Joshua, this is an excellent article, and honestly the more I read pieces like this after October 7th, the more frustrated and disturbed I become by how many people still refuse to confront reality.
At some point, if people still cannot recognize that we are dealing with ideological movements that openly reject compromise, openly glorify violence, openly celebrate massacres, and openly seek the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, then I honestly do not know what evidence would ever be sufficient for them.
And I say this not only about parts of the Israeli Left, but increasingly about segments of the Western world generally. It reminds me of the same kind of delusional thinking that allows someone like Mamdani to gain major support in New York, including from many Jews themselves. At a certain point it stops being naïveté and starts becoming something genuinely dangerous.
October 7th should have shattered these illusions permanently. Instead, many people simply reset themselves back to old ideological factory settings as though nothing happened.
That is what I find so incomprehensible.
And honestly, for some people, if they still have not woken up by now, I increasingly suspect no argument, no evidence, and no atrocity will ever be enough to wake them up.
Ideological capture is also crippling organizations like the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association. They are run by hard-leftist health care providers. Instead of producing medical knowledge and science, they are churning out propaganda.
Yes Harari is much like Magid here at Harvard in the US. If many of us have to die to be the morally pure actor in any perceived conflict it is worth it. Being stateless and having little agency is, of course, the morally pure act…sorry, that is the height of ivory tower thinking that causes mass casualty events.
I'm stunned that Jews are not still protesting Nicholas Kristof's rape dogs article in the NY Times. Where are the angry crowds outside the offices of the NY Times? There were protests for a hot minute, but now there's silence. What is it going to take for Jews to protest these constant antisemitic onslaughts?
I admired Harari's book Sapiens for its many insights but The Peter Principle is unyielding: everyone gets promoted to their first level of incompetence. Clearly Harari reached it trying to prescribe a political path for Israel.
The same tone-deaf attitude was seen in Shimon Peres in January 1994. That month 54 Israeli citizens were murdered in the first suicide bombings in the country, the first tangible results of the Oslo Accords signed just 4 months before. Shimon Peres explained it as "we will resume negotiations with the PLO after the funerals of the victims". That was the end of the Israeli Left.
The faculty and administrators in US higher education are also disconnected from the viewpoints and needs of the general US population. Why isn't there more pushback from the consumers of US higher education? The Marxist faculty intentionally hire more Marxist faculty. There is intentional exclusion of conservatives from the faculties of US universities. There is next to no viewpoint diversity anymore within US universities. Yet consumers of this shoddy product are not complaining or pushing back on the universities, which have become propaganda machines.
“…Harari emerged from October 7th apparently having learned nothing. Like much of the Israeli Left, he simply returned to factory settings — back to “peace with the Palestinians,” back to blaming Netanyahu, back to treating Israeli nationalism as the greater threat than jihadist barbarism.”
Harari is, in reality, a vicious wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing. And I respectfully suggest you are mistakenly treating him as the ‘sheep’ he pretends to be, rather than the wolf he actually is.
“…Harari emerged from October 7th apparently having learned nothing. Like much of the Israeli Left, he simply returned to factory settings — back to “peace with the Palestinians,” back to blaming Netanyahu, back to treating Israeli nationalism as the greater threat than jihadist barbarism.”
I suggest that view may perfectly capture the reality for ‘much of the Israeli Left’, but misses the mark for Harari and his fellow conspirators. To the extent it is accurate, it implies one or more of the following; 1) a completely irrational level of naiveté, 2) a tragic commitment to delusional thinking, and/or 3) a particularly strong case of mass psychosis.
Again, all of the above may characterize the bulk of the Israeli (and American) Left but Harari is not naive, delusional, or caught in a mass delusion. His is a far worse case than that; he is thoroughly wicked and cunningly evil. Whatever else he may be, he is a high-ranking and highly useful (particularly because he is Jewish) figure in Satan’s End Time cohort of fallen human ‘fellow travelers’.
And, tragically, from the standpoint of Bible prophecies in both the Tanakh and Brit Hadasha, worse is yet to come.
The state of ‘normal’ human health is not one in which no serious potential threats to life exist within the person, but rather a state in which the body has sufficient strength to successfully hold such forces in check. The same is true for all human societies in this period of human history.
What we are witnessing across Western Civilization today, which includes Israel, is the ‘fruit’ of societies in which the spiritual sources of their true strength have long been ignored, neglected, rejected, and/or replaced by falsehoods, false hopes, and the doctrines of demons.
The end is certain, and glorious - for those who love truth, love the true and living God, and seek to please and honor Him in and through their lives. But first, these troubling, dark, and evil days will run the full length of the prophesied course.
In the meantime, each person is confronted with choices that will ultimately bear an eternal weight. For those who care enough to earnestly seek to know how to live in these days, and how to secure the blessings of God in the life to come, all that is truly necessary to know may be found in the Book of Life; the Bible, taught by, and under the inspiration and guidance of the Spirit of the Living God.
Isaiah 30:18-21 (Tanakh)
“18 Truly, the LORD is waiting to show you grace, truly, He will arise to pardon you. For the LORD is a God of justice; happy are all who wait for Him.
19 Indeed, O people in Zion, dwellers of Jerusalem, you shall not have cause to weep. He will grant you His favor at the sound of your cry; He will respond as soon as He hears it. 20 My Lord will provide for you meager bread and scant water. Then your Guide will no more be ignored, but your eyes will watch your Guide; 21 and, whenever you deviate to the right or to the left, your ears will heed the command from behind you: “This is the road; follow it!"
And:
Isaiah 50:6 - 51:2 (Tanakh)
“6 I offered my back to the floggers, and my cheeks to those who tore out my hair.
I did not hide my face from insult and spittle.
7 But the Lord GOD will help me— therefore I feel no disgrace; therefore I have set my face like flint, and I know I shall not be shamed. 8 My Vindicator is at hand—who dares contend with me? Let us stand up together!
Who would be my opponent?
Let him approach me!
9 Lo, the Lord GOD will help me— who can get a verdict against me? They shall all wear out like a garment, the moth shall consume them.
10 Who among you reveres the LORD and heeds the voice of His servant?—though he walk in darkness and have no light, let him trust in the name of the LORD and rely upon his God.
11 But you are all kindlers of fire, girding on firebrands.
Walk by the blaze of your fire,
by the brands that you have lit!
This has come to you from My hand: you shall lie down in pain.
1 Listen to Me, you who pursue justice, you who seek the LORD: Look to the rock you were hewn from, to the quarry you were dug from. 2 Look back to Abraham your father and to Sarah who brought you forth. For he was only one when I called him, but I blessed him and made him many.”
And:
Matthew 5:17-20 (NKJV)
17 “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. 18 For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. 19 Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Historically, empires and countries failed from within and Israel is not immune to it. Often, it is the blind thirst for power, sometimes it is corruption and sellout for money, and often it is indoctrination of classes of people to follow blindly a cause devoid of any critical thought. The Israeli “left” got it all.
Yes, this is perplexing indeed. I can understand the non-Israeli Left's multiple reasons for what they believe. But how can Israeli leftists continue to believe that Hamas can be negotiated with and that the obstacles to peace are on the Israeli side? I have a friend from high school who is an Israeli leftist. The only explanation I could muster after talking to him is that he is mentally ill. But this doesn't seem to fit Harari. Can it be that they know they are spouting nonsense, but it is a form of virtue signaling? Usually virtue signaling is a form of low cost signaling. But after October 7, the cognitive dissonance must be a high cost. And high cost signaling is a mechanism for groups to diminish the prevalence of free riding and thus maintain internal cohesion from the threat of dissolution by free riders. From that point of view, I have compassion for them.
Joshua, this is an excellent article, and honestly the more I read pieces like this after October 7th, the more frustrated and disturbed I become by how many people still refuse to confront reality.
At some point, if people still cannot recognize that we are dealing with ideological movements that openly reject compromise, openly glorify violence, openly celebrate massacres, and openly seek the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, then I honestly do not know what evidence would ever be sufficient for them.
And I say this not only about parts of the Israeli Left, but increasingly about segments of the Western world generally. It reminds me of the same kind of delusional thinking that allows someone like Mamdani to gain major support in New York, including from many Jews themselves. At a certain point it stops being naïveté and starts becoming something genuinely dangerous.
October 7th should have shattered these illusions permanently. Instead, many people simply reset themselves back to old ideological factory settings as though nothing happened.
That is what I find so incomprehensible.
And honestly, for some people, if they still have not woken up by now, I increasingly suspect no argument, no evidence, and no atrocity will ever be enough to wake them up.
Lack of ability to learn from the past and the guarantee of repeated blunders are identifying features of the left.
Ideological capture is also crippling organizations like the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association. They are run by hard-leftist health care providers. Instead of producing medical knowledge and science, they are churning out propaganda.
Yes Harari is much like Magid here at Harvard in the US. If many of us have to die to be the morally pure actor in any perceived conflict it is worth it. Being stateless and having little agency is, of course, the morally pure act…sorry, that is the height of ivory tower thinking that causes mass casualty events.
I'm stunned that Jews are not still protesting Nicholas Kristof's rape dogs article in the NY Times. Where are the angry crowds outside the offices of the NY Times? There were protests for a hot minute, but now there's silence. What is it going to take for Jews to protest these constant antisemitic onslaughts?
Excellent article. Thank you for reading the NYT interview so we don’t have to.
I admired Harari's book Sapiens for its many insights but The Peter Principle is unyielding: everyone gets promoted to their first level of incompetence. Clearly Harari reached it trying to prescribe a political path for Israel.
The same tone-deaf attitude was seen in Shimon Peres in January 1994. That month 54 Israeli citizens were murdered in the first suicide bombings in the country, the first tangible results of the Oslo Accords signed just 4 months before. Shimon Peres explained it as "we will resume negotiations with the PLO after the funerals of the victims". That was the end of the Israeli Left.
Great article and observation of the cognitive dissonance that is rampant among those that consider themselves 'intellectual elites'.
The faculty and administrators in US higher education are also disconnected from the viewpoints and needs of the general US population. Why isn't there more pushback from the consumers of US higher education? The Marxist faculty intentionally hire more Marxist faculty. There is intentional exclusion of conservatives from the faculties of US universities. There is next to no viewpoint diversity anymore within US universities. Yet consumers of this shoddy product are not complaining or pushing back on the universities, which have become propaganda machines.
“…Harari emerged from October 7th apparently having learned nothing. Like much of the Israeli Left, he simply returned to factory settings — back to “peace with the Palestinians,” back to blaming Netanyahu, back to treating Israeli nationalism as the greater threat than jihadist barbarism.”
Harari is, in reality, a vicious wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing. And I respectfully suggest you are mistakenly treating him as the ‘sheep’ he pretends to be, rather than the wolf he actually is.
“…Harari emerged from October 7th apparently having learned nothing. Like much of the Israeli Left, he simply returned to factory settings — back to “peace with the Palestinians,” back to blaming Netanyahu, back to treating Israeli nationalism as the greater threat than jihadist barbarism.”
I suggest that view may perfectly capture the reality for ‘much of the Israeli Left’, but misses the mark for Harari and his fellow conspirators. To the extent it is accurate, it implies one or more of the following; 1) a completely irrational level of naiveté, 2) a tragic commitment to delusional thinking, and/or 3) a particularly strong case of mass psychosis.
Again, all of the above may characterize the bulk of the Israeli (and American) Left but Harari is not naive, delusional, or caught in a mass delusion. His is a far worse case than that; he is thoroughly wicked and cunningly evil. Whatever else he may be, he is a high-ranking and highly useful (particularly because he is Jewish) figure in Satan’s End Time cohort of fallen human ‘fellow travelers’.
And, tragically, from the standpoint of Bible prophecies in both the Tanakh and Brit Hadasha, worse is yet to come.
The state of ‘normal’ human health is not one in which no serious potential threats to life exist within the person, but rather a state in which the body has sufficient strength to successfully hold such forces in check. The same is true for all human societies in this period of human history.
What we are witnessing across Western Civilization today, which includes Israel, is the ‘fruit’ of societies in which the spiritual sources of their true strength have long been ignored, neglected, rejected, and/or replaced by falsehoods, false hopes, and the doctrines of demons.
The end is certain, and glorious - for those who love truth, love the true and living God, and seek to please and honor Him in and through their lives. But first, these troubling, dark, and evil days will run the full length of the prophesied course.
In the meantime, each person is confronted with choices that will ultimately bear an eternal weight. For those who care enough to earnestly seek to know how to live in these days, and how to secure the blessings of God in the life to come, all that is truly necessary to know may be found in the Book of Life; the Bible, taught by, and under the inspiration and guidance of the Spirit of the Living God.
Isaiah 30:18-21 (Tanakh)
“18 Truly, the LORD is waiting to show you grace, truly, He will arise to pardon you. For the LORD is a God of justice; happy are all who wait for Him.
19 Indeed, O people in Zion, dwellers of Jerusalem, you shall not have cause to weep. He will grant you His favor at the sound of your cry; He will respond as soon as He hears it. 20 My Lord will provide for you meager bread and scant water. Then your Guide will no more be ignored, but your eyes will watch your Guide; 21 and, whenever you deviate to the right or to the left, your ears will heed the command from behind you: “This is the road; follow it!"
And:
Isaiah 50:6 - 51:2 (Tanakh)
“6 I offered my back to the floggers, and my cheeks to those who tore out my hair.
I did not hide my face from insult and spittle.
7 But the Lord GOD will help me— therefore I feel no disgrace; therefore I have set my face like flint, and I know I shall not be shamed. 8 My Vindicator is at hand—who dares contend with me? Let us stand up together!
Who would be my opponent?
Let him approach me!
9 Lo, the Lord GOD will help me— who can get a verdict against me? They shall all wear out like a garment, the moth shall consume them.
10 Who among you reveres the LORD and heeds the voice of His servant?—though he walk in darkness and have no light, let him trust in the name of the LORD and rely upon his God.
11 But you are all kindlers of fire, girding on firebrands.
Walk by the blaze of your fire,
by the brands that you have lit!
This has come to you from My hand: you shall lie down in pain.
1 Listen to Me, you who pursue justice, you who seek the LORD: Look to the rock you were hewn from, to the quarry you were dug from. 2 Look back to Abraham your father and to Sarah who brought you forth. For he was only one when I called him, but I blessed him and made him many.”
And:
Matthew 5:17-20 (NKJV)
17 “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. 18 For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. 19 Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Am Israel Chai, to the glory of God!
GOD BLESSISRAEL AND ITS PEOPLE
Historically, empires and countries failed from within and Israel is not immune to it. Often, it is the blind thirst for power, sometimes it is corruption and sellout for money, and often it is indoctrination of classes of people to follow blindly a cause devoid of any critical thought. The Israeli “left” got it all.
The Jews that puzzle me and worry me the most are the Torah observant lefties.
Shalom Hartman Institute leaders are an example
as are some "Jewish Study professors" in universities and colleges across America
they are condescending and sanctimonious in tone.
they are Hararri like in content
They are shaping the minds (and have been) of young ppl , jew and non jew alike while wearing a Kippah and observing Shabbat and Kashrut
we Jews are are own worst enemy
Yes, this is perplexing indeed. I can understand the non-Israeli Left's multiple reasons for what they believe. But how can Israeli leftists continue to believe that Hamas can be negotiated with and that the obstacles to peace are on the Israeli side? I have a friend from high school who is an Israeli leftist. The only explanation I could muster after talking to him is that he is mentally ill. But this doesn't seem to fit Harari. Can it be that they know they are spouting nonsense, but it is a form of virtue signaling? Usually virtue signaling is a form of low cost signaling. But after October 7, the cognitive dissonance must be a high cost. And high cost signaling is a mechanism for groups to diminish the prevalence of free riding and thus maintain internal cohesion from the threat of dissolution by free riders. From that point of view, I have compassion for them.