Photos of the Hamas carnage from October 7; this is pretty ghastly, so do not click on the link if you're not steeled for it.
"What Palestinians really think of Hamas." From the article: "Arab Barometer, a research network where we serve as co-principal investigators, conducted a survey in Gaza and the West Bank days before the Israel-Hamas war broke out. The findings, published here for the first time, reveal that rather than supporting Hamas, the vast majority of Gazans have been frustrated with the armed group’s ineffective governance as they endure extreme economic hardship. Most Gazans do not align themselves with Hamas’s ideology, either. Unlike Hamas, whose goal is to destroy the Israeli state, the majority of survey respondents favored a two-state solution with an independent Palestine and Israel existing side by side."
Thomas Friedman actually writes something sensible (I'm not sure this has ever happened before):
I have sympathy for the terrible choices that Israel’s government faced after the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. But it was precisely because I closely followed [former Indian PM] Singh’s unique reaction to the Mumbai terrorist attack that I immediately advocated a much more targeted, fully thought-through response by Israel. It should have called this Operation Save Our Hostages and focused on capturing and killing the kidnappers of children and grandparents. Every parent could understand that.
Instead, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government immediately raced into a plan to, as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant put it, “wipe out” Hamas “from the face of the earth.” And in three weeks Israel has inflicted easily more than triple the number of civilian casualties and caused far more destruction in Gaza than Israel suffered, while committing itself to taking military control of Gaza — an operation, on a relative population basis, that is roughly equivalent to the United States deciding almost overnight to occupy half of Mexico.
The Oxford letter calling for a ceasefire (first noted here) has generated two responses from Israeli philosophers: one from David Enoch, and one from six Israeli moral philosophers. The latter seems to me the stronger response (the first comment in response to Enoch's piece is pretty on point [apart from the reference to the morally corrupt Anscombe!]). Enoch mocks, with considerable justification, the pretense of the Oxford letter to represent the expertise of "academics who spend our lives thinking about events such as these" (a description that perhaps applies to a couple of the signatories at best), and the letter from the six Israeli moral philosophers lends support to that criticism. Both Professor Enoch and the six moral philosophers assume that Israeli military options are cases of "self-defense" (and the latter makes that case more persuasively than I have seen elsewhere), but the idea that there were not other options is hard to take seriously. Even Thomas Friedman (above) noticed other options! Why not rebuild the fences and improve the border security, assassinate Hamas leadership and militants when possible, and, most importantly, negotiate to free the hostages? In that scenario, the only mass murder of civilians will have been perpetrated by Hamas ("proportional" mass murder of civilians in "self-defense" still doesn't look too good, but I guess I'm not a subtle enough moral philosopher?) It's not at all clear the invasion will make Israel safer.
Via Alon Harel on FB, I came across this interesting piece on "the future of Hamas" after October 7.
ADDENDUM: An Israeli "Intelligence Ministry" document explores the possibility of relocating all the Palestinians in Gaza to the Sinai Peninsula. This may not be the "official" policy, but for obvious reasons, that it is even being considered will greatly alarm the Palestinians and the Egyptians.
Recent Comments