Given the ever more obvious case that genocide is going on in Gaza, I had been thinking that Scott Aaronson’s going quiet on the issue meant that he was starting to realize that this had become indefensible. Turns out I was very wrong.
In his latest blog posting, he explains that the current situation in Gaza is analogous to an evil murderer kidnapping your child and strapping her to train tracks before an oncoming train. If you pull a lever to divert the train it will instead kill five of the murderer’s children. This situation provides for him a definition of Zionism:
Zionism, to define it in one sentence, is the proposition that, in the situation described, you have not merely a right but a moral obligation to pull the lever—and that you can do so with your middle finger raised high to the hateful mob…
Zionism, so defined, is the deepest moral belief that I have.
Scott formulates this as an abstract moral dilemma, but of course it’s about the very concrete question of what the state of Israel should do about the two million people in Gaza. Scott’s answer to this is clear: they want to kill us and our children, so we have to kill them all, children included. This is completely crazy, as is defining Zionism as this sort of genocidal madness.
Update: More from Scott, it seems that those opposed to what Israel is doing in Gaza are “brain-eaten zombies”. He’s also convinced that the zombie problem is mainly academics in the humanities. I hear that there’s a statement about what is going on in Gaza signed by thousands of prominent scientists that will soon be made public. A lot of very prominent brain-eaten zombie scientists out there, it seems.
Of course he’s still not allowing comments on his blog. For other discussion of his blogposts, see here and here.
Update: I’ve deleted quite a few comments from people who wanted to tell me that there was no genocide going on in Gaza (and if there was, it was the faulty of the Palestinians). Yesterday the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution (by an 86% majority vote) characterizing the Israeli actions in Gaza as genocide.
Update: More from Scott about how victimized he is, especially by some troll (see here) sending him an anti-semitic graphic that he then put up on his website as “woitwordview”. He seems to agree with me that he is “psychologically troubled”, but sees the fact that almost everyone is telling him this as indicating that “all the moral progress of humanity depends on psychologically troubled people” like himself.
For some idea of what is going on here as classes start, take a look here, here, here and here.
Just saw this from the university. Trying to figure out what it’s about, it seems that a couple students walked through campus holding a sign saying “some of your classmates were IOF criminals committing genocide in Palestine”.
I’ve recently decided that, in order not to become as psychologically troubled as Scott, I need to get out of here and detox for a while. Leaving for a week-long trip to Paris tomorrow, now shutting down comments here. Will try to spend more time thinking about Wick rotation, and less about Columbia and things like whether someone in the IDF read Scott’s “Deep Zionism” post and decided to do this, or the slaughter going on in Gaza that we’re not supposed to say anything about.
While I have no interest in talking to Peter ever again, let me say for the benefit of others here: his intellectual dishonesty is extraordinary. He erases the agency of the murderer himself, who at any time gets to save his own children as well as your child by simply stopping the train: that is, by not murdering. He demands an approach that would’ve meant immediate Allied surrender in WWII, since the alternative would surely kill German and Japanese children. He ignores the context of your family, in the thought experiment, having been murdered over and over to the crowd’s acquiescence or approval: if I were to use his own standards of argument, I’d say that struck him as perfectly fine and normal. Worst, he imputes to me an insane desire to kill “all” Gazans, rather than — as I’ve been clear over and over — the absolute minimum number needed to liberate both the Gazan and the Israeli peoples from the death grip of Hamas. If Jewish and Israeli STEM students should still go to Columbia at all, the reason should be that Peter’s attitude toward the prospect of their murder is an outlier among the STEM faculty there.
I hope Scott gets help, he is clearly insane.
Scott,
Your blog post is completely insane. I tried to tell you earlier this year that you should be seeking professional help about this, and things have now gotten much worse.
As for your insane reaction to the ongoing killing of huge numbers of innocent children in Gaza (i.e. that Zionism to you means choosing to kill the children of your enemy and giving the world the finger when you do it), apologies for the misunderstanding about whether this meant all or just some of them.
Scott Aaronson has been doing mental gymnastics then to keep justifying the genocide of Palestinians. Isn’t it a curious phenomenon that the pro-genocidaires keep framing the actions available to Israel as binary: (i) either indiscrimately kill and genocide the population of Gaza, or (ii) do nothing and every Israeli gets killed.
It should not be hard for people who have even a shred of morality to realize that this portrayal of the set of actions available to Israel is completely ridiculous. There has always been an entire spectrum of actions available to Israel. In Scott’s fictional, poorly designed thought experiment (why will the kidnapper tie five of their own children and present you with exactly two options, first being killing your child, and second being killing five of his children, knowing fully well that there is an overwhelming chance that you will not kill your child), there is infact a third option: you can do many things to stop or derail the train, go untie your child from the tracks, etc. This extraordinarily stupid thought experiment is not only completely intellectually dishonest, it is actually incredibly intellectually lazy.
And what is this obssession about referring to the WW1/WW2 era actions of the allied forces, when trying to justify what Israel is doing in Gaza? The Geneva convention came into existence because of what transpired during the world wars.
It seems that the definition of “zionism” is extremely fluid, and it keeps changing. I have seen the definition shape-shift at least a few times before, depending on the definition given by the person who identifies as a zionist: from “the right of Jewish people to self-determination” to “the right of Jewish people to self-determination in their ancestral homeland” to “the right of Jewish people to self-determination in their ancestral homeland maintaining Jewish majority”; but something tells me that the Scott Aaronson definition of zionism is not that mainstream, even among liberal zionists. Seems like the group of people identifying as zionists need to organize a conference or something to finally agree on a definition, and then let the rest of the world know.
The worst part of Scott Aaronson’s propaganda article is what he mentions at the end about Jews who oppose the genocide. After the Palestinians themselves, the next group of people who have arguably faced the greatest blunt of the attack from the pro-genocidaires, are the anti-genocide Jews, who have been called absolutely disgusting names ranging from kapo to self-hating Jews on the milder end, to Judenrat on the extreme end. Some like Shaiel Ben-Ephraim (an ex-zionist) has been publicly providing evidence of what kind of harrassment that he is being subjected to daily at the hands of the pro-genocide camp, because he is now publicly calling out Israel on its genocide: https://x.com/academic_la/status/1961123263406567642
The day of reckoning is coming for the Aaronsons of the world. Younger Jews in America do not associate with this level of fanaticism for Israel. He is about to get real world data on this very soon, as the majority of Jews vote Zohran Mamdani into power in NY. And if it doesn’t happen in this election cycle, it will surely happen in a decade or two from now – polling data overwhelmingly shows that the younger generation of Americans (Jews included) do not support genocide of Palestinians, and the younger Jews do not associate their identity with the state of Israel (who would in their right frame of mind).
Of course Scott A. would be the one to frame what Israel is doing in Gaza as a carefully crafted thought experiment, requiring to align the qubits just right, so that it all finally hangs on some ridiculously binary “pull the lever” choice.
And not one word on the forced starvation, not one word on the targeting of hospitals (with a second volley of tank shells to get the rescuers), not one word on the systematic murder of Palestinian journalists to suppress the last trickle of reporting on the ground, not one word on the murder of aid workers, not one word on what’s happening in the West Bank… (I skipped many other things that are so vile that I can’t even find the words to describe them)… all war crimes.
He’s made it clear: not one word on all those things because he’s really okay with it.
At least he’s no longer calling all this “the fight for enlightenment”, it’s now all part of the Z word.
Scott: Even if the legitimacy and continued survival of the Jewish State (within ‘Internationally recognized 1967 borders’ ) — which I am inclined to view as a defensible ‘definition of Zionism in one sentence’ — does indeed necessitate ‘pulling the lever’ — to use your metaphor – I fail to see a compelling/defensible reason to do so ‘with your middle finger *raised high*’ .
I am not in agreement with all of Thomas Friedman’s views, but that there is a borderline ‘suicidal’ aspect to some of the Israeli actions in Gaza (particularly as it pertains to ensuring provision of food and humanitarian assistance to the non-combatants — babies, women, and elderly) strikes me personally as a valid point of the gravest concern — for the Jews and Zionists above all.
@AG: Aha, the reason to defend your survival “with your middle finger raised high” is amply demonstrated by the other commenters on this thread, certainly including Peter. They see me saying, as clearly as possible: “fight those who seek to kill you, until they agree to STOP trying to kill you, and then make peace with them, just like the Allies did in WWII.” And they aggressively refuse to read it as meaning anything other than “kill Palestinians just for the sake of killing them.” That’s because they’re in the grip of a deep ideological delusion that would take an entire lifetime to deprogram. (I’ve stopped trying—one way in which the two years since Oct. 7 have radicalized me.)
Yes, there’s a whole spectrum of reasonable opinions about what Israel should do now, including “ceasefire at any cost, even though that means Hamas will rebuild and try again to invade and destroy Israel.” On the other hand, at least in my experience, no one who deploys the “genocide” accusation would suffer Israel to continue existing under any conditions. You know that Vasily Grossman quote, “tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of”? Say whatever else you like about the wisdom, strategy, or tactics of Israel’s current war against those theologically sworn to annihilate it, the only reasons to characterize it as “genocide” are
(a) to minimize the events that led to Israel’s founding, when the “international community” proved its total worthlessness in protecting the Jews from actual genocide, and
(b) to help pave the way for the *next* genocide of the Jews, the one that immediately ensues if and when Israel loses its current war of survival against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran.
Scott,
If you want to spend time discussing your blog posting or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general with other people, please open comments on your blog. There are a large number of people who would love to debate these topics with you, but that’s not a debate I want to spend my time moderating.
I never imagined anyone sane to comment his killing of children with „ middle finger raised high“ without any sign of sorrow or grief, under whatever circumstances.
Just reread “Deep Zionism” (and its addendum), and it’s even weirder than my initial impression when first looking at it yesterday. It reads like a satire written by someone trying to discredit both Zionism and “Rationalism”.
If I posted something here on my blog arguing that, at its deepest level, Zionism should be identified with making the choice to kill large numbers of Palestinian children, while giving the finger to the world since you knew no one would stop you, I’m pretty sure I know what would happen. I’d be pretty quickly suspended from my job, banned from campus and ultimately fired, on the grounds that I was clearly a rabid antisemite.
Clearly Scott has lost his mind, which he characterizes as “getting radicalized” (see his latest update)…
once you cross that line, then sane people who don’t belong to either side just won’t engage with you anymore (he knows it since he closed the comments, blaming it on all the others being even more radical than he is, if that’s even possible ), or with radicals on the other side (e.g. who’s wasting their time posting on islamist blogs to try and change their minds).
Anyway, very sad indeed.
I’m done commenting about Scott.
I would’ve thought that the principle “yes, of course you get to defend yourself against forces seeking to murder you, even when doing so produces innocent casualties” would be an uncontroversial one. After all, the alternative—one that actually reigned for most of our species’ sorry history—is a world where disfavored groups can simply be marked for elimination with no ability to defend themselves, and where there could’ve been no Allied victory in WWII.
Not for the first time, though, it seems I’ve underestimated the vastness of the moral chasm between me and those who despise me. On the positive side, this strongly suggests that my thought experiment was a relevant one after all!
I can think of only three explanations here:
(1) People simply refuse to believe the stakes are as I said they were—i.e. that my family members’ lives are actually on the line. Of course, within living memory, most of my extended family including children was forced to dig their own graves and shot in forests, while the Palestinians of the time cheered what would later be known as the Holocaust, and while the “international community” watched and did next to nothing—not even offering refuge to the survivors afterward. Of course, the Islamists’ explicit theology today is all about completing the Holocaust, as part of the reconquest of Dar al-Islam. Of course, this summer my own 8-year-old son was under threat of Iranian missiles in Tel Aviv, in and out of a bomb shelter all night, while nearby homes got destroyed. But none of this is real. It’s all just my personal psychological issue.
(2) As a second possibility, maybe the commenters here really are as self-sacrificing as they implicitly claim to be. I can almost believe this about non-parents: that they’d willingly offer themselves up for slaughter in order to save the children of their murderer, while the latter cackles and boasts about it. I have more difficulty believing that any parents here would actually sacrifice their own kids to save their murderer’s.
(3) Which brings us to the last possibility. Namely, commenters here believe that OTHERS — specifically me, or more generally, all Jews or all Israelis — are morally obliged to sacrifice their own children whenever genocidal ideologues set up a “my children or yours” choice, even while they themselves would never do so. There are terms for this sort of attitude. What was the one that I mentioned previously, in reference to Peter—was it “antisemitic piece of shit”?
Scott,
Seriously: seek professional help for your paranoid delusions/psychological defense mechanisms for justifying murdering Palestinian children on a large scale as part of a genocide/ethnic cleansing campaign.
If I had not already lost faith in humanity due to Trump, et al, Dr. Aaronson’s position would have been the tipping point. I.e., I have to assume that if my community had been plagued by bombs and suicide attacks and other atrocities over my lifetime, I too might well lose all sense of a common humanity and any compassion outside of my group. I also have to assume that with this tendency within us, humanity is doomed.
That would have been my comment on Dr. Aaronson’s blog, but apparently no comments are being allowed there on this issue.
Peter,
Regarding the following:
“If I posted something here on my blog arguing that, at its deepest level, Zionism should be identified with making the choice to kill large numbers of Palestinian children, while giving the finger to the world since you knew no one would stop you, I’m pretty sure I know what would happen. I’d be pretty quickly suspended from my job, banned from campus and ultimately fired, on the grounds that I was clearly a rabid antisemite.”
there is a solid chance that you would have been fine, and there would have been no consequences if you were pro-genocide to begin with. The axe of consequences only falls on you if you are anti-genocide. I’m certain about this, because Betar makes zionists look even worse, and they enjoy absolute impunity.
Of course now if you indeed wrote something of this nature, what you are saying will indeed happen, because you are not “in” with the pro-genocide group. You will be framed as spreading a blood libel.
Anonymous,
The way things are going, the US Jewish community may split into a majority appalled by the genocide and a minority including people like Scott and Betar more and more frantically devoted to justifying genocide. This second group already is at war with the first group (as, e.g. “kapos”), and I’m wondering if at some point their attacks on the Jewish majority will be deemed “antisemitic”.
As far as I know, here at Columbia we don’t have any faculty publicly supporting Betar, or anyone posting anything like Scott’s posting, so no hint about what the administration would do in such a case.
In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m not addressing any of my comments here to Peter, or to any of the cowards of his comment section. They’re unworthy of civilized conversation, as they don’t fulfill the basic prerequisites for it, like caring whether their interlocutors and their loved ones live or die. They’re not even able to *read words* like “I want my family not to live under the constant threat of theologically-motivated annihilation” as anything other than “I want to genocide Palestinians for the hell of it,” a bizarre form of ideological dyslexia. Not one of these cretins would’ve lifted a finger for my relatives during the Holocaust, nor will they lift a finger for my family in Israel after the IDF withdraws from Gaza and Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran rebuild and launch their next murderous ground invasion. They’ll just get to work blaming the victims again.
I’m exclusively addressing myself here to any pro-Zionist students (Jewish or not) who come across Peter’s blog and who feel isolated and terrified in the current environment, as they would’ve felt in the USSR. Please know that you’re not alone. Know that there are those of us to whom you can reach out for help. Know that the Jewish people (and Jews in academic science in particular) will survive this dark and hateful era for the world, as our predecessors survived even worse times.
Professor Woit: respectfully, I think you have Israel Derangement Syndrome. Have you tried just not thinking about it? I think went through most of this week without thinking about Israel and instead thinking about vacation and I have ahead for the fall semester. It was refreshing.
Isaiah: you’re right, and I have tried not thinking about it, with mixed success. Just recently I made a plan to improve my mental health situation (and celebrate my birthday), by getting out of Columbia and the US for a week or so, leaving late next week. Plan is to definitely not think about Columbia or the US, will also work on not thinking about Gaza.
I’m an American Jew but not connected to Israel and I’ll make an attempt to get through to Scott and similar people. The way I see it is that Israelis are deeply traumatized by Jewish history, especially the Holocaust, Oct 7 2023, and now the mind games Hamas is playing with respect to the hostages. It is certainly true that the “axis of resistance” would have killed or expelled the Israeli Jewish population if they could have. But it is also true that they have been thoroughly defeated militarily at this point. The goal of the Gaza war now should be to simply remove Hamas from power and rescue the hostages they can. There is no point taking the extreme measures Israel is taking now, like using reducing the food supply to weaken Hamas, airstrikes that level a city block to kill a single militant, and so on. These measures are taken out of fear and hysteria, don’t change the ultimate outcome of the Gaza campaign, and most of all don’t protect the Israeli public… Hamas simply doesn’t pose that kind of threat anymore. I am not saying that the enemies of Israel won’t try again, but in the short term Hamas and their allies simply don’t pose the level of threat Scott is describing. It’s time to calm down and finish off Hamas in a sane and successful manner, minimizing casualties of noncombatants in a way that doesn’t endanger Israelis.
I’m trying to ignore Scott’s paranoid delusional ravings, but I should address his specific accusations about me and students:
“Peter’s attitude toward the prospect of their murder is an outlier among the STEM faculty there.”
“pro-Zionist students (Jewish or not) who come across Peter’s blog and who feel isolated and terrified in the current environment, as they would’ve felt in the USSR.”
This really is nuts, and I encourage any students who want to check for themselves to stop by Math 421 and say hello. Will be busy early next week, then away for a week or so, but from the 15th on I’ll mostly be around and most times happy to stop what I’m doing and talk for a bit.
Michael Q,
Thanks for the effort to try to get through to Scott, but I’d rather not host/moderate attempts to talk sense to him here. For one thing, from long experience I know this will be a waste of time.
If he wants to engage with you and others in this kind of discussion, he really needs to open the comment section on his blog and have the discussion there.
Michael Q: Whether right or wrong, your position seems entirely reasonable and sane to me! But notice how different it is from the default position of academia, that Israel is an illegitimate white settler colony that embarked on a genocide of the peace-loving Gazans (who were minding their own business) because that’s what evil Zionists do. You and I, the Israeli left, moderate Democrats, and everyone else who doesn’t effectively demand that Israeli Jews offer themselves up for slaughter is on one side of this issue. The global far left, the DSA, international organizations, most of humanities academia, and Peter and most of his commenters are on the opposite side.
Scott,
I know this is hopeless to get you to understand, but your ideas about “the default position of academia” and what I and a lot of other people think is a paranoid delusion.
I’m sad that you are so deep in it that you can’t understand what is happening in the real world, and write lunatic stuff like “Deep Zionism”. Just for a moment some day think about whether the people you disagree with might not be demons who want to kill you and your family.
Scott, you’ve long lost the support of the “moderate democrats” for your genocide, but you really mean all the AIPAC-bought “support” you still have in congress from the “pro” Dems politicians, totally at odds with their base, which now only supports Israel at around 8-13%… they didn’t turn communists overnight, they just happen to recognize a genocide when they see its horrors in 4K on their phone, every single day.
The shark has finally jumped.
If genocide denial is not evil, nothing is. The cold reality is that Scott is making ludicrously morally myopic excuses for the ethnic cleansing of 2.3 million people, half of them children, and defending an ongoing genocide in service of that ethnic cleansing. I can see those pictures of skeletal children, and so can Scott.
I actually have enough respect for Scott’s analytic intelligence that I’m not going to accept his obvious mental illness as an escape from moral responsibility. It’s that “middle finger” line. He knows perfectly well that his ethical math has ended up at “pointing a gun at a million innocent children”, and he has chosen to support the people pulling the trigger.
I also wish to call attention to the fact that Scott has gone conspicuously silent with his prior criticism of the Trump administration’s authoritarianism, and he went silent at precisely the moment when the concentration camps, the secret police, and the military occupations came out into full public view. I can’t help but wonder if his present breakdown has something to do with that.
I’m glad that I can finally let the part of my brain that empathized with Scott’s perspective go. Only bad things come from that place.
Peter,
What is happening now in Gaza is a disaster. As an Israeli citizen I fully blame my government for their actions Gaza.
But everyone should realize that the Hamas are also doing everything they can to contribute to this disaster. They are operating from schools and hospitals. They attack the food convoys and spill flour on the ground. Every picture of a starving kid in western media is a success for them. Every dead child is a success.
Therefore, every blog post you make about the genocide in Gaza, you should be very careful to blame it both on the Israeli government and the Palestinian leadership. Otherwise, you are just playing to the hands of the Hamas who is trying to use dead Palestinian children for its own political gain.
Scott,
A longtime lurker on your blog who learnt a lot about quantum computing, p=np, randomness from your blog. You will always be an intellectual hero of mine due to your absolute integrity on these issues, and I hope you will continue to share your thoughts on those.
Regarding your latest post – it is really sad to see this extreme thinking. Yes in fact the stakes are not extreme as you say. Israel’s existence is not in fact at risk any more, except in the sense that its actions have caused it to lose support from almost everyone in the world. It is as if after 9/11 the US not only invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban but embarked on a fanatical attempt to wipe out every Afghani person until Osama Bin Laden was found.
There have been countless conflicts between people around the world, especially in the Middle East but always when people of different faiths lived side by side. These conflicts flare up and die down, both sides fight and do cruel things to each other, but its absurd to simply call for a population to be wiped out in response. I hope you will one day see the light.
Peter – fully agree if you do not wish to publish this.
Scott, I would say that the views you are describing are held by most Muslims and people on the far left, and even in those cases they are usually in denial about what would happen to Israeli Jews if Israel were conquered. They typically have their own delusion, which is that a Jewish minority would be well-treated in the new “just” situation, even though Oct 7 (and the history of neighbors like Syria and Lebanon) gives a much better idea of what will happen.
But I would say in a typical math department like mine, the number of people who think Israel should not be a country and should be replaced by a predominantly Arab Palestine is very small. Most people are generally appalled at the carnage in Gaza and want it to stop, and at the same time recognize Israel is a legitimate country which has a right to a future. It’s easy to focus on extreme voices on the internet and think they are the norm, but I really don’t think they represent mainstream opinion, at least in math.
Udi,
For a long time after October 7 I avoided criticizing what the Israelis were doing, precisely because they obviously had to deal with Hamas, so the ugly war was a joint responsibility. I started writing about what was going on here at Columbia in March and avoided discussing what was happening in Gaza. Only in May, in the 18th post in the series, see here
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=14770
did I finally discuss what was going on in Gaza and characterize it as genocide. I’ll refer you to that posting for an explanation of what I was seeing that changed my mind. (By the way, it was exactly this decision to denounce Israel’s behavior as genocide that led immediately to Scott’s announcement that I was an “antisemitic piece of shit”).
The responsibility for the war belongs partly with Hamas. The responsibility for the genocide belongs squarely with the Israeli government.
Scott, I respect the trauma underlying your position. And I don’t seek to minimize it.
Please consider that your trolley problem assumes perfect knowledge that the “murderer” will definitely kill your child if you don’t act. Even in conflict you have the ability to change future outcomes through current choices.
The irony is that the pull the lever with middle finger raised position you’re advocating is likely creating the very existential threat you fear. When you kill children, enemies or not, while expressing contempt for world opinion, you create new generations of people with profound grievances who absolutely will seek revenge. You undermine international support for Israel and even disregard the trauma Israeli soldiers endure who have to carry out these actions.
You mention WWII, but the Allies didn’t deliberately target German children. In fact when the war ended, they rebuilt Germany and Japan into allies. They understood that security that lasts comes from transforming enemies into partners, not creating perpetual cycles of killing.
I get standing your ground against social pressure and it is a sign of courage and strength when defending truth or justice. But when standing your ground means defending the killing of children while giving the world the finger, maybe that social pressure is trying to tell you that you’ve lost the moral thread, unable to distinguish necessary defense from vengeful cruelty.
Peter,
I see that one of the sources that changed your mind is Haaretz. I read Haaretz on a daily basis. I am very aware of the atrocities that the Israeli government is committing in Gaza. And as an Israeli I see it as my duty to criticize the actions of my government.
But where are the Palestinian news papers that criticizes the Hamas? Why don’t we hear about Palestinian demonstrating against their leaders? Because at the end of the day, both Hamas and the Israeli government have the same agenda — maximizing the suffering of the people of Gaza.
And I don’t mean it as an hyperbole. The Hamas are literally doing every thing in their power to have the Palestinians starve and have as many as their children as possible killed.
I know that it is hard to imagine. But this is the reality that Israel lives in. And this is why every time you mention the Genocide, you should mention that both sides are responsible to it.
To insinuate that the majority of people (who are opposed to this genocide and ethnic cleansing) actively want to see you and your family die is just so offensive and silly and unserious.
This absurdist, reactionary argument can be made about anything, to justify anything. Against the invasion of Iraq after 9/11? Actually you just want nuclear bombs to destroy every American city. We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud, right? Against the death penalty? You must love mass murderers and serial child rapists.
This is just a reactionary anti-morality. It’s obscene.
I suggest that instead of arguing, we try to determine which organizations are having the most success in trying to keep people from starving to death in Gaza, and contribute to them. A review of recent history, from Wikipedia:
On 2 March 2025, Israel cut off all aid to the Gaza Strip. The blockade caused food prices to increase by up to 1,400%. By the end of the month, all bakeries supported by the WFP [World Food Programme] had run out of flour and cooking oil. During this complete blockade (2–25 March 2025), at least 58 people starved to death.
On 25 April 2025, the WFP announced that it had delivered its last remaining supplies to kitchens preparing hot meals in Gaza; the meals were expected to be gone within days. The kitchens had been the only consistent source of food assistance in the last few weeks, although they reached only half of the population with one quarter of their daily food requirements. On 28 April 2025, the Gaza Media Office announced that there were over 65,000 cases of acute malnutrition in children in the Gaza Strip. UNRWA corroborated these claims, saying there were 66,000 children suffering from severe malnutrition in May 2025.
According to a United Nations report from early June 2025, 2,700 children under the age of five in Gaza were suffering from acute malnutrition, representing a threefold increase compared to three months earlier.
In mid-July 2025, it was reported that at least 76 children and 10 adults had died from malnutrition throughout the Gaza war. On 23 July 2025, the Gaza Health Ministry reported that 10 people had died from starvation in the previous 24 hours; this was after reporting the previous day that 15 people had died in the 24 hours before that. This brought the total death count from starvation to 111. On 26 July 2025, the death toll rose to 122.
As of August 2025, Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) projections show 100% of the population are experiencing “high levels of acute food insecurity”, and 32% are projected to face Phase 5 catastrophic levels by September 30, 2025. On 22 August 2025, the IPC said that famine is taking place in one of the five governorates in the Gaza Strip: specifically, the Gaza Governorate which includes Gaza City. The IPC added that, within the next month, famine was likely to occur in the Deir al-Balah Governorate and Khan Yunis Governorate. The IPC had insufficient data on the North Gaza Governorate for a classification but concluded that conditions were likely similar or worse than in the Gaza Governorate. Within the next 6 weeks as of 16 August, the number of people in IPC Phase 5 is expected to rise from 500,000 to over 640,000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip_famine
I gotta admit, it takes balls to openly, unapologetically show the middle finger to the starving children of Gaza. My hat is off.
Overall, it’s sad to see Scott join the side of evil and descend from Enlightenment values to genocidal, paranoia-driven fanaticism. A lesson for all of us that even the finest minds and characters are not immune to this virus.
I think it would redeem Scott a bit if he opened the comment section on his post. As of now he’s walling himself off completely to perspectives other than the most hardcore, rabid version of Zionism.
For a more sane take, I thought Lindsay Ellis’s recent breakdown of the issues was very clear and nuanced, if long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwpanShgOp4
Jim M said:
“Please consider that your trolley problem assumes perfect knowledge that the “murderer” will definitely kill your child if you don’t act. Even in conflict you have the ability to change future outcomes through current choices.”
What reality do you live in? The “murderer” in this case has already killed more than a thousand Israelis. He is not a “murderer” he is a MURDERER. He is holding 20 hostages for almost 3 years now.
I don’t like Scott’s style, but I understand his frustration when he reads comments like yours. The difference between us, is that I am giving you the benefit of the doubt that you just don’t understand the situation.
Udi,
Everywhere I look I see the same justification of genocide: “October 7”. This is essentially the point of Scott’s blogpost: October 7 justifies anything, including the mass murder of innocent children.
This has become so entrenched that you end up with Scott’s complete descent into madness, literally identifying Zionism with the ideology that Palestinian children must be murdered because of October 7. I don’t see why any Israeli would want anything to do with this. Why would you want your deepest expression of the essence of your nation to be that it has the right to commit genocide because of Hamas and October 7?
The occupation/siege, and the ongoing expansion of settlements, is completely not represented in the trolley fable.
“They” are religious nutjobs trying to kill us for no reason, while “we” are noble victims trying to protect ourselves.
How convenient that you have forgotten that *your* boot is on their neck! Religion is largely an opiate here — to fight back against impossible odds, they need the fanaticism provided by religion. The same was true for slave rebellions in the American South — many were Christian rebellions, and some, quite bloody for the slave-owners.
If Israel were to go back to the 1967 border with full autonomy for Palestine, and the Palestinians were still to attack Israel, the train analogy would be accurate. (Israel of course would never allow such a perfectly rational solution.)
But right now, this is just a Zionist straw-man.
Okay, I decided to give some money to Doctors Without Borders, for reasons I explained here:
https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2025/08/30/mariam-abu-dagga/
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation seems to be doing the most to ease the widespread starvation, but they are tangled in so much controversy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Humanitarian_Foundation
that it seemed wiser to support Doctors Without Borders, who are providing a lot of much-needed medical assistance.
I think many of us here can understand the mental and emotional challenges of growing up as an intelligent young person (or, heck, probably as a human in general). It’s very long been clear to anybody reading (in fact, he hasn’t even tried to hide it) that Scott had an exceptionally emotionally challenging time as a young man for a host of reasons, some of them centered on his Jewish identity and his people’s past. Given how high-strung he is and how difficult that was, it’s a great credit to him that he persevered and achieved as much as he has.
It’s also always been clear that he cares an unusual amount about ethics, although in a rather idiosyncratic fashion. To the extent he can, he has pursued virtue after his sense of it, and he has paid a serious emotional price for this in the past.
The last two years were like a custom-made missile ready to take down his mental and emotional stability, and tear apart the equilibrium he had spent years reaching. I feel sadness for this, and sympathy; I imagine there are courses of events that could do it to me, too. Nobody reading his post is going to think he’s in a totally functioning and stable place. But let us not make a spectacle over it. I don’t see that it is any more appropriate here than it was when a certain eminent mathematician, late in his career, made some very embarrassing gaffes.
May the horrors in Israel/Palestine come to an end for all, and may Scott and all of us reclaim our equilibria after these terrible times. Scott, I cherish your people and want them both to be safe and to know that they are safe. I want the same for all people. I don’t know how to achieve it.
Blessings to all.
Peter wrote:
“Everywhere I look I see the same justification of genocide: “October 7”. This is essentially the point of Scott’s blog post: October 7 justifies anything, including the mass murder of innocent children.”
You seem to have missed the part of Scott’s trolley analogy where he writes that “the murderer has also tied his own five innocent children to the tracks”. This is not about what the Hamas did on October 7. It is about what they are doing now.
Israel has not only the right, but the obligation to do anything we can to release the hostages. The fact that the Hamas is using its own population as a human shield should not play into our considerations.
That being said, I also repeatedly said that I condemn the actions of the Israeli government and hold them responsible to this genocide. The problem with the Israeli government is that they have an interest in extending this conflict as much as possible. Hamas shares the same interest and therefore they are contributing just as much, if not more to this genocide of their own people!
I don’t understand why you have no problem condemning Israel, yet you insist not to condemn the Palestinians.
Congratulations Scott, you made it to Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45076318
Thank you Peter for this brave post. To share it openly, you showed courage to pick the side and not stay just an observer of genocide. For Scott, it is brutal to use all your intellectual capacity to repeatedly justify cruel, starvations of civilians in Gaza, through paranoid construct of a hypothetical, all-world conspiring, about to happen holocaust. I can understand that this is a consequence of deeply routed trauma, but it won’t be healed by exterminating powerless people while showing the finger to the world.
If you are charged with murder, after killing someone who was attacking you, you have a legal defence; that you were acting in your own defense.
There is no such defense to genocide.
There is no such defense, even to crimes against humanity, such as starving a civilian population.
Careful lawyers, many of whom had themselves survived the holocaust, and which killed most of their relatives, drafted the laws against genocide. They considered whether to add such a defense, and they did not add it. They defined genocide and these other heinous crimes, as ones for which there is no possible excuse.
Hamas are not innocent. Their act on Oct 7th was descibed by the Lemkin Foundation for the prevention of genocide, as a genocidal act. But the vast majority of the Palestinian population are unarmed civilians, mostly children. Their attitude to Israel does not matter, because they cannot act on it.
Under the Genocide treaty, all countries have the obligation to do whatever is in their power to prevent genocide. In this, we are all failing. The situation is like if there are two clans in a village; members of one have committed murder; and instead of intervening to prevent strife, we simply send as many weapons as they want to the other one.
Scott, if you’re reading this, I don’t expect it to persuade you. But I (as a non-laywer) think your blog constitutes incitement under the International Criminal Court treaty, and you may therefore be well advised not to visit any signatory countries.
Scott, it seems like you use Judaism and Jewish tradition to justify every moral position you take. And yet, your behavior is so morally repugnant and childish that, in doing so, I’m sure you foment antisemitism everywhere you go. I suspect you have been a net negative influence on Jewish safety for that reason, and that’s what saddens me the most.
We don’t want your family to die, we don’t want Israel to disappear, only the most extreme of the extremists want anything like that. We want an end to the genocide, an end to Palestinian oppression, and an end to Hamas. We think that Hamas was born of oppression and is continuously fueled by oppression. We think that the right way to end Hamas is for the IDF to stop treating Palestinians like animals, and to invest a minimum amount of effort into killing terrorists rather than innocent civilians (You previously expressed admiration for the IDF’s “restraint” in pursuing their objectives – I just do not understand how you square that perspective with the widespread reports of torture, rape, and mutilation of Palestinians, not to mention the straight-up unprovoked murder of aid-seeking civilians.)
Perhaps most importantly, we think that stopping a genocide that is actually happening right now is more important than maybe preventing a genocide that might possibly occur in the future if your unrealistic paranoid fantasies come true. Hamas murdering Israelis is obviously very realistic, but Hamas rebuilding enough military power to seriously threaten Israel’s existence is laughable.
Udi,
I’ve deleted a lot of submitted comments which all essentially say, like Scott “Palestinians deserve to have their children killed because of Hamas”.
I don’t believe the argument that Israel needs to starve the population because Hamas might get the food, flatten all the buildings and destroy infrastructure to make the region uninhabitable because Hamas has tunnels, bomb residential buildings with families in them because a Hamas person is supposedly there, bomb hospitals multiple times ensuring death of first responders, because a Hamas camera is supposedly there, etc. etc.
Woah. Did I ever miss a meeting…
How about those Leptons eh? They’re really something.
This is not the discussion I would have naively expected on this important and wrenching topic from these exceptional minds. But I am not standing outside the problem. Far from it. I am very much inside this problem. Yet something has had to have gone very wrong with us all, for this to be *our* discussion. Across the board. We are supposed to be academicians. We are supposed to be setting an example for how all rational people can reason together. Sad to see it. Good luck to us all. I freely admit I don’t have a good suggestion of how to right this ship.
This is getting more and more ridiculous here. Irrespective of whether Scott A. is getting over the top in his desperation with the world (which is not impossible), and irrespective of whether the Israeli military is committing war crimes (which is not unlikely), there is increasing madness in this blog in specific and with parts of the left in general:
1. Peter W. and many commenters here, why on earth do you obsess on what Scott says? There are millions around the planet with more ‘offensive’ views then him, there are many thousands having more political influence than him, and there are many who may be actually legally guilty of crimes, differently from him.
2. The same group as in 1. plus much of the left, why on earth am I constantly to focus on and to support the Palestinians? I never lived there, I do not know anybody from there, but whatever happens there, I need to support them at highest priority. Forget about who and how many are being massacred in Sudan, Congo, Birma, you name it, every time there is trouble in the west bank or in Gaza, even before the war, it is ‘the Israelis did this and that, we need to support Palestine now’.
As far as I see it, you range somewhere between hypocrites and *expletive*, and my pity for your fascist dictator making your life difficult will be limited at best (with apologies to the good people who do not deserve him and his gang).
Here’s the tell: Scott is using an irrelevant hypothetical because the reality of what Israel is doing in Gaza—genocide—is completely indefensible.
Hypotheticals are the last refuge of the morally bankrupt.