Nobody owes the sophist Sam Harris a debate

Sam Harris explained why he won’t debate people who support Palestine. I’m not going to bother taking apart the pile of logical fallacies in his piece. But I do want to say one thing.

The International Court of Justice reached three conclusions that matter. The Israeli occupation is illegal and has to end as fast as possible. Israel must dismantle the settlements now. And Palestinians have the right to an independent state in 100% of the occupied territories. Notice what the Court didn’t say: that Palestinians have to debate Sam Harris first. His opinion, frankly, is beside the point.

And here’s the bigger thing. Talking to Israel-supporters is futile. Conversation only works when it can actually go somewhere. Palestine-supporters don’t need to talk to Israel-supporters, because Israel-supporters aren’t open to reason. Rational argument is supposed to be the peaceful alternative to violence. But as the ICJ said in its 2024 advisory opinion, Israel’s illegal occupation breaks the prohibition on the use of force, which makes it violence, not dialogue. So it’s unreasonable to demand that one side stick to polite debate while the other side imposes its will by force.

More than a century of rational arguments

For over a hundred years, Palestinians and the people who support them have brought arguments to the table. In “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine”, Rashid Khalidi quotes letters from 1899 between his ancestor Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi and Theodor Herzl. Yusuf Diya pointed out the obvious: Palestine was already inhabited and couldn’t simply be colonized. Herzl’s reply was that European Jews would colonize it anyway and make the Arabs rich and happy.

From the start, the will of the Arabs in Palestine just didn’t count. In “Imperial Perceptions of Palestine”, Lorenzo Kamel quotes the thinker Hans Kohn, who quit the Zionist movement in the British Mandate in protest:

“Lately I have become increasingly aware that the official policy of the Zionist Organization and the opinion of the vast majority of Zionists are quite incompatible with my own convictions. I, therefore, feel that I can no longer remain a leading official within the Zionist Organization […] We pretend to be innocent victims. Of course the Arabs attacked us in August [1929]. Since they have no armies, they could not obey the rules of war. They perpetrated all the barbaric acts that are characteristic of a colonial revolt. But we are obliged to look into the deeper cause of this revolt. We have been in Palestine for twelve years [since the British mandate] without having even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the indigenous people. We have been relying exclusively upon Great Britain’s military might. We have set ourselves goals which by their very nature had to lead to conflict with Arabs […] for twelve years we pretended that the Arabs did not exist and were glad when we were not reminded of their existence.”

The same thing happened at the United Nations. In “The United Nations and the Question of Palestine”, Ardi Imseis describes how the debate over partition played out. Palestine-supporters argued that the local population should decide Palestine’s future, in line with the principle of self-determination. The colonial powers brushed that aside and backed partition, on the grounds that the Arab majority was too primitive and backward to govern people they considered superior. Guatemala said this:

“[W]hat characterized a nation was its culture and not the number of inhabitants. In twenty-five years, the Jewish people had left upon Palestine the indelible mark of an outstanding culture, which characterized the country even more than the Arab culture: Palestine was no more Arab than certain Spanish countries of Latin America were Indian. The Jews […] transformed the deserts, and their model farms compelled admiration not only for their productiveness but also for the democratic character of their social structure. […] [T]he Jews had made a pleasant and healthy country out of a land in which a sparse and rachitic population had merely vegetated. It was incomprehensible that the Arabs should adduce their numerical superiority as an argument when it was the Jews who had made the increase in the Arab population possible. […] Could anyone think of placing that flourishing community under the domination of another community, even a community of a comparable standard of development? What would happen if the demands of the Arabs were yielded to and an independent State of Palestine were created? The Arab population with its simple religiousness and rudimentary political sense [would harm the Jews]. […] An ignorant majority should not be allowed to impose its will. […] There was a certain order in the world which helped to maintain the necessary equilibrium. If the United Nations wished to save that order it must consolidate it.”

Courts are the right place to settle disputes like this. Two sides with opposing interests lay out their arguments, and a neutral judge decides who’s right. Yet Israel-supporters dodge legal proceedings whenever they can. Why? Because they can get their way through military force or political power instead.

In “The Legality of a Jewish State”, John Quigley describes how Arab states in the 1940s tried, and failed, to put legal questions to the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion, one they promised to treat as binding. The questions were straightforward. Was the mandate for Palestine legal? Was the UN even competent to partition Palestine? Should the local population decide Palestine’s fate under the principle of self-determination? Who did Palestine belong to? Were the Arabs or the Jews the aggressors? European colonists lobbied to block all of it.

When the ICJ delivered its advisory opinions in 2004 and 2024, Palestinians showed up with rational arguments, and both times the Court ruled in their favor. In 2024, the Court found that Palestinians have the right to an independent state across all the occupied territories, and that Israel has to stop building settlements immediately. Israel didn’t show up.

Palestinians (Hamas included) want the International Criminal Court to rule on every war crime in this conflict. Israel-supporters refuse, and instead attack the Court with fallacies, sanctions, threats, blackmail and espionage.

Theodor Meron, a leading Israeli jurist and former judge at several international tribunals, advised the ICC prosecutor in the case against Israeli and Hamas leaders. Western politicians (who have no expertise in criminal law and haven’t seen the evidence) went after the prosecutor with logical fallacies. They used the same line Netanyahu used on X: that the ICC violated the principle of moral equivalence by issuing arrest warrants against Israeli leaders and Hamas members on the same day. That reasoning fails on two levels.

First, it’s a non sequitur. The fact that two decisions land on the same day tells you nothing about how the cases compare morally. When a prosecutor in Jerusalem indicts a petty thief and Adolf Eichmann on the same day, nobody concludes the prosecutor thinks they’re equally evil. Second, it’s an ad hominem. The prosecutor is, in effect, being accused of antisemitism with no evidence behind it.

Professor Adil Haque puts it plainly. The ICC doesn’t compare states or groups. It assesses individuals against their legal obligations. It isn’t weighing who’s worse. A war crime is a war crime. Former ICC President Chile Eboe-Osuji made the same point: the date on the arrest warrants is legally irrelevant. Issue them on different days and the facts don’t change at all. The real suggestion underneath all this is that Israeli leaders should simply never be prosecuted. Which implies some victims count for less than others. That’s discrimination.

Netanyahu was the first to talk about “twisted and false moral equivalence.” Israel-supporters parroted it back. Joe Biden repeated it, then AIPAC, then German government leaders, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, the Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, and even the Washington Post. Donald Trump went as far as imposing sanctions on the ICC, citing this supposed moral equivalence. Great Britain threatened to pull its funding and even to walk away from the Court entirely.

So why do Israel-supporters oppose the ICC prosecuting all the war crimes here? Because the settlements are war crimes too, and prosecuting them would stop Israel from grabbing more land. Former ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said back in 2015 that there was already enough ground to prosecute Israeli settlements as a war crime. By trying to keep the ICC from prosecuting every war crime in Palestine, Israel-supporters are simply trying to help Israel seize as much territory as possible.

Why rational arguments don’t work on Israel-supporters

Western politicians who back Israel would rather be swayed by the Israel lobby than by any argument. In the United States, lobby groups like AIPAC and Christians United for Israel pour hundreds of millions of dollars into election campaigns.

In his book A Promised Land, Barack Obama writes this:

“By the time I took office, though, most congressional Republicans had abandoned any pretense of caring about what happened to the Palestinians. Indeed, a strong majority of white evangelicals—the GOP’s most reliable voting bloc—believed that the creation and gradual expansion of Israel fulfilled God’s promise to Abraham and heralded Christ’s eventual return. On the Democratic side, even stalwart progressives were loath to look less pro-Israel than Republicans, especially since many of them were Jewish themselves or represented sizable Jewish constituencies.

Also, members of both parties worried about crossing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful bipartisan lobbying organization dedicated to ensuring unwavering U.S. support for Israel. AIPAC’s clout could be brought to bear on virtually every congressional district in the country, and just about every politician in Washington—including me—counted AIPAC members among their key supporters and donors. In the past, the organization had accommodated a spectrum of views on Middle East peace, insisting mainly that those seeking its endorsement support a continuation of U.S. aid to Israel and oppose efforts to isolate or condemn Israel via the U.N. and other international bodies. But as Israeli politics had moved to the right, so had AIPAC’s policy positions. Its staff and leaders increasingly argued that there should be ‘no daylight’ between the U.S. and Israeli governments, even when Israel took actions that were contrary to U.S. policy. Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as ‘anti-Israel’ (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election.

I’d been on the receiving end of some of this during my presidential campaign, as Jewish supporters reported having to beat back assertions in their synagogues and on email chains that I was insufficiently supportive of—or even hostile toward—Israel. They attributed these whisper campaigns not to any particular position I’d taken (my backing of a two-state solution and opposition to Israeli settlements were identical to the positions of the other candidates) but rather to my expressions of concern for ordinary Palestinians; my friendships with certain critics of Israeli policy, including an activist and Middle East scholar named Rashid Khalidi.”

Conclusion

Since 1899, Palestine-supporters have tried to win Israel-supporters over with reason, and it hasn’t worked. Israel-supporters would rather use violence and Western political power to get their way. In op-eds and parliaments, they lean on lies and logical fallacies. As recently as 2024, the largest Dutch party, the PVV, claimed the Palestinian people don’t exist, which is nonsense under international law.

Arguing with Israel-supporters is like dancing for rain. It goes nowhere. What’s the point of engaging if it leads nowhere? Anyone who insists that Palestine-supporters must sit down with Israel-supporters should first prove that Israel and its supporters are actually open to reason. Until then, nobody owes the sophist Sam Harris a debate.