Tag Archives: Yuval Harari

Guest Article: Why Hamas Will Lose

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By

Colonel (res.) Dr. Moshe Ben David*

Professor Yuval Harari, who teaches modern history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has turned himself into one of the leading intellectuals of the Western world. His books, particularly Homo Deus, deal with important turning points in human history as well as our ability to survive into the future. In no small part thanks in part to President Obama’s endorsement, they reached the stop of the best-sellers list. As requests for articles and interviews came pouring in, they also made the author famous. True, many of his best known prophecies have neither materialized nor look as if they are going to be materialized. Instead of making progress towards a better, more peaceful and better off, world what we see is Covid-17, starvation in the Sudan, and war both in Europe and the Middle East; not to mention terrorism over much of the world. None of this has caused Harari to lose confidence in himself and his ability to look into the future. In particular, in an article just published on Israel’s most important news website as well as a CNN-interview with Christiane Amanpour, he discussed the future of Israel’s war against Hamas. Israel, so Harari, has no chance of winning the war. Why? Because, to do so, the government in Jerusalem would have to lay down clear objectives, something which, so far, it has been unable to do. Israel, he went on to say, needs a new government. One that would drop its “preposterous Biblical fantasies” concerning a complete victory and prepare for some kind of compromise. He ends by saying that Israel and Hamas have reached an impasse. Even in case the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) succeed in defeating Hamas and disarming it, the real outcome will be a defeat for Israel. The only way to prevent such a situation is compromise, negotiation and peace.

I’d like to use, as my opening shot, the work of the widely respected American political scientist Bernard Brodie (1910-78). To be viable, so Brodie, a military-political plan must take into account objectives and means; including, among the latter, the balance of armed force and society’s willingness to sacrifice some of its young men in the process of attaining them. Seen in this light, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s statement, on the first day of the war, that Israel’s objective is “the complete destruction of Hamas”—the organization which, on 7 October 2023, subjected Israel to a surprise attack and inflicted some 1,000 casualties in a single day—appears both reasonable and attainable. Reasonable, because it reminds one of the Allies’ highly successful “unconditional surrender” during World War II, a formula that proved highly successful. Attainable, because of the military balance in Gaza. Clearly, in case Israel fails to achieve Netanyahu’s stated objective it will have to change its policy. That is what the cabinet is for.

Here it is worth adding that there exists a fundamental difference between the attacker and the attacked. The former, in this case Hamas, can adopt any objectives he wants. The latter, in this case Israel, faces a simple choice: either fight or surrender. Supposing he decides to fight, his only objective can be to defeat the enemy. Everything else comes later and must necessarily depend on events on the battlefield—meaning that the relationship between objectives and means must remain flexible and cannot be nearly as rigid as Harari imagines. Indeed the whole idea of laying down the political objectives ahead of events on the battlefield, which is what he seems to say, is, to use a term I have used before in this article, preposterous.

Second, his claim that, to win the war or at any rate not to lose it, Israel must have a new government. One that will rid itself of all kind of all kinds of illusions concerning total victory and prepared for some kind of compromise. In this context it seems that Harari is unaware of the fact that, right from the beginning of the war, the IDF has been following the government’s guidance step by step. Not a single encounter with the IDF that did not end with Hamas being defeated, either by having its troops killed, wounded or captured or when those troops evacuated their positions, leaving its enemy in control or the battlefield. One does not change a winning horse in the midst of a race; doing so can only strengthen Hamas in its decision to fight on. Besides, what does Harari think a change of government could achieve? Suppose the Israel decides to change its objective as laid down by Netanyahu and aim at replacing Hamas’s rule in Gaza by one run by the (Palestinian Authority) in Ramallah; does anyone really believe that Hamas will tamely sit down and agree? Halil Shkaki, the Palestinian’s Authority’s number one expert on polls and polling, says that 73 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank support Hamas and are in favor of the atrocities it has committed. Furthermore, the Authority spends 1.3 billion shekel, or 7 percent of its annual budget, assisting the relatives of Palestinian casualties who died while fighting Israel. This on top of symbolic gestures such as naming streets and squares after them, praising them in the schoolbooks it makes children study, and the like. Ending the war with a compromise, such as Harari suggests, will only enable Hamas to take over the West Bank in addition to Gaza, putting Israel’s heartland within easy reach of some of the heavy weapons it already has.

Harari’s third claim, namely that Israel and Hamas have reached an impasses that can only end in an Israeli defeat, is also wrong. Soon after the successful massacre they committed on 7 October Hamas’ leaders announced they were expecting to follow up with additional measures of the same kind. Unfortunately for them but fortunately for Israel, so far it does not appear as if they are able to realize that threat. Here is another, and much more likely scenario: following its successes so far, and after a due period of rest and reconstruction, the IDF will enter the city of Raffia in the southern part of the Strip and do away with the residuals of Hamas’ organized units on land, in the air, at sea, and underground. The oft-heard comparisons with the IDF in Lebanon as well as the American adventures in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq are, in reality, irrelevant. Why? Because the Gaza Strip only comprises 1.42 square miles, equal to 0.00083 percent of Iraqi territory, 0.00055 percent of Afghan territory, 0.0011 percent of Vietnamese territory, and 0.034 percent of Lebanese territory. Once Raffia is dealt with, all Israel will need to defeat what remains of Hamas and completely dominate the country is three brigades.

Dominating the Strip on all sides will also isolate it from the external world and make it much harder to smuggle in the kind of arms, money, and logistic support terrorists and guerrillas require. In this context it is important to keep in mind the fact that Gaza’s population is not homogeneous. About one third, consisting of natives (as opposed to those who left Israel at one point or another), supports the PA and would like few things better than settling accounts with Hamas which has been maltreating them ever since the Israelis withdrew almost two decades ago.

To sum up, it stands to reason that, even after it completes its occupation of the Strip, the IDF will have to carry out sporadic anti-terrorist operations. In doing so it will be able to draw on half a century’s experience not only in the Strip but in the West Bank as well. Ending terrorism will not be easy and will take time. However, given the various types of specialist forces the IDF deploys as well the various innovative techniques it has devised, many of which are the envy of foreign farmed forces and are widely imitated, there is no reason why the struggle will not lead to a successful end. Finally a word about the “preposterous Biblical fantasies” that, says Harari, are dreamt up by all kinds of Israeli extremists, including not a few in the government itself.  Nietzsche in his Untimely Meditations says that those who condemn the past endanger both themselves and others. This is because we are all products of the past, complete with all its problems, passions, errors and even crimes. That again is why, for both individual and nations, to deny their past is tantamount to shooting oneself. This is true of Harari himself; but it is even more true of countless others the world over who think as he does.

Col. (res) Dr. Moshe Ben David, is a retired IDF infantry officer with much experience in counterinsurgency. He is also a former vice president of Amadox Inc.

Big Questions

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Skimming my way through Amazon.com, as I often do either in search of interesting books to read or simply to pass the time, I came across the following description of my former student, best-selling author/historian Yuval Harari. Here is what it said:

Born in Haifa, Israel, in 1976, Harari received his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2002, and is currently a lecturer at the Department of History, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He originally specialized in world history, medieval history and military history, and his current research focuses on macro-historical questions such as: What is the relationship between history and biology? What is the essential difference between Homo sapiens and other animals? Is there justice in history? Does history have a direction? Did people become happier as history unfolded? What ethical questions do science and technology raise in the 21st century?

I cannot claim to have researched these questions in any depth. Let alone sold books by the million as Harari did and does. As so often, though, I considered the questions interesting. Sufficiently so to try and provide my readers, and myself, with some off the cuff answers. The more so because, as a historian, in one way or another I’ve been thinking about them throughout my life. As, indeed, most people, though not historians, have probably done at some point or another.

Off the cuff my answers may indeed be. Still, if anyone has better ones I’d be very happy to see them. Not wishing to have my thoughts censored, not even by Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, I refuse to join the so-called social media. But my email is mvc.dvc@gmail.com.

A. What is the relationship between history and biology?

Q. There is no question but that many of our most basic qualities are biologically determined. Including the need to eat, drink, rest, sleep, and have sex; but for them, we could not exist. Including the quest, if not for happiness, which is both a modern idea and hard to define, then at any rate for avoiding pain and sorrow and having “a good time.” Including the desire for security, recognition and dominance. Including the desire to do what we consider good and right (this desire even Adolf Hitler, talking to a small and intimate circle, claimed to feel). Including the need to “make sense” of the world around us. And the desire for sex, of course.

The number of humans who have ever lived on this earth is estimated at 90-110 billion, of whom almost one tenth are alive today. With very few and very partial exceptions, all have experienced these needs and these desires. To this extent biology and history, meaning cultural change, are independent of each other.

But history, meaning social and cultural change, does affect the way these needs and these desires are experienced and expressed by people belonging to different cultures at different times. An ancient Chinese living, say, 3,000 years ago would instantly understand both what food is and why we stand in need of it. What he would not understand is why we in our modern Western society consider some foods (e.g seafood) fit for consumption and others (e.g. insects) not.

A. What is the essential difference between homo sapiens and other animals?

Q. Historically speaking, the answers to this question have varied very much. For the authors of the Old Testament, later followed by any number of adherents to the other two so-called Abrahamic Religions, it consisted of our belief in God as well as the ability to distinguish between good and evil; whoever could or would not do these things was considered in- or subhuman and deserved to be treated as such. For Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes and the thinkers of the Enlightenment it was our ability to use reason in order to both understand the world and achieve the goals we have set for ourselves. For Rabelais it was our ability to laugh; for Marx, our ability to create and sustain ourselves by means of work; for Nietzsche, out concern with beauty and with art in general; and for Johan Huizinga, our willingness to engage in play both for fun and on the way to exploring the world and creating something new.

This organ has the ability to make love and satisfy your partner. viagra generika 50mg How Fast usa cialis Does Kamagra Work Normally, Kamagra is effective with an hour of its consumption. Thus, the man is guaranteed strong erection until generic levitra professional the medication ingredients are present in the system. Because ultimately if you can sort it out cialis online discount http://greyandgrey.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Court-of-Appeals-Ruling-in-Shutter-NYLJ-1997.pdf don’t you think the direct consequence could be that you will get bigger and longer lasting erection. Each of these views have been elaborated in mountains of publications of every kind. Each one has also been questioned at some length. Never more so than over the last two decades or so. The primatologist Frans de Waal, widely acknowledged as the world’s greatest expert on bonobos, in his 2013 book The Bonobo and the Atheist even went so far as to argue that the members of this species show something like religiosity, however rudimentary it might be.

A. Is there justice in history?

Q. Without going into detail as to what justice may mean, let me say that I doubt it very much. However, this question reminds me of a story I once heard about Israel’s former Prime Minister, Menahem Begin (served, 1977-1983). This was not long after he had concluded a peace agreement with Egypt and, by way of recognition, received the Nobel Peace Prize.

The story, which was told by an ideological rival of his, went as follows. Back in the summer of 1939, just weeks before the outbreak of World War II, twenty-five year old Begin was in Warsaw attending a meeting of Betar, a right-wing and rather belligerent Jewish movement of which, in Poland, he was the chief. Doing so he got into an argument with his mentor Zeev Jabotinsky, the equally right-wing leader and ideologist of Betar, world-wide. Then and later Begin was a fiery orator who tended to be swept away by his own words. On this occasion he spoke about might governing the world, called on Jews to use might and even violence in order to counter it, etc., etc. Whereupon Jabotinsky took the floor and said, “The world is run by judges, not robbers. And if you, Mr. Begin, do not believe that is true, then go and drown yourself in the Vistula.”

To repeat, whether there is justice in history I do not know. However, I do know one thing: but for the belief that there is such justice we might indeed drown ourselves in the nearest river.

A. Did people become happier as history unfolded?

Q. Some people today, including Harari himself in at least one of his books, have argued that, far from people becoming happier as history unfolds, they have become less so. As by having to work harder, being subject to greater stress, losing the intimacy that only members of small societies can experience, watching the world around us being polluted and nature destroyed, etc. This is a modern version of the Pandora story; except that, instead of Pandora (literally, “all blessings”), people speak of civilization.

To me, much of this seems to be based on nothing but nostalgia. More to the point, there is no way this question can be answered with any degree of certainty. Public opinion surveys aimed at doing so only started being held over the last few decades, and even they are hardly reliable. So I’ll skip.

A. What ethical questions do science and technology raise in the 21st century?

Q. I doubt whether science and technology raise any new ethical questions at all. To mention a few only, people have always confronted the question how evil—however defined–should be dealt with. They have always been forced to deal with the gap between the desires of the individual and the dictates of society. They have always been forced to decide what, from an ethical point of view, means should or should not be used to attain what ends. They have always done their best to influence the minds of others by whatever means at their disposal. And they always had to decide whether, and at what point, the deformed, the handicapped, the sick, and the old should (or should not) be killed or left to die.

In the words of Ecclesiastics, nothing new under the sun.

Just Published! Seeing into the Future

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From the introduction:

“The idea of doing this book was born somewhere in mid-2017. Its parent was Homo Deus, the second of three volumes written by my former student, the famous Yuval Noah Harari. As I went along, a single thought kept entering my mind: how can he, as well as many others who have engaged on a similar endeavor, know what the future will bring? How about Ray Kurzweil, Stephen Hawking, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne? And how about Nostradamus, Hildegard of Bingen, the Roman augurs, the Greek Pythia, the Hebrew prophets, the ‘Chaldean’ astrologers? What were their underlying assumptions, what kind of reasoning did they apply, and what methods did they use? The more I thought about these questions, the more difficult they appeared. If I dared tackle them, then this was precisely because I saw them as a terrific challenge.

The medicine causes the penile system to respond since consumption and act discount cialis generic as a quick component to the activity. Thirdly, driving license is something that a tantric massage can assist with. viagra uk sales It may also be associated with other lifestyle risk factors like smoking, online viagra order obesity, high blood pressure * Already taking medicine for erectile dysfunction Erectile dysfunction or Impotence is a common condition affecting millions of young and old men alike. You may try herbal remedies to cure the wrong practice online viagra on sale here of over masturbation. The role that the willingness and ability to look into the future plays in human life, both individual and collective, can hardly be exaggerated. Call it anticipation, call it vision, call it foresight, call it prediction or call it forecasting: without it, human life as we know it is utterly impossible. Goals cannot be established, nor efforts towards realizing them launched; nor the consequences of reaching, or not reaching, those goals be considered. Neither can threats and dangers be identified and either be met head on or avoided. All this is as true today as it was when we first became human. Presumably it will remain true as long as human we remain. Briefly, but for foresight and the attempt to exercise it, much – perhaps most – of what we understand as thought would be impossible. ‘Blind we walk, till the unseen flame has trapped our footsteps,’ said the chorus in Sophocles’ Antigone.

Some philosophers and scientists go further still. To them the ability to anticipate the future, meaning something that does not yet exist, and to act accordingly does not belong to us humans alone. Instead they see it as an essential, perhaps the essential, characteristic of that mysterious and hard-to-define phenomenon, “life.” After all, ours is the age of so-called posthumanism. And one key pillar of posthumanism is a renewed emphasis on our evolutionary ancestors and the things we have in common with them; this specifically includes the belief that our brains are nothing more than ‘linearly scaled-up’ versions of primate ones, which in turn are nothing more than “linearly scaled-up” versions of vertebrate ones. And so on and on, all the way back to the “protoplasmal primordial atomic globules” of Gilbert and Sullivan fame. As a result, all sorts of qualities that until recently used to be considered exclusively human are now seen as being shared, at least to some extent, by many other animals as well. So with empathy, so with altruism, so with reason. And so, surprising as it may sound, with morality and what many believe to be morality’s origin, religious feeling. Some vague form of the last-named, the greatest living expert on bonobos has been telling us, can be found among those animals.”

Want to know more? Get the book.

Back to Eden?

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evolveMy friend and former student Yuval Harari, I am proud to say, needs no introduction from me. His book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind has sold more copies than any other non-fiction work in the entire history of Israel. It occasioned a special exhibition—not a very good one, incidentally—at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. It has also been translated into thirty different languages, becoming a best-seller in many of them. That is why I want to discuss it here.

Harari is not alone. Sapiens is one of several similar volumes that have done well in the last decade or so. Some were written by historians, others not. Regardless, all belong to the genre known as “big” history. Meaning that the authors do not pay attention to trivia such as individual people, places, dates, and events. At least one considers himself equal to Newton. So great are his intellectual powers that he is able to span, not to say scan, tens of thousands, millions, sometimes even billions of years.

All also have this in common that they try to place the history of man—talking it for granted that the term covers women too, I am sufficiently old fashioned to use it—within a wider context. One that consists of paleontology, biology, chemistry, physics, cosmology and what not. Had doing so been possible, surely they would have gone back not only to the big bang, as some of them actually do, but beyond it too.

Another thing they have in common is the idea that our species has been going steadily downhill. In this they differ from previous efforts such as Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1973). Once upon a time, so the new story goes, we humans—there were very few of us then—were in Eden. We lived in small bands of 30-40 people all of whom were related by blood or marriage. The bands wandered around in unspoiled nature, gathering food and hunting such small animals as came their way. Evenings were spent relaxing, telling stories around the campfire, and making love. From time to time they joined some other bands similar to themselves. On those occasions they would have a big feast with much singing, dancing, and worshipping their necessarily primitive gods. Food was shared, marriages were concluded, and some simple presents exchanged.

All the individuals who made up each group were more or less equal. There was no accumulation of property and no government to oppress people and extract resources from them against their will. Cain had not yet killed Abel, so that violence and war were unknown. Men, those cruel, heartless beings who are always intent on one thing only, did not lord it over poor, defenseless women. How women can be both poor and defenseless and lay claim to important positions in society, incidentally, has always been a mystery to me. There was no work to be done, no deadlines to be met, no stress. No traffic jams. No pollution and no unwholesome food (all food was “natural”).

Right? Dead wrong. Food may indeed have been “natural.” Whatever that may mean; did anyone ever see food that was un- or supernatural? However, since it could not be preserved for very long its quality was often dubious and its supply always uncertain. The outcome were alternating periods of boom and bust that could decimate entire populations and even finish them off. If there was no pollution, then only because the energy at people’s disposal consisted almost exclusively of what their own muscles could produce. What that meant was nicely illustrated the other day when a French student hooked a toaster to a pedal-operated dynamo. Only to discover that, in the entire world, there are perhaps two or three people sufficiently fit to produce enough power to toast a single slice of bread. Having succeeded in doing so, more or less, they were far too exhausted to even try toasting another.

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Far from leading a relaxed life our ancestors, spreading out from Africa, had to cope with many kinds of wild animals. Quite a few of which were both very dangerous and much stronger than themselves. To say nothing of enduring the weather in what makeshift shelters they were able to dig or erect; how many of you readers would really want to live in a cave or some kind of shed? As far back as we can look, even the simplest, most backward, societies have always been run predominantly by men, not women. Violence and war, far from being unknown, were endemic. If you have any doubt about that, I suggest you read Napoleone Chagnon’s The Fierce People.

Government, in the sense that some individuals had priority over others and were entitled to consume resources they did not produce, has always existed. As is clear from the fact that, even among chimps, alpha males regularly take what they need from their weaker neighbors, both male and female. Equality only existed to the extent that it did not interfere with the pecking order, i.e. hardly at all. And the pecking order itself was absolutely essential to prevent every minor conflict from degenerating into violence. People also suffered from a permanent shortage of animal protein. Indeed the fact that it was men, not women, who hunted was one reason why the former were able to dominate the latter.

If there was no overpopulation, then one very important reason for this was that a great many infants died soon after they were born. So did a great many newly-delivered women; by the best available figures, so-called perinatal death was perhaps two hundred times as prevalent then as it is in today’s most advanced societies. Only fifty percent or so of infants ever reached adulthood. As a result, life expectancy at birth was probably not much more than thirty years. Person of fifty was considered very old and looked and acted the part. For lack of proper care people’s teeth fell out at an early age. Festering wounds and infectious diseases, which today can easily be cured by means of antibiotics, could and did kill people of all ages. For anatomical reasons that I do not have to explain, many of these problems affected women more than they did men. With the result that, in marked contrast to the situation as it has developed over the last two centuries, the latter tended to outlive the former by a considerable margin.

Life, to quote Thomas Hobbes, was nasty, brutish, and short. Or why else were all those nefarious inventions Harari and others tell us about made? But suppose the story they tell were true. If so, what would it take to take mankind back to Eden? The answer is simple. It has been calculated that, had we still been hunters and gatherers as we used to be until about twelve thousand years ago, the earth could only have supported about eight million of us. In other words, out of every thousand people alive today nine-hundred-ninety-nine would have to die.

And that I respectfully submit to Harari, his fellow authors and their countless followers, is too high a price to pay for returning to Eden. The more so because, in all probability, it has never existed.