TRIGGERnometry - Why I’m off the Fence About Israel’s War - Konstantin Kisin

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

I'm off the fence about Israel's war, here's why... Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm off the fence about Israel's war. Here's why. Exactly a year ago, when thousands of Hamas militants crossed Israel's border to engage in an orgy of medieval violence, I knew little about Israel and had no opinion about the long-running conflict there. I've never been to Israel. I've never been to Gaza. I've never been to the West Bank. It's not a conflict I studied at university or read about extensively. People on both sides who care passionately about this issue find it hard to believe, but in truth, most people are like this. That's why, for many months after the October 7th attacks, I avoided commenting on the war or even discussing it on our show. Instead, I read, watched, and listened to the endless commentary, debates and discussions to understand what people on various sides were saying.

Having gathered those perspectives, I then did my best to apply first principles thinking to the arguments I heard. Thinking from first principles means stripping whatever you're trying to analyze down to its core and working back from there. Context is extremely important to understanding, or when it comes to highly emotive situations like this one, people often flood you with emotional context, which does not support the argument they're actually making. There are some obvious examples in this debate, which we will address shortly. First Principles thinking helps you see the structure of arguments. The logic of an argument is like the skeleton of a body. You cannot see it from the outside, but it is usually the cause of why the body moves the way that it does.

Getting to the skeleton of an argument is essential to understanding it. This was my approach when we had prominent pro-Palestine guests like Basim Youssef and Norman Finkelstein on trigonometry, as well as pro-Israel guests like Ben Shapiro and Natasha Hausdorff. It was also my approach when I hosted a fiery debate on the subject at dissident dialogues, and when safety namas invited me to discuss this issue on this podcast. So what does first principle thinking tell us about the conflict? First, the easiest way to understand a complicated problem is to find a comparable situation about which you already know what to think. For example, if we accept that October 7th was a terrorist

attack, as I believe most people do, the obvious approach would be to compare it to other terrorist attacks in recent history. That as it happens is impossible, because on a proportion of basis, the Western world has never experienced an attack on this scale. If we take 9-11, the most impactful terrorist attack in living memory, which shook the world's dominant superpower, to its very core, we see that 2,97 people were killed in a country of 285 million people. On October 7th, approximately 1,200 people were killed in a country of just 9 million people. Some keep calling October 7th Israel's 9-11. That isn't remotely true. If October 7th was Israel 9-11, on a per capita basis, only 100 people would have been killed. In other words,

October 7th was at least 12 times as bad as 9-11. And that's before I accounting for the fact that Hamas took hundreds of hostages, many of whom had been killed since. So the obvious question is, if thousands of armed Mexicans had penetrated the southern border of the United States, killed 36,000 Americans and dragged off thousands of hostages, how would America have reacted? Would there still be a Mexico to speak of? Whatever you view of the history of this conflict, I believe the logic of this is impenetrable. However, there are some persuasive arguments from the anti-Israel camp which are aimed at contextualizing October. 7th. Let's look at them. Number 1. History did not start on October 7th. The crux of this argument

when broken down to its central premise is that the state of Israel is illegitimate. In this conception, Israel was created because land belonging to Palestinians was taken by Western powers and given to European Jews fleeing the Holocaust. Palestinians were not consulted, did not give consent, and found themselves kicked out of their homes. Israel is a settler colonial state. 2. October 7th was a response to Israeli brutality and oppression. Those of you who watched my debate with safety in Amos will recall that he made this argument repeatedly. The people of Gaza and the West Bank are treated so badly, he argued, the response we saw on October 7th was totally understandable. An act of resistance aimed at redressing the

wrongs they have suffered. Three, Israel is killing civilians. The scenes of parents pulling their children out of rubble speak for themselves. Four, Israel is engaged in indiscriminate attacks, which is why so many innocent people are dying. This argument aims to prove that Israel is the bad guy in this war because it is killing lots of people, either deliberately or due to a callous disregard for the lives of Palestinians. These are, to the best of my knowledge, the four principal arguments made by the anti-Israel side. If there are others, please let me know in the comments and I will address them in a follow-up video. Let's go through the arguments one by one.

And for the sake of argument, let us accept that every point in each argument is valid and historically accurate. I know many viewers will find this objectionable, but I believe that the argument the best way to unpack this entire discussion is to take people's arguments as valid and see if they make sense. The first argument, whose central premise is that Israel is illegitimate, seems to be at the core of every debate. It feels reasonable and logical to many people to contextualize Israel's response to October 7th in this way. After all, if Israel was created through illegitimate means, it puts a discussion on an entirely different footing, doesn't it? Well, actually, no, it doesn't. Again, let's think from first principles. If we believe every pro-Palestinian claim and accept that Israel was created

through the force placement of European Jews in a foreign land by Western powers, we must look for a comparable situation in which a country was created through some form of displacement of the native population. Most of you live in such a country. The United States, Australia, New Zealand and Canada are all the products of invasion, colonization and brutal conquest. If you go back far enough, so is almost every other country in the world. Like it or not, Israel exists.

It's home to over 9 million people. The idea that they would, could or should accept a destruction of what is now their country is absurd. The United States government would not tolerate missile strikes and terrorist rampages from Native American reservations. Neither would any government of any country under any circumstances. Peace in the Middle East will not be achieved by attempting to undo many decades of history.

The second argument centers on the idea that October 7th was a response to Israeli occupation and brutality. This, again, seems reasonable to many people. After all, what would it take for you to behave the way Hamas did on October 7th? The problem with this argument is that what happened on October 7th was not an attempt to weaken Israel militarily. It was not an attempt to break Hamas militants out of Israeli jails. It was not an attack on the Israeli defense force. It was not a prison breakout, as some people like to describe it,

because when people break out of a prison, they don't normally head to the nearest town and start massacring women and children. October 7th was, by design and implementation, a terrorist attack, whose purpose was to slaughter civilians, terrify Israeli society, and nothing else. This was not an act of resistance. It was an act of terrorism, which is why Israel had to react to in the manner that it has, and why any other country would have done the same. The third argument is that Israel is killing civilians. This is the one claim made by the anti-Israel side that is undeniably true.

However, this is an example of the emotive but irrelevant context I mentioned earlier. civilians are always killed in war. The question is not whether they're being killed, but who bears responsibility for their deaths and who can stop the killing. Again, applying first principles thinking we must reach for a comparable example. There is no exact equivalent that comes to mind, but there is some useful context we can consider. Hamas has repeatedly stated that given the opportunity, they will repeat the October 7th attacks again and again and again. While this may seem shocking to us in the West, it makes perfect sense given that Hamas, believes Israel is illegitimate and would like to see it gone. This means that unless Israel

destroys or degrades their ability to carry out their threats, it is likely to experience more terrorist attacks again and again. Does anyone seriously believe that any government of any country anywhere in the world would or could react to something like 12-9-11s in one day and the threat of more to follow as many times as possible with anything other than all-out war? And who can end the killing? Well, theoretically Israel could, of course, but for the reason we just discussed, they can't warn and shouldn't. That leaves Hamas, who could have returned the hostages and surrendered the people who took them. What is more, they could hide their civilians in the vast network of tunnels they've built to reduce casualties. Instead, they refuse to build bomb shelters

and do everything they can to maximize civilian casualties. That's not my opinion, it's something Hamas are themselves proud of. A senior spokesman for the group, Sammy Abu Zuhri, gave an interview on Palestinian station Al-Axa TV the last time this conflict flared up. The policy of people confronting Israeli warplains with their bare chests in order to protect their homes has proven effective against the occupation, he said. We in Hamas call upon our people to adopt this policy in order to protect Palestinian homes. So yes, the deaths of civilians are tragic, and in a modern world where you can fill your social media feed with gruesome footage,

that tragedy can be broadcast straight into your homes. 24-7. But the responsibility for their deaths is entirely with Hamas and the failure to put a stop to the killing is theirs and theirs alone. Which brings us to the final argument. Israel's attacks are indiscriminate and designed to inflict civilian casualties. This is actually the simplest argument of the for to address because it is an empirical matter. The war in Gaza is not the first conflict in human history. We can compare the ratio of combatant to civilian deaths and this war to others. What happens when we do? Historically, urban warfare operations result in a casualty ratio of nine civilians for every one enemy fighter killed. In Gaza, it is two to one. In other words,

despite the deliberate attempts by Hamas to increase the number of civilian casualties, Israel has been extraordinarily successful in reducing them. This doesn't mean that there won't be incidents in which innocent Palestinians are killed, and, as in any war, there will likely be war crimes committed by both sides. But overall, the numbers don't lie. If you need further evidence that claims of Israel's indiscriminate attacks and nonsense, just look at the way various commentators reacted to what has been dubbed Operation Grim Beeper. Thousands of Hezbollah pages were rigged with explosives and then detonated simultaneously, killing and injuring thousands of terrorists and a small number of bystanders. The pages in question were not picked at random. Israel

specifically selected a batch of senior Hezbollah operatives. And still, people like Hamza Yusuf, Scotland's former First Minister, complain about Israel's indiscriminate attacks. This was, definitionally, the most precise, targeted and surgical, large-scale anti-terrorist operation in human history. In summary, I've engaged with an open mind and in good faith with all the anti-Israel arguments presented to me over the last year. On balance, I regard them as disingenuous, irrelevant, and designed to pull at my heartstrings in order to obscure the harsh reality of this conflict. We would respond exactly the way that Israel has.

The only difference is we would do so with the support of every member of the international community, while Israel has to fight not only the terrorists who want to wipe them off the map, but Western apologists for those terrorists as well. If you enjoy these videos, you should know that they're available on my substack weeks, sometimes months ahead of time.

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