STEVEN PINKER ON HIS JEWISHNESS AS IT RELATES TO ISRAEL, THE GAZAN WAR AND THE GENOCIDE LIBEL

How I wish Harvard taught students to talk about Israel

I am heartsick over the death and destruction in Gaza. But I am also stunned by the simplistic hatred that has been hurled at Israel, not least by students at my own institution.

By Steven PinkerUpdated October 7, 2024, 3:00 a.m.

Jewish culture is driven by disputation and dialectical thinking, by the ability to weigh opposing ideas. Rabbis have yeshiva students switch sides in debates on Jewish law to hone their skills and clarify the issues. And according to a cherished wisecrack, “Two Jews, three opinions.”

My own biography has equipped me with this mindset. I grew up in a Zionist community, had a Jewish education which emphasized that Jews gave morality to the world, and taught Sunday school in the Reform Temple where I had been a student. Yet while I remain proudly Jewish, my adult convictions have pulled me in directions away from this background.

I’m an atheist and feel no need to praise God. I’m a humanist who argues that morality comes not from scripture but from treating people impartially and maximizing their well-being.

And I am not a Zionist in the sense of seeing a Jewish state as the natural aspiration of the Jews. I believe a state should be based on a social contract that secures its citizens the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not the embodiment of religious or ethnic yearnings. 

And I believe that if Jews are distinctive, it’s because we are a diaspora people, relying on norms and knowledge rather than ties to the soil, and drawing from the many civilizations in which we have lived.

In the past year, the universalism of my adulthood, layered atop the ethnocentrism of my upbringing, has left me in a state of agonized ambivalence. Like most American Jews, I oppose many of the actions taken by the current Israeli government and am heartsick over the death and destruction in Gaza. 

Yet as I struggle to apply objective yardsticks to Israel and its policies, I have been stunned by the simplistic hatred that has been hurled at it, not least by students at my own institution, Harvard University.

In a statement issued three days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre on Israel, 34 student groups held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible” for the slaughter and rape of 1,200 of its citizens. Entirely! Our students exonerated the men who pulled the triggers, raped women, and set houses on fire with families in them. They took no note of the murderously antisemitic ideology of Hamas, nor of their strategy of killing noncombatants, a war crime. They seemed unaware that Egypt blockades Gaza, too, and that Hamas is armed and encouraged by a malevolent theocracy in Iran.

Then, this spring, the students camping in Harvard Yard went far beyond protesting Israel’s attack of Gaza, an understandable impulse. They declared “From the river to the sea,” and displayed signs that wiped Israel off the map.

Calling for the annihilation of a state is extraordinary. None of the other 192 members of the United Nations has had its existence seriously questioned, and in 79 years none has gone out of existence through conquest. Many historians note that the grandfathering of states since 1945 is a major cause of the historical decline of war.

This is not to deny the tragic displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s founding. Yet the turbulent post-World War II period was a time of population transfers all over the world, as new countries coalesced and people fled out of fear or duress. 

Refugees included massive numbers of ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe and Hindus and Muslims in partitioned India, long since resettled. Crimes against humanity took place in those years, and the victims deserve sympathy and compensation. 

Yet it would be grotesque to try to reverse this history three generations later, or to abolish countries like Poland or Pakistan that emerged from the chaos.

Even those who are skeptical of ethnic or religious states have no grounds for opposing the very existence of Israel. Many liberal democracies have state religions (including the United Kingdom with its antidisestablishmentarianism), and many more have a responsibility to preserve the cultural heritage of their ethnic majority. Israel can be a Jewish state in the same sense that Denmark is a Danish state, each granting full rights to its minority citizens.

Just as egregious as calls for the destruction of Israel is the blood libel that it is committing “genocide,” the worst of human evils. War and genocide are not the same. An armed force waging war targets enemy fighters for a military goal, harming noncombatants only as an unwanted side effect. An armed force committing genocide targets noncombatants with the goal of destroying a people.

Israel may deserve criticism for launching the Gaza war or for sacrificing too many civilians in fighting it (despite its stated efforts to spare them). Yet its military objective — eliminating a militia dedicated to Israel’s destruction — is crystal clear, as is the reason so many civilians have been harmed, namely that Hamas entrenched itself in tunnels beneath homes, schools, and hospitals.

I would desperately like to see a cease-fire in Gaza and a Palestinian state. Yet I know enough Israelis and American Zionists to understand the counterarguments. 

No other country would tolerate a fortress on its border that regularly bombarded it with tens of thousands of rockets and sent out terrorists to kill and kidnap its citizens. A state in the West Bank, always vulnerable to Hamas takeover, would multiply the menace. I like to think that human ingenuity can find a way for Israel to attain the security of other democracies, with no force or repression. Yet its venomous critics have advanced no such plan.

When I was a Sunday school teacher, the curriculum was ethics, and I led pupils in deliberating moral dilemmas with no obvious right or wrong answer. During the past year I have found myself grappling with new ones and wishing that my august institution taught its students this skill.

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the author of “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why it Matters.”

BRIEF EXCHANGE ON POEM “EMPIRES” BY ANTHONY JOSEPH

 Empires

Anthony Joseph

In Malick, my cousins were clearing a drain.
Silt and vine were tangled in the water. 
Muscle in the water like dregs of an abattoir. 
When the river came down it brought panty-wash,
dialysis swill and original bones 
from mansions hid in the northern hills 
The rubric of our history is synonymous with loss. 
But haven’t we built such beautiful homes
on the hillside coming down. 
Empires of one-one brick and pillar post. 
Empires of galvanise and dirt. 
I stood in my English clothes and watched
my cousins make a river flow again, 
and colour come back to the earth.

————-

R:

The muted expressiveness means that I have to provide the emotional force.  Which just doesn't happen.  

Why "synonymous with loss?"  Why not just "loss?"  Can "galvinize" be a noun?  It's as if the writer doesn't speak English well. 

I thought the lines about the empires were ironic,  but the last three lines aren't.  

So not  a good poem in my view. 

———————————

Me:

“nounDIALECT•WEST INDIAN

noun: galvanise

1. galvanized steel sheeting, as used for roofing or fencing."the rain was beating hard against Miss Orilie's galvanize"

——————————

R:

That I didn't know.

——————

Me:

“The rubric of our history is synonymous with loss” goes to collective experience of a people’s history as rooted in dispossession and erosion, which is to say “loss”.

After all, a” rubric" denotes “a guide or framework, often associated with structure or evaluation.” So “loss” here isn’t just an event but is the way their history of loss is understood and judged, as though “loss” is the title of their story.

“Synonymous” reinforces this: “loss” is inseparable from that  history—as though woven into it. 

 And there are tangible losses, like land, resources, or lives via imagery of “silt,” “vine,” and “original bones” washed away by the river, evoking dispossession and erosion.

Also intangible losses—culture, identity, or agency—erased or diluted through that history, colonized history to be sure.

Yet there’s explicit juxtaposition, that of loss with building “beautiful homes” and “empires of galvanise and dirt.” So, despite the burden of historical loss, there’s abiding creativity energy of reclamation. Here “galvanise,” which you pooh-poohed, is stirring as it reverberates with material and enspirited resolve.

So the “rubric of loss” encompasses a history of both destructive loss and hope-laden reconstruction. The act of clearing the drain and making “a river flow again” evokes restoring life and meaning amidst ruin.

The speaker’s “English clothes” fuses a detached, inescapable“post-colonial” lens with his cousins’ reclaimant labor, a literal down-to-earth local job of revivification. 

So then “The rubric of our history is synonymous with loss”, as I began, goes to a loss-laden history rooted in what’s been taken, but is also the ground for the hopeful noting of nothing less than survival and creation.

So it’s a good, evocative and moving poem tight in its abiding conceit but expansive in the sweep of its moving resonance, and no less that in its moving last three lines.

———————-

Me:

Sonnet as poetic shell here is poetic “English clothes.”

————-

R:

It has lots of implied meaning but lacks any immediate expressive force I don't want to puzzle out meanings.  

——————

Me:

0 to puzzle out.

Its meanings flow like the river the cousins rehabilitate.

X’S AIZENBERG’S TEN QUESTIONS TO THOSE CLAIMING GENOCIDE IN GAZA…

 Aizenberg on X: 

Only days after October 7, a chorus of so-called “genocide scholars,” NGOs, and activists began hurling the charge of genocide at Israel. In reality, this accusation functions as a deliberate inversion of 10/7 itself. 

Hamas carried out mass killings with openly genocidal intent, yet the charge has been flipped onto Israel to whitewash those crimes and blame their victim. In the months since, the charge has only accelerated, turning into a kind of groupthink repeated through recycled slogans ("Israel is targeting healthcare"), canned storylines ("intentional starvation"), and misrepresented quote snippets ("remember Amalek"). 

These claims are delivered with an air of authority, but they collapse under even basic scrutiny. If Israel truly had a national policy to exterminate the Palestinian people, the evidence would be overwhelming and undeniable. The ten questions that follow cut through that haze. They cannot be answered honestly without exposing the genocide accusation as false, which is precisely why the accusers never confront them directly.

1. If extermination of the Palestinian people is Israel's goal, why hasn’t it happened?

If Israel wanted to kill 100,000 or more Gazans in a single day it easily could, for example by carpet bombing the Al-Mawasi humanitarian area. You claim Israel’s leaders are pursuing a policy of extermination, directed from the highest levels of government and the IDF, against Palestinians solely for their identity. 

Some point to Hamas’s claim of 60,000 deaths as proof, but that only sharpens the question: if extermination of the Palestinian people were truly the goal, why stop at tens of thousands when Israel has the capacity to kill millions in days? 

Why, after 22 months, has no such attack ever been carried out? Do not evade by pointing out that genocide does not require mass killings; address why a state supposedly bent on extermination of the Palestinian people has not taken the obvious steps to achieve it.

2. Why are millions of Palestinians safe under full Israeli control?

Arab-Israelis, about 2 million people, are ethnically the same people as the Palestinians in Gaza and are often called Palestinian citizens of Israel. They live under full Israeli authority, yet not a single one has been exterminated. 

History shows that when genocidal regimes have unimpeded access to the very population they seek to destroy, that population is in immediate and mortal danger. 

Can you cite a single genocide where millions of the supposed victims lived safely under the perpetrator’s rule, even serving in its government and institutions? If Israel is pursuing extermination of the Palestinian people, how do you reconcile this reality?

3. Why are Palestinians in the West Bank untouched?

Three million Palestinians live in the West Bank, the same people as in Gaza. Israel could kill many thousands there in a matter of hours if extermination were truly the policy, but this has not happened in 22 months. 

Why would a state bent on destroying the Palestinian people leave millions unharmed while supposedly carrying out a genocide next door? If extermination of Palestinians as such were the policy, there would be no reason to differentiate by geography or governance. 

And do not fall back on the claim that the West Bank is different because the war is against Hamas, since your own accusation insists that the only reasonable inference from Israel’s actions in Gaza is exterminating Palestinians as such. 

4. How does the legal standard for proving genocidal intent fit here?

The ICJ has held that genocidal intent must be the only reasonable inference from a state’s conduct (Bosnia v. Serbia, para. 373; Croatia v. Serbia, para. 148). Israel’s declared goal has been to destroy Hamas and recover its hostages. 

In pursuit of that goal, IDF soldiers have suffered over 3,000 casualties including 450 killed, evidence of an actual war against an armed adversary. Genocidal regimes do not send soldiers to die in door-to-door combat when they can exterminate entire populations wholesale. 

How, then, can genocide be the only reasonable inference from Israel’s actions in Gaza?

5. How does “intentional starvation” fit the actual food data?

You claim Israel’s extermination policy against Palestinians is also being carried out through deliberate starvation. Yet Israel has allowed over 1.4 million tons of food into Gaza since 10/7, exceeding prewar daily averages and, by standard calorie estimates, sufficient for the population over this period. UN reporting for much of the war shows daily truck entries matching or exceeding prewar levels. 

Do you dispute these figures? 

If so, provide your numbers and methodology, and explain how they square with a state policy to starve Palestinians to death. If your answer is distribution problems inside Gaza, that is not evidence of an intent to withhold food by policy. And if extermination were truly the goal, why allow any food in at all?

6. Where is the famine, where are the starvation deaths?

Even by Hamas’s count, roughly 200 people have died of starvation since 10/7. Without food, most people die within about two months. A sustained famine over this period would have produced deaths in the hundreds of thousands. How do you reconcile that with a claim of a deliberate Israeli starvation policy aimed at extermination? 

If you argue there was severe hunger only recently, you concede there was no famine for the first 20 months while the alleged genocide was supposedly already under way. How is that timeline consistent with an extermination policy by starvation? 

7. Why does the IDF risk soldiers’ lives in door-to-door combat?

Israel has suffered thousands of casualties in Gaza, much of it from close-quarters fighting against snipers, IEDs, and booby traps. If genocide were the goal, why would Israel choose a combat method that exposes its soldiers to high risk instead of avoiding casualties by annihilating everyone from the air? If your claim is that the only reasonable inference is genocidal intent, how do you explain these costly ground operations?

8. Why is the civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio lower than in other recent urban wars?

Hamas claims that about 60,000 Gazans have been killed, while Israel says more than 20,000 were combatants. Even taking Hamas’s figure at face value, the civilian-to-combatant ratio is roughly 2:1. By comparison, reported ratios in U.S. and allied operations in Iraq and Afghanistan were 3:1 to 5:1. If Israel’s intent were the indiscriminate massacre of Palestinians, why are its ratios lower than those of other Western militaries in urban war? 

If you dispute these numbers, provide your own analysis—and then explain whether they resemble recognized patterns of genocide, or the tragic but typical outcomes of modern urban combat.

9. Why are IDF tactics often consistent with avoiding civilian harm?

Israel has repeatedly used tactics such as advance evacuation warnings, and designated humanitarian corridors before strikes, measures that slow operations and provide advance warning to enemy fighters. For example, Israel waited weeks to attack Rafah, allowing for an evacuation. 

Some military experts have called these steps unprecedented in the history of warfare. These measures are not always perfect or effective, but they are unnecessary if the intent were to slaughter the Palestinian people. In known genocides, perpetrators have never taken active steps to limit casualties among the very group they sought to exterminate. How can such actions be explained if Israel’s true objective is genocide? 

10. Why facilitate mass medical care if the goal is extermination?

In February 2025, the WHO, with Israel’s cooperation, completed a mass polio vaccination campaign for over 600,000 Gazan children under age 10, about 95 percent of that age group. This was the third round of vaccinations that began in September 2024. 

Why would a state intent on killing Palestinians for their identity simultaneously help vaccinate nearly all of Gaza’s young children against disease? In recognized genocides, do perpetrators ever devote resources to preserving the lives of the very population they are accused of trying to destroy? How do you explain this contradiction.

Conclusion

These ten questions show that the genocide accusation is not just weak but unsustainable. A charge as serious as genocide requires clear and overwhelming evidence, yet the record is full of contradictions: millions of 

Palestinians remain unharmed under Israeli authority; casualty ratios resemble other modern wars rather than mass extermination; food, medicine, and vaccinations have continued to reach Gaza throughout the conflict; and the supposed statements of "genocidal intent" by Israeli leaders collapse under scrutiny. In reality, the genocide charge is a deliberate inversion of 10/7 itself.

Hamas carried out mass killings with genocidal intent, yet the accusation is flipped onto Israel to whitewash those crimes and recast Israel as the villain. When facts so consistently point away from intentional extermination, persisting in the genocide narrative is no longer scholarship. It is propaganda posing as scholarship.