Recently, Sam Harris wrote an essay, "Why I won't Debate Critics of Israel," which has been widely cited and quoted. It boils down to one question: What would each side do if it had the power to do whatever it wanted? If Hamas had that power, it would carry out a genuine genocide, a project it has announced repeatedly and acted on when it could. If Israel had it, the war would already be over. Harris said the histories are irreconcilable and that no amount of relitigating 1948 will change what the two populations want and are willing to die for today, so the only honest test is the one applied to the present.
Peter Beinart's reply runs almost three thousand words and never answers the main question. That omission is the whole story.
Beinart is a careful writer who knows exactly what Harris asked, and he declines to engage it because the answer cuts against him: Palestinians want the Jewish state destroyed, full stop. This applies to Muslims and Christians, religious and secular. Every poll shows that Palestinians overwhelmingly support specific terror attacks against Jews. Beinart cannot answer Harris' question because he knows Harris is right.
Instead, Beinart reopens every historical and legal sub-debate Harris specifically set aside, then frames Harris's refusal to be dragged backward as intellectual cowardice. Harris declined to argue the past because the present is dispositive. Beinart spends three thousand words proving him right by refusing to discuss the present at all.
Harris points at a question reality can answer and lets the answer stand. Beinart does what he has always done, the skill I have documented at length: he sets the frame so the other side's facts cannot be admitted, smuggling the accusation in as a shared premise rather than stating it as a claim the reader might examine. Beinart is very good at this sleight of hand. Here is what is behind the curtain in this case.
Harris called Israel a free society, and Beinart answers by describing a Palestinian living under military administration in the West Bank — no vote, military courts, permits to travel, Military Order 101 restricting political assembly. The claim was about Israel, the society that runs competitive elections, seats Arabs in the Knesset and on the Supreme Court, and lets a free press savage the prime minister daily. Beinart pretends to rebut it by describing the governance of a territory whose final status Oslo left to negotiation where Arafat chose an intifada instead of a state. Moreover, most Palestinians live under PA laws, not Israeli laws, and that is an unfree society - and would remain so under any Palestinian state. Hell, Gaza was practically independent, living completely under Palestinian/Hamas rule, imports through Israel were at an all time high, and that didn't stop October 7. The collapsing of "a Palestinian in Area A or Gaza lives in Israel" is the same move he has run for years, the one that treats a population with its own flag, courts, passports, and UN membership as residents of a state denying them the vote; by that logic Canadians live in the United States because the US dominates Canada economically, and the US isn't a free society because Puerto Ricans cannot vote for President. The subject changed between the claim and the rebuttal, and Beinart is counting on you not to notice.
Beinart offers George Habash, the Greek Orthodox choirboy who founded the PFLP, as proof that Palestinian nationalism cannot be reduced to jihadism, alongside Said, Ashrawi, and Bishara. Harris named the entire Middle East and a specific roster of Islamist groups as the fundamental regional problem, so Christian Palestinians never touched his thesis. But even if we accept Beinart's argument, Habash pioneered international airplane hijacking and ran a Marxist-Leninist program for the elimination of Jewish sovereignty by force. A secular Marxist and an Islamist arriving at the identical destination is not evidence that the nationalism is moderate; it is evidence that the eliminationist aim is the constant and the theology is interchangeable costume. Beinart reached for a counterexample and produced Harris's deeper point — the rejection of Jewish political existence predates Hamas, predates 1948, and survives every change of ideological dress.
Beinart says the Palestinian Authority laid down its arms for twenty years, coordinated security with the IDF, got nothing, and watched Fayyad resign in defeat. Harris's hypothetical asked for two things: laying down arms and abandoning the culture that valorizes killing Jews. The Palestinian Authority did the first and rewarded the second the entire time, paying graduated salaries to imprisoned and deceased terrorists and naming schools and squares after them across the very years Beinart is citing as proof of renunciation. You cannot offer Fayyad as evidence that nonviolence failed while the institution he served was cutting checks to murderers by the severity of the murder. Moreover, Fatah, the party that runs the PA and is headed by PA president Mahmoud Abbas, built into its platform during those very years that terrorism is legitimate and legal, just not tactically wise at this moment in time. Beinart's own framing finishes the demolition: he notes that Hamas "gains recognition and is strengthened" as Fayyad's moderation looks like failure, which concedes that the population rewarded the violent faction — the exact thing Harris's question was designed to surface.
Harris charged that Hamas built hundreds of miles of tunnels and excluded its own civilians from them. Beinart answers that insurgents everywhere fight from within populations, that the Viet Cong dug tunnels too, and that the Kirya sits in downtown Tel Aviv. The Viet Cong tunnels sheltered fighters and villagers alike, which is the opposite of the accusation; the charge was not "Hamas fights in a city" but "Hamas kept its people above ground as cover." Locating a headquarters in a city and forbidding civilians to flee a combat zone are different acts, and the entire moral and legal weight of "human shield" rides on the difference. Beinart elides presence into shielding and moves on before you can object.
There are a number of other specific points where Beinart uses the same rhetorical devices - false framing, changing the subject, trying to change the playing field because he knows he cannot beat Harris' arguments. The pattern repeats: Harris makes a claim about the present, and Beinart answers a different claim about the past, the law, or some other country, performing the substitution at the seam and calling the result humility. The giveaway is not any single error. It is that the question Harris actually posed sits untouched on the page for three thousand words, because the man replying knows what reality would say if he let it answer.
Beinart closes by inviting Harris into a respectful public conversation, the implication being that confidence this firm must be fear of being tested. Harris already named the test. Beinart spent his entire reply avoiding it. This shows that Beinart is the one who is afraid of conversation, not Harris. And it proves Harris' point: debating Beinart is a waste of time because he will keep on reframing the past and assume the audience misses his slippery methods instead of discussing the present reality.
|
Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
 |
Buy