You may have seen the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast where journalist Douglas Murray and comedian Dave Smith exchange barbs about whether there was a famine or a deficit of goods in the Gaza Strip following the 2005 disengagement, whether Gaza was in effect an open-air prison and whether there was a blockade of the territory.
It’s gone viral for a reason. But before I move forward, I have two admissions to make to remain 100% transparent.
Until this podcast, I had never heard of Dave Smith. Maybe he’s a funny comedian, maybe he isn’t. Maybe he should stick to comedy and not regularly weigh in on something he self-admittedly has no firsthand knowledge of.
Also, I stopped listening to Rogan’s podcast shortly after Oct. 7, 2023, when in his “quest to find the truth,” he gave his platform to hateful, bigoted, ignorant people who used that opportunity to spew vicious lies about a “genocide” going on in Gaza. Rogan even acknowledged to Murray on air that he has yet to have a pro-Israel guest whose sole purpose for being on the show is to explain Israel’s perspective.
As for Murray, I watched his incredulity at Smith’s admission of having never been to the Middle East, let alone Gaza, I felt a niggle in the back of my brain; this rising fear that, while these two people were talking about one topic, they might be talking about two different things. Was it possible that the individuals in this debate were, in essence, speaking two different languages and having two different conversations?
A follow-up discussion on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” where Smith appeared with John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at West Point, instead of Murray, continued the debate and shed more light on the problem. Spencer is arguably one of the world’s leading experts on urban warfare and someone who has regularly defended Israel’s tactics in Gaza as being legal under the laws of war. He was on the show to support Murray’s arguments and debate Smith about the legality of Israel’s actions in Gaza.
It was during their exchange, as I became more and more frustrated at Spencer’s inability to dismantle Smith’s arguments, that I realized what had been bothering me from the interview on the Rogan’s show. During both interviews, Smith was arguing about the morality of war and was using Israel as a case study with which to bash war.
Meanwhile, Murray and Spencer were arguing about the legality of war. Two completely different topics, and this hit me as I watched Smith getting increasingly exasperated with Spencer, who kept going back to the laws of war and to a lesser degree, the history of war.
Smith wants to exist in the world of vague, idealistic theories about whether war is moral or not. This, let’s be honest, is nearly impossible to argue against. Most people would agree that war probably is not the most moral thing in the most literal meaning of the term, but whether we believe war is moral or not, it exists. War always has been, and unless human beings fundamentally change their DNA, war always will be.
So, instead of arguing whether it is moral to make war, civilizations need to create boundaries within which wars can be fought, hence the internationally agreed upon laws of war. Smith didn’t want to debate whether Israel’s actions in Gaza were legal or illegal; he just wanted to argue that they are immoral. This is a conclusion people draw if they remove facts and law from their equation. If war is immoral because civilians die, then yes, Israel’s actions would be considered immoral.
However, if Smith were to step down from his moral high horse—from where he observes the world and casts his net of moral utopianism onto a world that is not a utopia—he might realize a few things. He might realize that war is horrible and that when wars are fought, innocent civilians die. He might realize that in the prosecution of war, some actors do all they can to reduce the loss of innocent life, while there are other actors whose very strategy in war is to maximize the loss of innocent life. They, of course, do this so they can use that carnage as a weapon against their adversary as well, which is what is happening in Gaza today.
Smith might also realize that if the loss of innocent life were so important to avoid, then the actors, in this case Hamas, should not start a war and then fight it from behind or beneath innocent civilians. Israel, I might add, does the opposite; it puts the lives of its soldiers on the line to protect the lives of people in Gaza, and this has cost Israel dearly.
It’s time for Smith to take his head out of the clouds, plant his feet back on terra firma and understand that wars are never fought in sterile environments, devoid of civilians, where all combatants observe the same rules or follow the same laws. If they were, we would not be having this conversation.
One final thing: Israel did not want this war and did not start this war. But morally speaking, we must acknowledge that Israel has a moral obligation to its citizens to prosecute this war to its conclusion. To do anything less would be immoral and a violation of the government’s duty to protect its people.
If Hamas laid down its arms tomorrow and returned the hostages, the war would end. If Israel laid down its arms … well, then maybe Smith would be sitting with Rogan talking about how sickened he is by all the dead Jews, but, then again, maybe he wouldn’t.