On April 17, ZeroHedge hosted a debate on the Israel-Palestine conflict moderated by Saagar Enjeti of Breaking Points, which pitted libertarian comedian and political commentator Dave Smith and The Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur against conservative talk show host Dennis Prager and Newsweek deputy opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon.
The main topic of debate was whether Israel’s ongoing military operation in Gaza is justified. Smith and Uygur argued in the negative while Prager and Ungar-Sargon argued in the affirmative.
The apologists for what the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has deemed to be a plausible genocide in Gaza premised their position on the claim that Israel does everything possible to avoid harming civilians, and Palestinian civilians have only been dying because Hamas was using them as human shields.
Ungar-Sargon additionally argued that the “kill ratio” of combatants to civilians is evidence that Israel is trying to avoid harm to civilians.
She also argued that Israel’s warnings for Palestinians to flee northern Gaza is additional evidence of its benevolent intent — which she immediately conceded, before even being challenged on the point, could also be construed as evidence that Israel was at least guilty of the crime of ethnic cleansing.
Prager went so far as to describe the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as “the most moral army in the world”, citing as evidence the word of Colonel Richard Kemp, a retired former commander of British forces in Afghanistan.
Kemp is frequently cited by Israel’s apologists as though his statements about the IDF’s wondrous munificence can be considered credible and serious.
Alan Dershowitz, for example, has rolled out the same talking point about Israel being “the most moral army in the world”, similarly citing Kemp.
But we’ll come back to Kemp. First, let’s briefly examine the “human shields” and “kill ratio” arguments.