On September 11, 2001, a horrified Sam Harris watches the towers collapse into a smoldering pile of rubble. The deadly jihadist attacks of that fateful day inspired him to immediately begin writing The End of Faith, a book that would launch the “New Atheist” publishing phenomena and cement his legendary status as one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism” alongside Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett.
Harris engaged in countless debates on religion over the years, and though I greatly admire Dr. Harris and find many of his arguments compelling and eloquent, this article is not about those arguments. It is about how his views on the Israeli-Palestinian stand in great tension and inconsistency with his usual critique of dogmatism, especially how religious dogma shapes violence. This is not some abstract exercise in intellectual hairsplitting, but a necessary call for Sam Harris to rejoin the forces of sanity, put away willful blindness, and live up to the name of his podcast by Waking Up. We need Harris to apply the same piercing logic and arguments to the Christian Zionists and fanatical settlers as he does to jihadists. I waited far too long to speak out against these forces when I should have known better, running a religious-based psyop for Israel, and I don’t like watching him make a similar mistake.
The heyday of the New Atheist movement may have passed, but Sam Harris finds himself in good company, once again sitting at the head table alongside Bari Weiss, Ben Shapiro, and Douglas Murray, whom I’m labeling the “Four Horseman of New Zionism.” This is the first of a four part series focusing on each horseman.
This is not an issue of lack of regional knowledge. The End of Faith literally opens with a scene of a suicide bombing in Israel, and since October 7, 2023 Harris has frequently written and spoken about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While early on in his career he said he opposed the idea of a Jewish state on religious grounds and has made the occasional jab at some of Israel’s extremist dogmatism—Harris once said that he thought Israeli settlers in the West Bank ought to be dragged away by their beards (a statement one would think would get him labeled an antisemite by Weiss, Shapiro, and Murray)—since long before October 7 Harris has maintained a stance of near total deference to the Israeli government. In 2014, he published an episode entitled Why I Don’t Criticize Israel.
To summarize that piece, the central arguments Harris makes for his deafening silence are: Intent matters more than death count and Israel aims not to kill civilians while Hamas does representing a crucial asymmetry; that jihadist ideology drives the conflict and makes compromise impossible; that Israel represents liberal values in a region hostile to them; that selective outrage against Israel distorts moral judgement. There are kernels of truth in some of these points, however it is what is left unsaid and Harris’ own one-sidedness that ultimately render his views untenable.
What is stranger than his unwillingness to offer any real critique of religious extremism driving policy from within the Israeli government, is his unwillingness to really take on the dangerous dogmatism of the Christian Zionist movement. In his crucial work Letter to a Christian Nation, not once does Harris devote so much as a paragraph to dissecting the danger of American Christians supporting Israeli policies for explicitly apocalyptic theological reasons, all the more shocking given the book’s focus on Christian belief in regards to political power, Harris’s fixation on Israeli-Palestinian conflict elsewhere, and that the book was written at the height of W. Bush-era evangelical foreign policy. President Bush was quoted as saying that God told him to invade Iraq. While Harris may criticize that framing, we heard crickets when it was revealed that the Israeli government misrepresented Israeli intelligence regarding the lack of a WMD program in Iraq to help steer the United States towards invasion. With allies like these, who needs enemies? We literally have a pastor as our ambassador to Israel right now who is constantly referencing scripture as the basis for his decisions, and once again, Harris is silent.
When Sam Harris does speak out against jihadism and the response to it or lack thereof, he is usually dead on. He harps on issues like Hamas’s original charter calling for the extermination of all Jews, Hamas being an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement, Its horrendous treatment of gay people and women, and Western academics celebrating the October 7 attacks.
However, consider some of the rhetoric, policy, and actions Harris is silent on or implicitly defends. Starting on October 7, 2023, more Palestinians civilians have been killed in the West Bank than Israeli civilians. Many of the deaths are the result of fanatical Israeli settlers descending upon Palestinian villages and engaging in wanton murder in what can only be described as pogroms. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of National Security who was once convicted of support for terrorism, is the leader of a ultranationalist Kahanist party and can be seen here distributing assault weapons to Israeli settlers.
That is not even counting Gaza, where tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, largely in incidents of “collateral damage,” a dehumanizing term referring to deaths of non-militants in a bombing campaign. Harris would be quick to counter that Hamas started the war and bears responsibility in that regard, but also effectively uses the civilian population of Gaza as “human shields” by hijacking civilian infrastructure and using it for military purpose. For the record, there were also many reports of the IDF dressing civilians in Israeli uniforms and sending them into harms way as objects to detonate IEDs, yet no mention of this from Harris who would, correctly, point to international law statutes that support this view. However, Israeli leadership and much of its society hardly seem emotionally torn up by the carnage wrought in Gaza and can often be seen openly celebrating mass fatalities.
It is all too common to hear things like “we need to kill their offspring” emanating from Israeli society. I personally heard one of my colleagues at the Israeli Consulate in Houston exclaim that “They should all be raped” in reference to the people of Gaza. In regards to its bombing campaign Israeli officials are on record saying things like, “There is no such thing as innocent people in Gaza” or “emphasis is on destruction, not precision,” which poses a serious challenge to the constant refrain one hears from Harris and other Israel defenders that Israel acts with extreme restraint in carrying out these operations stemming from an intent not to kill civilians.
There exists a palpable religious aspect to much of this which really ought to bother Harris. This last summer, Israel Minister of Defense Israel Katz exclaimed after a bombing operation in Yemen that he intended to visit the plague of the firstborn upon enemies, i.e. he wants to murder their children. Shortly into the Gaza War, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we remember, and we are fighting,” as he read from prepared remarks. This is undeniably genocidal rhetoric that explicitly appeals to religious fundamentalism, the sort of thing one would expect Sam Harris to dedicate hours to. “From the river to the sea!” will be greeted with contempt, but a phrase from settlers harkening back to Biblical Israel, “From the Euphrates to the Nile!” won’t be visited upon at all.
When Israeli officials aren’t celebrating death, they are often lying about it, as in the multiple cases of World Central Kitchen convoys targeted for destruction, or the instance where first responders were slaughtered and dumped in a mass grave. We only know what happened because a cell phone video was recovered from one of their bodies that stood in sharp contrast to Israel’s official version of events.
These instances are by no means exhaustive, and lest you get the impression that things did not get bad until after October 7, I should remind you that for years fanatical Israelis, often joined by elected officials chanted “Death to Arabs!” every year as they paraded down the street marking Jerusalem Day, the day Israel captured Jerusalem in 1967. Baruch Goldstein was an Israeli terrorist and adherent of the Kahanist ideology of religious extremism. He gunned down dozens of Palestinian worshipers at the Cave of the Patriarchs, yet Ben-Gvir saw fit to hang his portrait in his home, quite literally glorifying a terrorist.
All four horsemen of new Zionism conflate critique of Israeli policy with antisemitism. They will spend an inordinate amount of time dissecting the ravings of blue-haired undergrads who hold virtually zero influence over the shape of American or Israeli policy, but almost no time condemning the rhetoric of the top Israeli leadership, like the prime minister himself, or American leaders in regard to Israel, like Ambassador Mike Huckabee. One might expect this from Douglas Murray, but it is quite hypocritical coming from Harris considering he has made similar critiques against the right for equating the rhetoric of randos with the president of the United States. Not long ago Huckabee met with the traitor, Jonathan Pollard—who betrayed the United States by selling its nuclear secrets to Israel—at our Embassy in Jerusalem. Pollard has been quoted as urging that Israel should be prepared to nuke the U.S. if Washington were to try to force Israel to moderate its conduct, particularly regarding Gaza and similar conflicts. If this isn’t fanatical and dangerous enough to deserve commentary from Sam Harris, I don’t know what is.
In conclusion, Harris isn’t wrong about the power of dogmatism to exacerbate political violence. He isn’t wrong about Hamas or Hezbollah. He isn’t wrong in his condemnation of many of the reactions of the October 7, attacks. He is wrong to selectively apply his keen analysis, and he is wrong to put his trust in a government that would brutalize and dominate millions because a book said they were made a promise by the creator of the universe.
Perhaps my pleading will fall on deaf ears, but Dr. Harris would do well to consider the words of his old friend and fellow horseman Christopher Hitchens on seeking peace in the so called Holy Land, because it isn’t just the jihadists blocking it:
“…there should be enough room for two states for two peoples in the same land, I think we have a rough agreement on that. Why can’t we get it? The UN can’t get it, the US can’t get it, the Quartet can’t get it, the PLO can’t get it, the Israeli parliament can’t get it, why can’t they get it? Because the parties of God have a veto on it, and everybody knows that this is true. Because of the divine promises made about this territory, there will never be peace there will never be compromise. There will instead be misery, shame and tyranny and people will kill each others’ children for ancient books and caves and relics, and who is going to say this is good for the world?”
