Coleman Hughes Special: Israel, Hamas & the Myth of Moral Equivalence

0:28If you love epic stories of myth and legend, listen up. brings myth to life with serious production value, full-scale battles, and a sweeping original orchestral score. At its core, this is a return to classic epic storytelling, where faith, prophecy, and sacrifice truly matter. Stream the Pendragon cycle, Rise of the Merlin, only on Daily Wire Plus. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. Today, I'd like to share a few thoughts about what's happening in Gaza.

1:04This is a difficult topic and there's no way to say anything meaningful about it without offending people. But I think it's important to discuss nonetheless. As I've said on this show and on a few of my Joe Rogan appearances over the past few years, I believe that in the war between Israel and Hamas, the Israelis are the good guys and Hamas are the bad guys. That may seem like a cartoonish way to describe the situation, or it might seem like an obscene opinion given the images of emaciated children that you've probably seen over the past few weeks, but it's still the truth. And it's a truth that's incredibly easy to lose sight of amid the day-to-day coverage of this war.

1:46In my view, the deepest tragedy in the war right now is that both sides have committed war crimes, and in both cases, those war crimes are falling on Palestinian civilians. The truth, of course, is that every war features war crimes, but usually, each army commits those crimes against the enemy's population. In this case, the Palestinians of Gaza have received a double dose of the excesses of each side. But here's the crucial point. That doesn't make both sides morally equal. Let me begin by making something clear. When I say that the Israelis are the good guys in this war, I'm not saying that everything the IDF does is justifiable.

2:34Far from it. And I'm not saying that Israeli soldiers haven't committed war crimes. Certainly they have. What I mean is that Israel's goals as a country are far more benign and ethical than Hamas's goals. Israel's goal is to live in peace with its neighbors. Now, you can focus on the far-right faction within Israel that wants more than that, but it's just that. It's one faction within a democracy, no more representative of the will of Israelis than AOC or Marjorie Taylor Greene represents the will of Americans. By and large, Israelis don't want to conquer Gaza. In fact, they left Gaza voluntarily in 2005, and they don't want to wipe Gaza off the map.

3:17If they wanted that, they could have done it any time in the last several decades. With their advantage and firepower, they could do it now, in a matter of weeks. And you should ask yourself why they don't. Hamas, on the other hand, does want to conquer Israel and wipe it off the map. and they would be happy to do what they did on October 7th to the entire country. That's what I mean when I say that the two sides in this war are not the same. There is a huge moral asymmetry between them and that matters. The point I'm making here is right on the surface of how we look at most wars in history. It's possible to agree with the goals of an army, but condemn its methods.

4:06In fact, it's not just possible, it's actually most people's default view of most wars, including just wars. Many people take that attitude towards dropping atomic bombs on Japan, for instance. Or when you learn about the Union Army burning down 40 % of Atlanta, including civilian homes during the Civil War, most of us respond by thinking, wow, that was terrible, and some of it must have been unnecessary, but the North was still the good guy in that war. Why were they the good guys? Not because they were the underdogs, in fact, they weren't. Not because they suffered more war crimes, in fact, the South almost certainly suffered more war crimes, but because their goals were more benign.

4:51The South was fighting to preserve slavery, and the North was fighting to end it, if not at the beginning of the war, then certainly by the end. In other words, the goals that each side is fighting for matter a great deal. That's not to say that goals are the only things that matter. How armies conduct themselves matters too. And it's very easy to find examples of IDF soldiers conducting themselves terribly. Each example of this should be reported on and exposed, and those responsible held to account. However, it's also true that this is to be expected in any war. If 1 % of all human beings are sociopaths, and just humor me with that assumption for a moment, if 1 % of all people are sociopaths, then out of 500 ,000 or so Israeli soldiers that have served in Gaza, you'd expect 5 ,000 of them to be maniacs.

5:48And that would be true in any war. How much damage could 5 ,000 heartless soldiers do over the course of a year and a half? How many war crimes could they commit against innocent Palestinians? And how much bad PR could they generate for Israel? Yet that's what we'd expect to see even if the IDF were doing everything right. right. But is the IDF doing everything right? Absolutely not. For one thing, the choice to cut off all humanitarian aid to Gaza for over two months earlier this year in order to pressure Hamas to release the hostages was, in my view, a mistake and arguably a war crime. Hamas has stolen enough aid to survive in its tunnels for a prolonged period, we know that, and they're completely unaffected by the suffering of their own people, we know that too.

6:37You can add to this the failed experiment in aid distribution that's been going on since May. IDF soldiers using live rounds for crowd control, which is to say shooting above people's heads to disperse crowds. But there are also credible reports of soldiers shooting civilians who are trying to get food and accidentally go into a prohibited zone. Now some of these are tragic accidents and some are doubtless war crimes. But again, it's worth lingering over the asymmetry of war crimes even here. When an IDF soldier goes berserk, he commits a war crime. But every time a Hamas fighter shoots a bullet without wearing a uniform, it's a war crime.

7:24Hamas's entire MO is one big war crime. And unlike most wars, where each side is committing crimes against enemy civilians, In this case, almost all of the excesses, both of the IDF and of Hamas, fall on Palestinian civilians. But whose fault is that? Is it Israel's fault that its own civilians are incredibly well protected by defensive infrastructure like the Iron Dome and bomb shelters? Is it Israel's fault that Hamas has built one of the most extensive networks of underground bomb shelters in the history of warfare, but doesn't allow its own civilians to enter them? Is it Israel's fault that Hamas uses children as lookouts, thereby turning them into combatants under the international laws of war?

8:14because when we hold Israel alone responsible for the civilian death toll in Gaza, a death toll that results directly from Hamas's barbaric style of warfare, we are implicitly holding Israel responsible for Hamas's war crimes against the Palestinians. Now, it's incredibly easy to lose sight of this given the mainstream media bias on the topic. For instance, the New York Times released a story on July 24th entitled, Gazans Are Dying of Starvation. The article relied on testimony from several doctors working in Gaza, as well as the Gaza Health Ministry, and it used that to build a case that deaths from starvation are on the rise.

8:56In the article, there was one photo that stood out. It was a photo of a mother holding an emaciated skeletal infant named Mohamed Zakaria al-Mutawak. This photo was displayed prominently on the front page of the physical edition of the New York Times, and made the rounds on social media. You almost certainly saw it. And importantly, it was the only photo in the article that clearly suggested starvation as opposed to chaotic, hungry refugees. It wasn't long before Sleuths on X discovered that there was another photo, which the Times chose to omit, of the boy and his mother next to his three-year-old brother, who clearly isn't starving.

9:38So if there's no food, why is the three-year-old not also thin? It turns out this young boy didn't look emaciated because of starvation conditions. In fact, he was born with serious disease. Perhaps cerebral palsy or hypoxia, it's not yet clear. But six days after the article came out, the New York Times had to issue a correction, noting that the boy was born with unrelated health issues that account for his skeletal appearance. Now, if such crucial information could be left out of the original article, what other information was left out? Now, let me be clear here. I'm not saying there isn't hunger or food insecurity or humanitarian disaster in Gaza.

10:21Of course there is. What I'm saying is that the pipeline that's feeding you information about the humanitarian disaster in Gaza is fundamentally broken, biased, untrustworthy, and weaponized against Israel. Now think about what had to happen for the New York Times to publish that photo on its front page without the information that this particular child was born with serious disease. Journalists had to talk to the child's mother and doctor, who presumably withheld this crucial detail, and the claims had to survive fact-checking without anyone at the Times pointing out how strange it was to see one child emaciated and his brother right next to him looking fine.

11:06And then after the Twitter sleuths got to the story, they had to call this doctor again and ask him, hey, did you by chance leave out the fact that this particular baby looks the way he does because he has a disease unrelated to this war? And then you have to wonder, because the entire story is based on the testimony of similarly placed doctors, how many of the doctors in Gaza, who are generally not neutral about the two sides in this war, how many of those doctors who talk to Western journalists are making similar omissions? And if they are, how would we even know? As for the Gaza Health Ministry, which is a part of Hamas's political infrastructure, it's very difficult to trust their reports as well.

11:52On one level, they're the only real source of information about what's happening in Gaza, so you can't just discount them blindly. But nor can you trust them blindly. Recall that when there was an explosion at a hospital early on in the war, The same Gaza Health Ministry reported within minutes that exactly 471 people had been killed by an Israeli bomb that hit the hospital. And the New York Times reported this uncritically. Well, it turns out the true death count was less than half that number. The hospital itself wasn't even hit. It was the parking lot next to the hospital. And oh yeah, it wasn't an Israeli bomb.

12:30It was actually a Palestinian jihad rocket. So one has to be skeptical about how the Gaza Health Ministry arrives at its confident conclusions, and one has to understand that their incentive is to exaggerate as much as they can get away with. And the less skeptical that we are as Western journalists, the more they can exaggerate without penalty. Again, the information pipeline here is just fundamentally broken. it. Finally, I want to discuss the charge of genocide, because this is one of the most serious charges made against Israel. It's also, in my view, one of the most absurd. Genocide is the physical destruction, not the metaphorical destruction, not the destruction of property, but the physical destruction of a people in whole or in part.

13:24Israel's aim in Gaza is not to destroy the Palestinian people as a whole, nor to destroy Gazan Palestinians in particular. How do we know this? Because even if we accept the Gaza Health Ministries numbers at face value, that is 60 ,000 people killed in Gaza in about 22 months of war, that is 3 % of Gaza's population. You could argue that it's more than 60 ,000 dead because there are uncounted bodies tragically trapped under the rubble. But on the other hand, you'd have to subtract the combatants from that number as well, and the IDF says that about 20 ,000 combatants have been killed. To be clear, my default assumption is that both sides in any war are exaggerating their numbers.

14:10But for the sake of argument and fairness, let's just take both sides at their word for a moment. So 60 ,000 dead, 20 ,000 of whom our combatants. That's about 3 % of Gaza's pre-war population killed in 22 months of war. Now, critics of Israel are fond of pointing out just how big the power disparity between Israel and the Palestinians is. And they are completely correct. Israel can do just about anything it wants. If the IDF chose to destroy Gazans as a people, they could kill almost everyone in Gaza in a matter of weeks. So ask yourself, why haven't they? And if your answer is international pressure, meaning they really would like to commit a genocide except they don't want to become a pariah state like North Korea, well then you've already conceded that they're not in fact committing a genocide.

15:08What you're accusing them of in that case is harboring secret wishes that they're not acting on. So we can have that conversation, but that's separate from an accusation of genocide. The Nazis killed 60 % of European Jews. The Turks killed over 50 % of Armenians. In Rwanda, something like 80 % of Tutsis were killed in 100 days. Those were genocides. And in legitimate cases of genocide in which a smaller percentage of people were killed, it was because the Genesider didn't have the ability to kill more. Now, we know that Israel could easily kill 50 % or 60 % or 80 % of Gazans in less than 100 days, if they wanted to, but they don't.

15:56And that's really all you need to know to be sure that Israel isn't committing genocide. The focus on what an Israeli defense minister said in his angriest moment after October 7th, or some truly awful comment made about Palestinians by a far-right minister, this focus is understandable, but it's actually misplaced. The reason we focus on what politicians say is to divine their intentions from unclear information, right? We're trying to understand what they would do if they had the power to do it. But in the case of Israel and Gaza, we don't have to divine their intentions because they're so powerful they can already do whatever they want.

16:41Now that said, if you do want to get into the weeds about what Israeli decision makers have actually said, as opposed to what propagandists claim that they've said, then you should read the Atlantic article by Yair Rosenberg called, What Did Top Israeli War Officials Really Say About Gaza? For instance, one of the most frequently circulated quotes, including in the New York Times, the BBC, the NPR, and the Guardian, was literally fabricated. It was a fake quote. And many others were deliberately taken out of context. So check out that article if you want more. But again, all of this is a little bit beside the point because the IDF is so powerful that the best indication of what Israeli decision makers are trying to do in Gaza isn't a cherry-picked quote by a minister.

17:32The best indication is what they're actually doing. And what they're actually doing is trying to destroy Hamas, an organization that started a war against them and is fanatically committed to their destruction. So there's more I could talk about, but in the interest of brevity, I'll leave it here. Whether or not you agree with everything I've said, hopefully you find something I've said useful. See you next time on Conversations with Coleman.