory of mind breaks down, and it becomes almost impossible psychologically for people to realize that others see reality differently than us. To give you a glimpse of my theory of mind, and this is how I sort of dissect out the layer of religious extremism of the Islamic sort that is riding over this entire catastrophe. I mean, so for instance, the Israelis have very little leverage with respect to Hamas now. I mean, it seems that Hamas doesn't care, in fact, wants them to bomb indiscriminately and kill lots of civilians. That works for their propaganda purposes. But they actually do have leverage. I described this idea in no way endorsing it, and you'll see why in a moment.

But they have a building, they have the Al-Aqsa Mosque that everyone really claims to care about. I mean, Hamas cares about it. Every jihadist organization on earth cares about it. Muslims everywhere care about it. Any group that could have leverage with Hamas, the Iranians or any other group cares about it. They could say, listen, we don't much like this building that you care so much about. If you don't return the hostages in 48 hours, we're going to demolish it. I'll put it to you. What do you think would happen if they did that? The Third World War? Okay, exactly. So, I mean, literally, I would expect, and I think everyone would expect,

not just World War III or something quite like it, but they would expect buildings in London and Paris to also burn, right? I mean, just literally an uprising the world over of a sort that no one could possibly contemplate. So what we have, what we're all acceding to here is a picture of the Muslim community worldwide that is so combustible, and it's so provocable on the basis of pure religious symbolism, right? It's not that they don't care when Assad kills hundreds of thousands of their fellow Muslims. There's not a single protest over that. They don't care when the Saudis kill over 100,000 people in Yemen. They really do care when the Jews start killing Muslims, as we see in Gaza, but they care even more about religious symbols, right? They care about the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. That's what causes embassies to burn in a dozen cities. And if the Israelis said,

listen, we're so sick of killing your children, we're just going to destroy this building unless you give us our hostages back, that would be a provocation that would overturn this period in history. So that is a completely insane and untenable status quo, right? I mean, my view is that the Muslim world has to figure out how to perform an exorcism on itself such that that is not the level of religious fanaticism, generally speaking, in the Muslim community in a hundred countries. We're dealing with the Christians of the 14th century. There's no other community that is combustible like this. If the Israelis destroyed the Church of the Nativity, there wouldn't be a Christian uprising the world over, and for good reason, because as sentimental as people are about it, it is just a building. So from my point of view, the underlying problem that we really have to deal with is there is an

ambient level of religious fanaticism that is totally at odds with a pluralistic civilization in the 21st century. And we have to figure out how to release that pressure, the operative pressure of that ideology and the commitment to it. And until we do that, that is always going to be casting a shadow over all of these kinds of moments. Yeah, I think basically what we can say is that in history, story matters. The stories in people's minds are often the most powerful forces

that shape history, that shape politics and culture. And this is a large part of what it means to do history, is to listen to the stories that people tell you. Now, you do have also dogmatic stories. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast,

along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at samharris.org. you