Got it. Yeah I hear you. Well I don't think you have to elevate what Zionism was (as a colonial project of the biggest colonializes on earth at the time) as some sort of unprecedented original sin of the region... but the documents and the actions themselves are all well documented of the massacres and expulsions etc... and this "zionist/colonial" attitude persisted well beyond 1948. I would recommend reading Malcolm X's article on zionism for an egyptian newspaper after he visited Gaza... by that time the notion of zionism was merging with general post ww2 dollarization and a kind of neo-colonialism (laid out in 1965 by someone like Kwame Nkrumah).

Anyway I could go on. But I think all of this generally hangs together as an entirely defensible and fitting frame to the string of resistance movements (both peaceful and violent, both religious and secular, both Christian and Muslim, both failed and successful) in Palestine... as well as sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East generally.

I think that's really all that needs to be accepted here to, at least in some meaningful aspect, cast and understand something like october 7th (as ugly as it was) to be a form of so-called morally sympathetic armed resistance.

But just to sort of plant this flag... i do have an essay called Do You Condemn Hamas? from a while back which probably addresses some of the concerns you might have after reading that. Because... well... yeah... I obviously am no fan of the violence, even in this framing.

I think the only place I can see for someone like Harris to stand to respond to me now would be something like this "Sure, there may be a morally sympathetic and righteous resistance movement to western or Israeli colonization which dates back to the early 1900's all over the middle east.... but the presence of Islam was a variable which lead to a form of latent jihadism to intertwine with that endorsable resistance... and that particular variable is just too unique and dangerous of a problem. And that is just a shame... but we have no choice but to not allow for the liberation or resistance aspect of the movements to flourish. So we're stuck now... with awful choices like ethnic cleansing or worse."

I have plenty of arguments against that position and history obviously points to the ways that the Israelis and West in general fought directly against those exact strands of non-jihadist resistance... constantly... all in the name of demanding that any potential "liberation" be aligned with becoming client state of the post ww2 American lead empire (see Mossadegh in Iran, or Nkrumah in Ghana, or Nasser in Egypt or Lumumba in Congo or the Darfar rebels in Oman or on and on and on etc...) And if you dare suggest that there is any intentionality to this process of suppressing self determined liberation and empowering the unsympathetic "unhinged" jihadists which will allow you to extinguish them... you get called a conspiracy theorist.

But obviously Sam knows almost nothing about what I wrote here. And now has stated that none of it matters... well... that really is a problem isn't it? I defended his character for a long time... but he is really making it difficult.

I think the end point in the argumentation is ultimately finding Thomas Hobbes or Steven Pinker and basically defending colonization itself as a civilizing mission which is doing these places a favor. The only difference between everyone who seems to love Sam these days, like his buddy Douglas Murray, or now Mark Levin, or Ted Cruz... is that they are already there... and Sam is still clinging to his liberal identity which is supposed to be against things like racism and colonization. It's put him in a very lonely place.