The Attempt to Justify Mass Killing

Gaza is in ruins. The tiny strip of land, home to roughly 2.1 million Palestinians, has been pulverized by a year of Israeli attacks. Most of the buildings are at least partially destroyed. Mosques, universities, schools: everything is a wreck. The attacks have made Gaza the deadliest place in the world to be a child. More aid workers have died there than in all of the rest of the world’s conflict zones combined. Atrocity after atrocity has taken place, from the killing of Hind Rijab to the shooting of unarmed Palestinians with their hands up. Doctors who have worked in Gaza describe scenes of unimaginable horror. Israel is the aggressor in the underlying conflict, because it illegally occupies Palestine, but it also routinely violates the laws of war. We know from internal Israeli sources that Israel has little regard for civilian lives, a disregard that is matched by the rhetoric of Israeli politicians and commentators. Israel’s national security minister is now gleefully talking of plans to steal Gaza outright and populate it with Israelis. The United States could stop the war at any point, since it is the chief arms supplier for Israel. But it has repeatedly used its UN veto power to block a ceasefire, and refuses to even join the majority of the world’s countries in recognizing Palestinian statehood. Instead, the U.S. administration pretends to be engaging in diplomacy to end the war, while really sustaining it. 

These are all facts. They are well-documented and cannot be seriously disputed, although they can be (and regularly are) ignored. Anyone who wants to honestly and intelligently discuss this conflict has to reckon with these facts. 

Political commentator Konstantin Kisin presents himself as this kind of honest and intelligent analyst. In a recent video and blog post, he explained that he has kept an open mind for the past year and tried to analyze the conflict in good faith. But, he says, the arguments made by critics of Israel have not convinced him, and he has concluded that Israel is in the right. He is now “off the fence.” After releasing his video, Kisin said that while it appeared to be inspiring “vitriolic meltdowns,” “not one [critic] has addressed a single argument I made… I wonder why that is,” he mused, implying that because people had not refuted his arguments, they could not, because the arguments are so spectacularly sound and well-reasoned.

Regular readers of this magazine know that one of our specialties is addressing arguments, and we have always been critical of those on the left who don’t feel they need to address the other side’s argument, precisely because it allows people like Kisin to say “Aha, nobody has refuted my arguments, I must be right.” So I do want to go through his points carefully, especially since he is not the only one who makes them. I firmly believe that because Israel is carrying out a major atrocity in Gaza, to believe as Kisin does is to sanction one of the most monstrous acts of our time. I believe Kisin has ended up holding a completely indefensible position. I assume he has arrived there in good faith, and to his credit Kisin has interviewed champions of Palestinian rights like Norman Finkelstein and Bassem Youssef (although his history as an unremitting critic of “wokeness” and his tendency to use racist, sexist insults like “DEI Barbie” does make me somewhat doubt his professed neutrality). Still, it’s important to make sure that others don’t end up similarly misled and confused. 

Kisin says that he has discerned four core arguments that critics of Israel make. They are:

• “History did not start on October 7.” 
• “October 7 was a response to Israeli brutality and oppression.”
• “Israel is killing civilians.”
• “Israel is engaged in indiscriminate attacks.” 

Let me go through the points one by one. First, let’s look at Kisin’s explanation of the argument he is responding to, and then his criticism of that argument: 

• History did not start on October 7.

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.[…]

 

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 7 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 forced 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 the 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. 

Now, first, I have to note that Kisin does not actually seem to be responding to the claim that “history did not begin on October 7.” He is responding to a different claim, that the State of Israel is illegitimate. I don’t see why Kisin concludes that the “crux” or “premise” of “history did not begin on October 7” is that Israel is illegitimate. One can very easily accept Israel’s legitimacy and also believe that the moral dimensions of the conflict are impossible to evaluate if single events (like Oct. 7) are considered while other facts (the hundred-year project of dispossessing Palestinians that preceded Oct. 7) are ignored. That’s what I take the claim “history did not begin on October 7” to mean: to understand the conflict, we can’t just look at one side’s actions as if they came out of nowhere. For instance, the day after the Oct. 7 attacks, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz penned an editorial placing blame for the attacks on Benjamin Netanyahu, claiming that his government’s policies were responsible for the blowback. Haaretz was arguing that the context of Oct. 7 is critical for understanding it, but the editors did not claim the State of Israel is illegitimate. I am not sure, therefore, why Kisin conflates an argument for the necessity of historical context with an argument that Israel is illegitimate, and it seems pretty clear that he hasn’t refuted or even addressed the claim.

What of the claim he does address, that Israel is illegitimate? Well, Kisin doesn’t try to claim Israel’s founding was legitimate. He concedes (at least for the purposes of argument) that Palestinians have a rightful claim that the founding of the State of Israel was not legitimate, because it was done against the will of the majority of Palestine’s population, who were not allowed to decide whether their land would be turned into a state for others. Instead, he says that even if Israel is illegitimate, the idea that Israelis “should accept the destruction of what is now their country is absurd.” He says that the U.S. government would not accept it if Native Americans tried to get their land back through force, and that history cannot be undone. 

Now, this is not the only place in the video where Kisin argues that if the U.S. government would react a certain way, we cannot blame Israel for behaving similarly. Elsewhere he poses a hypothetical: “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?” He says that in this situation there wouldn’t be a Mexico to speak of. But the descriptive question of how a violent country can be expected to react to an attack has no bearing on the issue at hand here, which is whether Israel is waging a just war. I think, for example, that Americans’ racist dehumanization and mass imprisonment of Japanese people was a predictable reaction to the Pearl Harbor attacks. But I still think it was gravely wrong. Kisin has not justified anything by pointing out that the Israeli response to Oct. 7 is precisely what we would expect from Israel.

The core point Kisin makes here is that the illegitimacy of Israel’s founding does not mean it should suffer “destruction,” because this principle would require Native Americans to be given their original country back (which he believes would be intolerable). Again, I must emphasize that we are far afield from the original argument Kisin claims to be responding to, namely that historical context matters for understanding October 7. But what of the claim: “Israel does not deserve to be destroyed merely because it is illegitimate.” How you interpret that claim hinges a lot on what you mean by the word “destroyed,” which is used differently by different people. What does it mean for Israel to be destroyed? Are we referring to outright acts of murder and expulsion? Or would it “destroy” Israel if Israel ceased being an officially Jewish state and granted full equal rights to everyone under its sovereignty? Many, including even harsh critics of Israel like Norman Finkelstein, argue that it would “destroy Israel” if Israel were to cease being an officially Jewish state. In other words, Israel is by definition a state that is explicitly meant for one ethnic group over another, and so to end that ethnic character would end the country itself. In this sense of the word, it’s not Israel as a physical place, or its cities and people that would be “destroyed,” but the political structure of “Israel as we know it.”

 When Kisin says that Israel does not deserve to be “destroyed,” then, is he making the claim that (1) Israelis do not deserve to be driven out of their country and killed or (2) Israelis deserve to be able to preserve an ethnic supremacist state in Palestine? It’s not clear, but I think the word “destroyed” is sometimes used to obscure the critically important distinction between what is called the “one-state solution” (a single democratic state in the whole land of historic Palestine) and an actual attack on Israelis. In his video, Kisin does not clarify what he means by the term, which makes it impossible to know what he is actually saying. Is he saying that Israelis deserve peace despite the state’s illegitimacy, or that they also deserve to permanently maintain the ethnically exclusionary character of their state? I would certainly agree with the claim that people do not deserve to be physically attacked just because their state was founded (as states tend to be) through illegitimate violence. I would not agree if the claim is that Israel has a right to permanently subjugate Palestinians while maintaining sovereignty over them. 

I therefore think Kisin is too unclear about what he’s saying for me to even refute it. But what’s certain is that he hasn’t offered any persuasive response to advocates of Palestinian rights. Let us move to point 2. 

• October 7 was a response to Israeli brutality and oppression.

Those of you who watched my debate with Saifedean Ammous will recall that he made this argument repeatedly, [that] the people of Gaza and the West Bank are treated so badly. He argued the response we saw on October 7 was totally understandable, an act of resistance aimed at redressing the wrongs they have suffered.[…]

 

The second argument centers on the idea that October 7 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 7? The problem with this argument is that what happened on October 7 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 7 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 it in the manner that it has, and why any other country would have done the same.

Here, Kisin is just demonstrating a basic incapacity for logical reasoning. He responds to the claim “Oct 7 was a response to Israeli brutality and oppression” by arguing that October 7 was purely a terrorist attack, rather than an attack on the IDF. He’s factually mistaken here, because nearly 400 members of the Israeli security forces were killed on October 7, which included attacks on military bases. It’s not true that the purpose was to “slaughter civilians, terrify Israeli society, and nothing else.” Rather, the events of Oct. 7 involved a mix of attacks against civilians and military targets, and the portion of those attacks that were directed against soldiers were arguably justified as an act of self-defense against occupation and siege. (Note: only that portion.) 

But more importantly, Kisin’s claim just doesn’t make sense. How does the fact that Oct. 7 was terrorism mean that it was not a response to occupation and brutality? It can be both, just as a slave revolt can consist of violence against civilians while still being a response to the condition of slavery. (There are many examples like this throughout history, from Nat Turner to the Haitian Revolution.) If I kidnap your child, and you respond by beating me up, whether your action is a response is separate from the question of whether it is reasonable. The fact that an attack is not a lawful or moral reaction to oppression does not mean it is not a reaction. So Kisin has not refuted the argument he’s addressing. His second argument fails as badly as the first did. 

• Israel is killing civilians.

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 are 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 7 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, won’t, 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, Sami Abu Zuhri, gave an interview on a Palestinian station, Al Aqsa TV, the last time this conflict flared up. “The policy of people confronting Israeli warplanes 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 home 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.

Once again, Kisin does not attempt to argue against the point. Of course Israel is killing huge numbers of civilians. It has killed over 16,000 children. Since Kisin likes to measure things in units of 9/11s, that’s 5.3 9/11s consisting entirely of children (and that’s before adjusting for population size; Gaza’s population is 0.67% that of the U.S. If the same level of catastrophe happened in the U.S., it would mean at least 2,512,000 dead children, or about 837 9/11s worth of dead children.) So it’s impossible to argue that Israel is not killing children in vast numbers. Kisin’s argument is that Israel is not at fault for its killing of children, and bears zero responsibility for their deaths, because it is trying to eliminate Hamas, which has promised to keep attacking Israel. Also, Kisin says, Hamas wants the civilians to die.

Now, note that the Hamas quote Kisin cites does not prove what he says it proves, namely that Hamas is trying to maximize civilian casualties. The Hamas spokesperson says that people should confront Israeli warplanes with their “bare chests.” What’s funny about citing this quote is that the argument Sami Abu Zuhrin makes here is actually an argument for unarmed nonresistance as practiced by Gandhi. You may find that laughable, but look at what Zuhrin was saying. He was saying that people should protect their houses with their bodies. He was not admitting Hamas puts civilians in harm’s way, but specifically asking civilians to courageously resist warplanes without weapons. Incredibly, for Kisin, this is further proof that Hamas is responsible for their deaths, which is a little like arguing that if Martin Luther King exhorted people to be willing to face down Southern sheriffs without any weapons, this was proof that King (not the sheriffs) was responsible for the resulting brutality. (People did make that argument of course, but those people are now discredited.) Kisin says that it is Hamas’s fault for not building bomb shelters in Gaza, not Israel’s fault for dropping bombs on Gaza, which is like saying that if I shoot you and you die, it’s not my fault because you should have worn a bulletproof vest. It’s certainly true that Hamas does not do enough to protect the lives of Gazan civilians, but if Israel weren’t obliterating the entire place with colossal bombs, the question of protecting lives against bombs wouldn’t arise.

But Kisin appears to believe that every bomb is justified, because Hamas threatens Israel. He does not ask the obvious question: if Israel is justified in responding to threats with a mass bombing campaign that targets civilians, would Palestinians be justified in responding similarly to Israeli threats? Do Gazans have a right to defend their territory using violence? Or does the right to use force belong to Israel alone? Left out of Kisin’s analysis is the basic fact underlying the whole conflict: Palestine is occupied by Israel. Israel maintains a brutal, undemocratic, apartheid-like occupation in the West Bank, and has long kept Gaza under siege. Hamas has stated that its goal is to end this occupation. Does the occupation count as aggression? Do the theft of Palestinian land, the kidnapping and indefinite detention of Palestinians, the killing of Palestinian fishermen, constitute violence that allows for a right to self-defense? How should Palestinians have responded to the annexation of their country? By asking nicely? They tried that. They went to the UN, where they secured widespread recognition of their right to independent statehood. Israel and the U.S. refused to recognize their rights, and the occupation continued. They peacefully demonstrated for their rights, and were shot in the hundreds while the world looked on indifferently. If waging war against Israel was not legitimate, what would have been? 

I don’t know what Kisin thinks the answers to those questions are, because he doesn’t address them. But given that they are the fundamental questions about the conflict, the fact that he doesn’t even seem to have thought about them shows he’s not actually interested in taking the pro-Palestinian point of view seriously. 

• 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.[…] This is actually the simplest argument of the four to address, because it is an empirical matter. The war in [Israel] is not the first conflict in human history. We can compare the ratio of combatant to civilian deaths in 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 are nonsense, just look at the way various commentators reacted to what has been dubbed “Operation Grim Beeper.” Thousands of Hezbollah pagers were rigged with explosives and then detonated simultaneously, killing and injuring thousands of terrorists and a small number of bystanders. The pagers in question were not picked at random. Israel specifically selected a batch of senior Hezbollah operatives, and still, people like Humza Yousaf, 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. 

Apparently, Kisin believes it is not necessary to address any of the many reports by human rights organizations carefully documenting numerous indiscriminate attacks in Gaza. This is because he says the issue can simply be resolved “empirically,” by looking at the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in Gaza. Historically, he says, urban warfare typically results in “a casualty ratio of nine civilians for every one enemy fighter killed.” In Gaza, he says, it is two to one. Case closed. Civilians inevitably die in war, the question is whether the ratio is reasonable, and here it actually demonstrates Israel’s careful minimization of civilian casualties.

But hang on: a two-to-one ratio of civilian to military deaths. What else had a 2:1 ratio? The October 7 attacks themselves! There, nearly 800 civilians were killed and nearly 400 members of the Israeli security forces. So if it’s true that a 2:1 civilian to combatant ratio is sufficient to prove an attack isn’t indiscriminate, then the Oct. 7 attacks weren’t indiscriminate, a point I think Kisin would be very unlikely to accept. Oct. 7 itself shows that a 2:1 ratio of civilian to combatant deaths is in no way inconsistent with indiscriminate slaughter. In fact, Kisin has argued that Oct. 7 was an effort to maximize civilian casualties, which if true means that a 2:1 ratio could occur in a situation where the aim was to kill as many civilians as possible. Kisin either has to concede that the 2:1 ratio does not in fact prove anything on its own, or he has to say that the Oct. 7 attacks were just as carefully humane as Israel’s attacks on Gaza. 

In fact, you can’t tell much from ratios alone, for obvious reasons. If you attacked a military base and killed 200 soldiers, then went to the neighboring village and slaughtered a bus full of children, you might have an overall favorable ratio of combatant to civilian casualties, but an indefensible atrocity would still have been committed. This is why statistics are not enough. We must carefully examine the facts on the ground to understand who is being killed, and under what circumstances. When we do, we find that internal Israeli sources admit Israel accepts vast numbers of civilian casualties and uses an AI targeting system of dubious reliability. We know that even when organizations carefully give their coordinates to the IDF, aid workers are killed, and Israel wipes out entire blocks without offering any military justification. Doctors who have worked in Gaza say that children are targeted by snipers, and there is no shortage of reports of unarmed civilians being murdered. (Heck, Israel even killed its own hostages as they waved a white flag, because it mistook them for Palestinians.) Israeli soldiers show little ability to distinguish between civilians and “terrorists,” and report running over hundreds of “terrorists” at once with bulldozers. None of the facts are dealt with, because Kisin thinks his meaningless ratio “empirically” absolves Israel. 

As for the Hezbollah pager attack, we have discussed it at length here before, but this gruesome attack hit huge numbers of civilian workers, and Israel couldn’t have known who was in possession of the pagers, which is one reason they killed children. That’s why both supporter of Israel Michael Walzer and ex-CIA director Leon Panetta label the attacks terrorism. 

Kisin claims that he has “engaged with an open mind and in good faith with all the anti-Israel arguments presented to me over the last year” but has come to “regard them as disingenuous, irrelevant and designed to pull at my heartstrings in order to obscure the harsh reality of this conflict.” In fact, I don’t see where he’s engaged with any of the serious arguments at all. The basic argument is that Israel needs to stop its occupation and dispossession of Palestinians and grant them their basic right of self-determination, either through recognizing a Palestinian state (a “two-state solution”) or following the one person, one vote principle and accepting Palestinians as full citizens (the “one-state solution.”) Kisin deals with this nowhere. The serious evidence of Israel’s atrocities is simply ignored. The long history of the U.S. and Israel defying almost all of the rest of the world at the UN to thwart Palestinian statehood is absent. So is any discussion of Hamas’s previous diplomatic overtures and attempt to succeed through negotiation and protest. There should be a heavy intellectual burden on those who want to justify mass killing. If you intend to prove the counterintuitive proposition that killing large numbers of children is moral and necessary, you should have to do a lot of work to show that what seems heinous is actually acceptable. Kisin has done no such work. This is not a serious attempt to engage with pro-Palestinian arguments. It is simply another attempt to paper over the worst horrors in the world through simple-minded propaganda.