On October 7th of this year, Hamas militants, in coordination with other Palestinian militias, launched a surprise attack on Israel from Gaza, planned in part by Iran (Said, Faucon, & Kalin, 8 Oct 2023), resulting in at least 800 civilian deaths and many hundreds of additional military deaths, though the exact numbers are heavily disputed. This attack has escalated the tense and long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a full-scale war. Given the involvement of Iran and the relationship between Israel, Palestine, the Middle East, and the rest of the world, concerns have been raised about horizontal escalation (Jeffrey, 2023). It’s an incredibly touchy subject, but with the involvement of religion as a motivating factor and the relevance of Israel to American evangelical eschatology, it seems appropriate that I weigh in on it. I’m going to do my best to stick to my wheelhouse here: I am not a political or strategic analyst and any political commentary I make here is personal and should not be considered as any sort of professional expert analysis. One could spend their entire life studying nothing but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and still not cover everything, and I’m approaching the subject as a relative neophyte. But it’s a matter I want to understand better and I study new topics by researching them and writing about what I’ve learned, and that’s what I’ll be doing here.
Mostly I’d just like to try to contribute something useful to the discourse, because otherwise I’m just muddying things with more shallow opinion, and that’s about the last thing we need right now. I’d like to present what I think are some non-viable ways that have been used to think about the situation, and then some tools that I think could be helpful in trying to see how this whole situation hangs together.
The first draft of this essay included some words about the moral complexity of the issue. It is indeed an incredibly complex situation and I don’t think we do well for ourselves by reducing the whole thing down to a single bit of information—this side or that side—but at the same time I think the moral complexity of the situation may be somewhat overstated in the general discourse. Not that there aren’t complexities involved, but Israel is an apartheid state, and to say so is hardly antisemitic when it is the position endorsed by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the Israeli Zionist newspaper Haaretz, and a full quarter of American Jews (Loewenstein, 2023). Nor does such a condemnation of Israel amount to an endorsement of Hamas; one of the things I’d like to highlight in this essay are the ways in which Hamas and Israel collaborate to oppress and brutalize the Palestinian people and endanger the Israeli people. Beyond that, I’d like to step back from a black-and-white dichotomy that divides along state lines and it’s important that the actions of those involved be subject to moral scrutiny, but it’s important as well to remember that neither Israel nor Palestine nor any of the smaller-scale social systems involved—Hamas, the IDF, Hezbollah, and so forth—are moral agents. It is indeed the case that Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, but this statement is an abstraction from the material reality of Hamas militants attacking Israelis. We can say that Israel is launching artillery strikes into Gaza, but this as well is an abstraction from the material actions of Israelis who are loading and firing ordnance.
I don’t normally watch TV but caught some recently while staying with family and saw several advertisements funded by an organization called Facts for Peace—an organization whose backers remain a mystery—which laid out some facts about Hamas, about their classification as a terrorist organization and their intent to destroy Israel. And yes, those things are true, Hamas is a terrorist organization and they want to destroy the State of Israel and have expressed genocidal intent towards the Jewish people. But the moral calculus behind the advertisements amounts to “Hamas bad, therefore Israel good,” and in my book that’s pure intellectual and moral cowardice. Hamas is bad in a general value-theoretical sense, but there’s a lot more going on here. I have my opinions about the situation and if you listen to the last episode I did on the historical background and this one, do your own research, think the matter over, and come to a different conclusion, I can accept that. If, on the other hand, you know nothing about the conflict, hear a 30-second ad spot, and on that basis take up my exact position, then you’re an ignoramus and I consider you my enemy whether you agree with me or not. This conflict does not dissemble into Hamas/Israel or Palestine/Israel. Pick whatever level of analysis you want, this is not a binary conflict. Even Hamas by itself is a complex organization involving dozens of social systems at multiple levels of organization, each with its own goals.
Beyond that, Hamas and Israel have different properties than the material entities from which they are abstracted. The slicing of a throat at a peaceful concert and the pressing of a button that launches an airstrike are subject to moral judgement, but whatever we might say about free will or the absence of it, it’s a brute fact that human behavior is stochastically determinant. If you go to a jam band or stoner rock concert, you might not be able to predict the behavior of any one individual in the crowd, but you could still reliably predict the presence of a skunky-smelling haze wafting in the air. The difficulties of predicting individual behavior smooth out when considered at higher levels of organization—the entire insurance industry is predicated on this—and so I think our best approach to considering behavior at the level of large-scale social systems like militaries and states is not to talk about what they should or shouldn’t do but rather what they will or won’t do. Again, this should not lead us to a centrism or to an avoidance of moral judgement; rather, such facts inform and contextualize our moral judgement.
In an article from 17 October, Benjamin Wittes, political analysist and editor of the excellent Lawfare blog, writes
…when a state is attacked militarily, it will respond militarily to the extent that it can. This is legitimate both morally and legally, and it makes intuitive sense strategically as well. The state’s most fundamental purpose is the protection of its citizens. A state that fails militarily to defend its people forsakes its reason to exist.
I think the claim that a state military response to an attack is morally legitimate is a category error; it’s not that such a response isn’t morally legitimate but rather that it’s not a judgement we can legitimately apply either way. People are moral agents; states are not. We can say that talking about the morality of state actions is really just an abstraction from the constituent actions of individuals, but that seems like an easy way to disperse individual responsibility. That’s basically the Eichmann defense: “I’m not personally responsible for this because I was acting as the agent of the State.” In any case, however surprising the October 7th Hamas attack, the fact that there would at some point be such an attack, and the broad strokes of Israel’s response, should surprise no one. And it’s important to keep that in mind because, if I know that, then strategic commanders on both sides know that as well; that the war is playing out as it has means that key people on both sides wanted it to.
That aside, Wittes makes several important points, the most central of which is the moral separability of the response to the October 7th attack from the Israeli treatment of Palestinians in Gaza. Wittes is critical of both, but his critique is nuanced and does not devolve into the sort of “this side good, that side bad” argument common to the discourse. If Israeli commanders are being unnecessarily brutal in their response to the attacks, or if they lack a clear objective that warrants such a response, that is the case and would be the case regardless of their prior treatment of Palestine. If the Hamas attack violated the laws of just war—which is very obviously the case—that is morally separable from how Hamas and the Palestinian people have been treated by Israel.
On November 7th, neuroscientist, philosopher, and prominent atheist Sam Harris released an episode of his podcast Making Sense entitled “The Bright Line Between Good and Evil.” I had expected that Harris would go all in for defending the Israeli response, and that’s not the case; he expresses concern “that the extensive bombing (and now invasion) of Gaza could be a mistake,” though he couches this language in strategic rather than humanitarian concerns. But his analysis of the underlying religious component of the conflict is typically myopic; he interprets Islam as being the dominating cause of the conflict, rather than as one factor among many in a complex web, although undeniably a very significant one. He makes an extensive case that global support for Hamas is nonsensical, and I have to agree: their various civil actions notwithstanding, they are at the core a violent, evil, genocidal organization that has given up its entitlement to share the world with the rest of us. But Harris doesn’t separate Hamas from the Palestinian people. He writes
All university administrators, and Diversity Equity and Inclusion geniuses, and Hollywood celebrities who rushed to sign open letters in support of the Palestinian cause, without taking a moment to understand what actually happened on October 7th, or understanding it and not caring, you are all now part of history.
And elsewhere
Gaza is only an “open air prison” because its democratically elected government is a jihadist organization that is eager to martyr all Palestinians for the pleasure of killing Jews.
Calling Hamas “democratically elected” is accurate only in the most purely technical sense; they did win an election at one point but took their present position in a kind of coup. They use violent authority to stay in power without further elections and given how young the Palestinian population skews, it’s fair to say that most Palestinians presently living had no say in putting them in power. Yes, antisemitism and homophobia are problems in the Arab world in general but I think Harris’s “Diversity Equity and Inclusion geniuses” probably realize that this doesn’t justify blowing up their children and understand that that’s not going to solve those problem in any case. (I also want to mention that Harris uses this angle to bring up a really petty and completely irrelevant point about identity politics and microaggressions that he supports with an anecdote that sounds very much like some made up bullshit that never happened).
I agree with Harris that religion—not Islam in general but rather the specific Islamic religion of individual members of Hamas—is likely a key motivation for many, if not most or nearly all, Hamas militants. But we have to ask what the actual relationship is that Harris is asserting. Is violent religious rhetoric a sufficient cause for brutal violence? Then why are most Muslims nonviolent? Is religious rhetoric necessary for brutal violence? Then why does such violence occur elsewhere in the world absent overt religious motivation? Is it just a significantly influential factor? Take a look at Harris’s statement here:
Apparently, it’s not enough for an educated person with economic opportunities to devote himself to the most extreme and austere version of Islam, to articulate his religious reasons for doing so ad nauseam, and even to go so far as to confess his certainty about martyrdom on video before blowing himself up in a crowd. Such demonstrations of religious fanaticism are somehow considered rhetorically insufficient to prove that he really believed what he said he believed.
This is a straw man, at least with regards to my own position. Put aside for the moment that “an educated person with economic opportunities” does not describe most Gaza Palestinians, although it’s true that people matching that description are not unknown to commit acts of terrorism. But whether or not the belief system in question is sufficient to motivate such an action, I think that belief alone is rhetorically insufficient for understanding the action, which is about more than just its direct motivation. After all, Islam does not separate the religious domain of human discourse from the political or the economic, and yet critiques of Islam tend to place it under an ideological quarantine, making the beliefs themselves into a kind of prime mover, an uncaused cause. In actuality, we see the religious ideology of Hamas bow to other concerns. For example, recreational drugs under Islam are strictly haram, and yet Hamas has used drug trafficking as a means of financing its operations (Levitt, 2006, p. 70).
Harris makes the very common error of treating religion as being a natural category, a genus of which Islam and Judaism are species, sharing the general properties of religion while differing only in content. He says, “I’ve always had a paradoxical position on Israel. I’ve said that I don’t think it should exist as a Jewish state—because, in my view, organizing a state around a religion is irrational and divisive.” But really, Judaism isn’t the same kind of thing as Christianity or Islam; our calling all three religions is an artificial imposition on things that share some key features but which function in the world in quite different ways. Jews are a people, an ethnicity, with which the Jewish religion is largely but not entirely coextensive. There are Jews who identify very strongly as such who are atheist, for example, and there are people who hold Jewish religious beliefs who are not ethnically Jewish. But by and large, what it means to be “a Jew” is more than just a collection of beliefs. Exact numbers are hard to come by precisely because of the impossibility of separating Jewish ethnic and religious identities, but according to Wikipedia at least, about 45% of Israeli Jews are secular or nonobservant, and about 20% are atheist. Harris’s homogenization of religion is a problem because it facilitates the kind of ideological quarantine that I’m talking about. Human behavior must be studied holistically if we are to understand it.
Ecumenical thinking can help us out here. If you haven’t heard my essays on the subject, the ecumenicon is the material reality of the human symbolic life-world, the connectionist neural network of human minds interconnected by language. All of our concepts, symbols, words, ideas, fictions, stories, and more, as they exist both individually and collectively, are substructures within this network, repeated with differences from one mind to the next but functioning in a unitary way across individuals through language.
Suppose we map the ecumenicon to geography; that is, we model the ecumenicon mathematically and map that model to the geographical locations of the people whose minds form the primary nodes of the ecumenical network. This would be a map of human symbolic reality as it exists geographically. What would this map look like? This is a bit of an oversimplification, but take the concept “liberal” and observe its variations over the territory of the United States. We’d probably see something that looks a bit like voting maps from the last few elections: a certain understanding prevalent in rural areas which transitions to a different understanding in urban areas. These are regions of intensive difference: for any given individual, the concept of liberalism is associated with other concepts, and those associations scale by intensity, with the individual’s understanding of liberalism being the collective of those intensities. At first, this is just telling us what we already know: people in rural America tend to be more hostile to liberalism, while people in cities tend to be more favorable towards it. But the power of this model is that it allows us to think about these intensive differences in a generalized way. Rural Americans are, as a statistical matter, more conservative than urban Americans, but those differences are just one component of a field of intensities that are comparatively similar. We can bring other differences into our model as well, material differences like language and income, and then we start to get a picture of what’s really going on in American culture and society: particular differences of high intensity as deviations from a field of broad similarity.
Where in the world do we see the greatest degree of intensive difference over the smallest area? This is the point with which Benjamin Wittes opens his article: the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip. Most obvious are the material differences: as Wittes points out, using figures from the International Monetary Fund, the per-capita GDP in Israel is $55,000 per year. In Gaza, on the other hand, according to the World Bank, the per-capita GDP is a scant $1,250 per year. If you’re a Gaza Palestinian, every aspect of your understanding of the world will be colored by this privation. Food, shelter, and safety are objective necessities which Gaza Palestinians lack, and these privations are prior to ideology: these are circumstances which almost every Palestinian has been born into. A Palestinian may understand starvation well before learning the Arabic word for “food.” And when they do learn the word for “food,” they’re going to immediately ask why they don’t have any. What kind of explanation do you suppose they’ll get? Certainly not some nuanced look at the difficulties faced by both sides in working towards a stable peace, but rather something a child could understand, and the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky notes in a 2017 book about human behavior that Us/Them dichotomies are hard-wired into the amygdala and insular cortex and so are easily graspable by children. The amygdala is the brain’s emotional core and the insular cortex integrates emotion with bodily experiences, such as hunger, as well as mediating social emotions like empathy.
Ideology, including religion, is promulgated within this environment. No one can look at the circumstances of their life with pure objectivity. It’s not just that too much is at stake; rather, there is a fundamental ontological gap in our experience of the world. Ideology is a frame into which the contents of our lives are inserted; Slavoj Žižek calls this the parallax view. Parallax is the apparent change in the positions of objects when they are viewed from different angles. If you’re riding in a car and looking out the side window at a distant mountain range, the mountains are going to appear to be moving along much more slowly than closer objects, like road signs. Ideology works the same way, shifting the symbolic appearance of everything in our lives. Harris wants to simplify a complex system by restricting his ideological focus to religion and ignoring the circumstantial content which ideology always serves to frame. According to Sapolsky (2017), our genes aren’t hard-wired for phenotypes the way we generally suppose but rather have a complex interaction with the environment: genetics don’t determine being; rather, environment determines how genetics manifest. Not only does this indicate that the nature/nurture debate has fallen heavily on the side of nurture, I suspect that memes—not internet memes but the “genetic” units of cultural and ideological coding—work the same way: it’s not that beliefs determine behavior (as Harris has said elsewhere) but that environment determines how beliefs determine behavior.
I am not making a direct moral argument here. I’m not claiming that the material or conceptual circumstances of the Gaza Strip excuse, permit, or forbid any particular action, past or future, on either side. The October 7th attacks were morally indefensible. Any strikes launched by the Israelis which lack a specific objective germaine to defeating Hamas while minimizing civilian casualties whenever possible would be similarly indefensible. But, as I said earlier, human behavior is stochastically determinant. It is a brute fact that people deprived of basic necessities will act in certain ways and not in other ways. Whether they’re deprived justly is simply irrelevant to predicting and understanding behavior. Given an ideology, no matter how violent or peaceful its implications may appear on the surface, people will interpret it in violent ways given the right circumstances. Whether this interpretation is “correct” or in keeping with the spirit of the ideology’s founders is completely irrelevant. Send all the Islamic theologians into the Gaza Strip you want, they’re not going to be convincing anyone not to interpret Islam in a way that conflicts with their hatred of the people blowing up their children (and, as a point of reference, as of this writing, more than 3,600 Palestinian children have been killed in the conflict (Debre & Shurafa, 2023)).
If we were to suppose that the policies of Israel with regards to Gaza were entirely justified, that every single Gaza Palestinian deserves to be treated exactly as they have been by Israel—a hard argument to make given the age distribution of the Gaza population—that would do nothing to change the fact that those same policies made the October 7th attacks or something like them entirely inevitable. If the collective punishment applied to Gaza were entirely deserved, we would still have to ask Israel whether the desire to inflict punishment were worth exposing its own population to these sorts of attacks. Again, that doesn’t justify the attacks themselves, but our moral condemnation is not any sort of preventative measure. And if the collective punishment is undeserved, then we have to ask what Israel even wants to accomplish. Because however much Israel state media talk about Israel’s right to its own defense, it seems very much to be the case that the state is callously putting its own citizens in unnecessary danger.
Remember that quote from the Wittes article on Lawfare: “The state’s most fundamental purpose is the protection of its citizens. A state that fails militarily to defend its people forsakes its reason to exist.” This Hobbesian sort of justification for state power is rather naïve and antiquated; the purpose of a state, its final cause and telos, is its own expansion and reproduction. States for which this is not the case cease to exist; all other concerns are secondary. Obviously some measure of citizen protection is necessary, but we’ve seen as a matter of historical record that states which can ignore or even sacrifice a segment of their own population to serve their expansion and reproduction will do so to the furthest extent they can get away with. This is another case in which, however we might judge the situation morally, the reality will proceed independent of that judgement.
Keep in mind the economic considerations here. Israel spends more on defense per capita than any nation in the world except Qatar. The defense industry is a major driving force of the Israeli economy. They sell arms to anyone willing to buy them, with previous customers including the Government Junta of Chile under Augusto Pinochet, Pahlavi Iran under the Shah, apartheid South Africa, Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship, Hutu militias in the leadup to and possibly even during the Rwandan genocide, and many others (Loewenstein, 2023). What’s more, the unique conflict conditions of Israel means that its defense industry has ample opportunity to refine and test new products; it then advertises those products on the international market with specific reference to that process, using slogans like “battle-tested” and using combat footage in advertising materials (ibid.). The strong field of intensive difference in the Levant generates a well-deserved reputation: Israel is both surrounded and interpenetrated by enemies; it is famously one of the most embattled nations in the world, and its continued survival indicates a robust defense system.
Palestinian uprisings have global economic benefits. They’re good for business. The conflict in Ukraine has increased defense spending, boosted defense contractor revenues, and shaped an overall optimistic outlook with regards to the defense sector (Stone, 2023; Cavendish et al. 2022; Heckman, 2023); I’m not a market analyst and I couldn’t say whether the conflict in the Levant will do the same, but we can at least say that there is the potential for general economic benefits from the crisis. Defense contractors in Israel clearly benefit and act to capitalize on those benefits, and regularly partner with technology companies, with Israel having one of the fastest growing technology sectors in the world. Israeli media benefit, as millions tune in for information about the latest attacks. The attacks justify the government and its policies, and Israel simultaneously receives billions of dollars of foreign aid from the United States. Israel is getting paid for their treatment of the Palestinian people.
There are economic considerations for Hamas as well. Hamas is presently a keystone organization of the State as it exists in Gaza and it wants to stay that way. By fighting Israel, Hamas acts in the interests of other Islamic nations, such as Iran, which aided in planning the October 7th attacks. Just prior to the attacks, Saudi Arabia was moving forward with a U.S.-backed plan to normalize relations with Israel. Saudi Arabia and Iran have been at odds for quite some time and only normalized their own relations in March of this year (“Iran and Saudi Arabia agree to restore relations,” 2023); normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia would have shifted the balance of power in the region against Iran. That plan was scuppered after October 7th. Hamas relies extensively on charitable donations ostensibly directed towards the welfare of the Palestinian people; these funds are then redirected towards its military efforts (Levitt, 2006). Palestinian suffering—and, more importantly, the image of that suffering as it appears in the media—is quite lucrative for Hamas.
Islamic extremism is often situated strongly against global capitalism; after all, the 9/11 attacks were targeted, in part, at the World Trade Center, both an operational nexus of global capital and a prominent symbol of the same. Granted, the Islamic opposition to capitalism often has an explicitly antisemitic framing, with the term “globalist” having become a racist dog whistle for “Jew.” But whatever the source of the opposition, it’s ironic that Hamas is employed in the production of a valuable commodity: the media image. Hamas militants armed themselves for the October 7th attack not only with firearms but with GoPros and cell phone cameras, recording footage of the attack and even streaming it live in a disgusting celebration of brutal, hateful violence. Israel—specifically the office of IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagari—then compiled this footage, taken from the internet and from the devices of killed or captured terrorists, into a 43-minute film which was then screened for selected audiences, including members of the Knesset (Israel’s legislative body), as well as to select diplomats and members of the foreign press (Staff, 2023). There are understandable motivations for this: the world has a bad habit of denying bad things that happened to the Jewish people. But the symbolic production and image production of modern warfare unavoidably spill into the market. Images such as that of Palestinian militants surrounding a burning Israeli tank proliferate in the market as commodities; they have a use-value and a commodity function within the market, visually framing the event for the global audience. The militants are content creators, and their content becomes a part of a broader media narrative.
I’ve heard it said that if the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace; whereas, if the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be a genocide. Harris quotes that in the podcast episode I mentioned earlier. It’s one of those pithy, dichotomous statements that puts things in simple terms for people unwilling or unable to face the real complexity of the world. Clearly, this is not a symmetrical conflict in many respects. Hamas has formally used genocidal language towards Israel and the Jewish people and I think probably would try to wipe them out given the opportunity; at the same time, it’s clear that Israel has what could very generously be described as a high tolerance for civilian casualties—a Lawfare article by Mark Lattimer makes a strong case for exactly that position: “The accepted circumstances of the Oct. 31 Jabalia [refugee camp] attack [by Israel] and the light shed by the IDF statement on planning for the attack suggest that Israel’s tolerance for civilian casualties is now completely out of step with that employed by the U.S. and its coalition partners in the war against ISIS and other counterterrorism operations in Iraq and Afghanistan over two decades” (2023). Palestinians who have put down or who have never taken up weapons are not being met with peace but rather are being killed in large numbers. Further, there are 2 million people living in the Gaza Strip. There’s a hospital and a university in Gaza City; that means they have doctors and scholars. And I’m certain that there is a non-trivial population of Palestinians in Gaza who found out about what Hamas did on October 7th and were rightly disgusted by it, however angry they might still be at Israel. I looked at one study that suggested a 43% endorsement among Palestinians for finding a non-violent solution to the conflict. Is that the case? I don’t know, it’s just one study. But what if it’s even just 25 percent? That’s about 500,000 people in Gaza that we can then assume really did not want any of this to happen. Israel describes its own strategy towards Palestine as “mowing the grass” (Taylor, 2021), which is descriptive of a policy of periodic reprisals to beat back resistance without doing anything to address the underlying situation. In fact, it makes the underlying situation sound desirable: grassy lawns are positive features that just need to be kept under control. But also, grass is homogenous; the Palestinian people are not.
I can’t offer any solutions to the conflict and even if I could, I doubt anyone is making policy based on my essays. But the more immediate problem is that the conflict has taken on a kind of realism: it’s become impossible to even imagine a solution or a future in which the problem has been solved. It’s true that there is probably no solution where the violence just ends tomorrow and everyone starts getting along. But one of the main points I want to get across in these episodes is that the conflict is not fundamentally driven by race or religion. Yes, those factors play a major role and condition how the conflict has progressed and will continue to progress, but the core problem, as I see it, is economic: Israeli and global markets profit at the expense of Palestinian civilians, and at the expense of Israeli civilians injured, kidnapped, or killed in the resulting violence. Framing the conflict as being essentially about race and religion, saying “Jews and Arab Muslims hate each other and that’s just the way it is,” is a way of justifying the conflict, of making it seem natural and inevitable. So I think we have to start by rejecting that narrative and pointing the discourse towards the underlying economic incentives driving 21st century global conflict.
Works Cited or Referenced
- Cavendish, G., Chinn, D., Grießmann, N., Lavandier, H., & Otto, T. (19 December 2022). Invasion of Ukraine: Implications for European defense spending. McKinsey and Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/aerospace-and-defense/our-insights/invasion-of-ukraine-implications-for-european-defense-spending
- Debre, I. & Shurafa, W. (2 November, 2023). More than 3,600 Palestinian children were killed in just 3 weeks of war. Associated Press. https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-11-1-2023-children-killed-4a352398b32887e60a658e0270f0a021
- Hamas Covenant 1988. In the Yale Law School Lillian Goldman Law Library. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp
- Harris, S. (7 November 2023). The bright line between good and evil. https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-bright-line-between-good-and-evil
- Heckmann, L. (20 June 2023). PARIS AIR SHOW NEWS: Ukraine, China Dictate Global Trends in Defense Spending. National Defense Magazine. https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2023/6/20/ukraine-china-dictate-global-trends-in-defense-spending#:~:text=PARIS%20%E2%80%94%20Upward%20trends%20in,a%20potential%20conflict%20with%20China
- Iran and Saudi Arabia agree to restore relations (10 March 2023). In Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/3/10/iran-and-saudi-agree-to-restore-relations#:~:text=10%20Mar%202023,The
- Jeffrey, J. (14 October 2023). What 50 years of wars in the Middle East tell us about Gaza. In Lawfare. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-50-years-of-wars-in-the-middle-east-tell-us-about-gaza
- Lattimer, M. (16 November 2023). Assessing Israel’s approach to proportionality in the conduct of hostilities in Gaza. Lawfare. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/assessing-israel-s-approach-to-proportionality-in-the-conduct-of-hostilities-in-gaza
- Levitt, M. (2006). Hamas: Politics, charity, and terrorism in the service of jihad. Yale University Press.
- Loewenstein, A. (2023). The Palestine laboratory: How Israel exports the technology of occupation around the world. Verso.
- Public Opinion Poll no. 88. (14 June 2023). In the Palestinian Center for Policy and Research. https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/940
- Said, S., Faucon, B., & Kalin, S. (8 October 2023). Iran helped plot attack on Israel over several weeks. In The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iran-israel-hamas-strike-planning-bbe07b25
- Sapolsky, R.M. (2017). Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst. Penguin Press.
- Staff, T. (1 November 2023). MKs are shown raw videos of Hamas atrocities; some leave in tears. In The Times of Israel. https://www.timesofisrael.com/mks-are-shown-raw-videos-of-hamas-atrocities-some-leave-in-tears/
- Stone, M. (27 October 2023). Ukraine war orders starting to boost revenues for big US defense contractors. In Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ukraine-war-orders-starting-boost-revenues-big-us-defense-contractors-2023-10-27/#:~:text=The%20Russian%20invasion%20of%20Ukraine,and%20countries%20around%20Europe
- Taylor, A. (14 May 2021). With strikes targeting rockets and tunnels, the Israeli tactic of ‘mowing the grass’ returns to Gaza. In The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/05/14/israel-gaza-history/
- Wittes, B. (17 October 2023). On strategy, law, and morality in Israel’s Gaza operation. In Lawfare. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/on-strategy-law-and-morality-in-israel-s-gaza-operation