Regular readers of my blog will know that occasionally I wish to copy here something that’s been written elsewhere, if I feel it’s particularly apposite or well-written. I’ve been a fan of Konstantin Kisin’s articles and podcasts for some time and feel that what follows is one of the best summaries of the Israel/Gaza war that I’ve read, using first-principles thinking, of which I’m a fan. And it happens to coincide with my own views, as they have developed since the first article I wrote about this. I recommend it to you.

You can find Konstantin Kisin’s website at https://substack.com/@konstantinkisin

and his brilliant podcasts with Francis Foster here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/

The anniversary of October 7 is fast approaching and I have been thinking carefully about how to word this article. But first, I must confess that when thousands of Hamas militants crossed Israel’s border to engage in an orgy of mediaeval violence on that day, I knew little about Israel and had no opinion about the long-running conflict.

I have never been to Israel. I have never been to Gaza. I have never been to the West Bank. It is not a conflict I studied at university or read about extensively.
People on both sides who care passionately about this issue find my ignorance and lack of interest hard to believe but, in truth, most people are like me. 

That’s why, for many months after the October 7 attacks, I avoided commenting on the war or even discussing it on our show. Instead, I read, watched and listened to the endless commentary, debates and discussions to understand what people on various sides were saying. Having gathered those perspectives, I then did my best to apply first-principles thinking to the arguments I heard.

Thinking from first principles means stripping whatever you’re trying to analyse down to its core and working back from there. Context is extremely important to understanding, but when it comes to highly emotive situations, people often flood you with emotional context which does not support the argument they are making. There are some obvious examples in this debate, which we will address shortly.

First-principles thinking helps you see the structure of arguments. The logic of an argument is like the skeleton of a body – you cannot see it from the outside, but it is usually the cause of why the body moves the way that it does. Getting to the skeleton of an argument is essential to understanding it. 

This was my approach when we had prominent pro-Palestine guests like Bassem Youssef and Norman Finkelstein on TRIGGERnometry, as well as pro-Israel guests like Ben Shapiro and Natasha Hausdorff. It was also my approach when I hosted a fiery debate on the subject at Dissident Dialogues, and when Saifedean Ammous invited me to discuss this issue on his podcast.

So what does first-principles thinking tell us about this conflict?

The easiest way to understand a complicated problem is to find a comparable situation about which you already know what to think. For example, if we accept that October 7 was a terrorist attack, the obvious approach would be to compare it to other terrorist attacks in recent history. That, as it happens, is impossible because on a proportionate basis, the Western world has never experienced an attack of this scale. 

If we take 9/11, the most impactful terrorist attack in living memory which shook the world’s dominant superpower to its very core, we see that 2,977 people were killed in a country of 285 million people. On October 7, approximately 1,200 people were killed in a country of 9 million. 

People keep calling October 7 Israel’s 9/11, but that isn’t remotely true. If October 7 was Israel’s 9/11, on a per capita basis, only 100 people would have been killed. 

In other words, October 7 was at least 12 times as bad as 9/11. And that’s before accounting for the fact that Hamas took hundreds of hostages, many of whom have been killed since.

So, the obvious question is: 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? Would there still be a Mexico to speak of?

Whatever your view of the history of this conflict, I believe the logic of this is impenetrable. However, there are some persuasive arguments from the anti-Israel camp which are aimed at contextualising October 7:

1) “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. Israel is a settler colonial state.

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. 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. 

3) “Israel is killing civilians”

The scenes of parents pulling their children out of rubble speak for themselves.

4) “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.

These are, to the best of my knowledge, the four principal arguments made by the anti-Israel side. If there are others, please let me know in the comments, and I will address them in a follow-up article. 

Let’s go through them one by one. And, for the sake of argument, let us accept that every point in each argument is valid and historically accurate. 

I know many readers will find this objectionable, but I believe that the best way to unpack this entire discussion is to take people’s arguments as valid and see if they make sense.

The first argument, whose central premise is that Israel is illegitimate, seems to be at the core of every debate. It seems reasonable and logical to many people to contextualise Israel’s response to October 7 in this way. 

After all, if Israel was created through illegitimate means, it puts the 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 one: the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are all the products of invasion, colonisation 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 is 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.

The second argument centres 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 IDF. It was not a “prison breakout” as some like to describe it, because when people break out of a prison they do not head for the nearest town and start massacring women and children. October 7 was, by design and implementation, a terrorist attack whose purpose was to slaughter innocents, terrify Israeli society, and nothing else. That is 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.

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 end 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 be shocking to the Western reader, 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 twelve 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 reasons 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 built to reduce casualties. Instead, they refuse to build bomb shelters and do everything they can to maximise civilian casualties.

This is not my opinion. It’s something Hamas are proud of. A senior spokesman for the group, Sami Abu Zuhri, gave an interview on Palestinian station Al-Aqsa TV the last time this conflict flared up:

“The policy of people confronting the Israeli warplanes with their bare chests in order to protect their homes has proven effective against the occupation… we in Hamas call upon our people to adopt this policy in order to protect the Palestinian homes,” he explained.

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. 

Which brings us to the final argument: Israel’s attacks are indiscriminate and designed to inflict civilian casualties. This is actually the simplest argument to address because it is an empirical matter. The war in Gaza 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 9 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 does not mean that there will not 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 for 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 precisely targeted and surgical large-scale anti-terrorist operation in human history.

In summary, I have engaged with an open mind and in good faith with all the anti-Israel arguments presented to me over the last year. On balance, I regard them as disingenuous, irrelevant, and designed to pull at my heart-strings in order to obscure the hard reality of this conflict: we would respond exactly the way Israel has. The only difference is, we would do so with the support of every member of the UN, while Israel has to fight not only the terrorists who want to wipe them off the map, but Western apologists for those terrorists as well.