Report by David Warden
Background and context
On 29 December 2023, South Africa filed a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing it of committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Presiding judge Joan Donoghue ruled that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide but not, as sometimes claimed, that the case of genocide itself was ‘plausible’ (the court has not made any ruling on this as yet). A report in March 2024 by the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide has been met.
Steven Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular science author known for his work in evolutionary psychology and the science of language. He identifies as a humanist and his 2018 book Enlightenment Now made the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress as essential to improving the human condition. In a recent interview with The Free Press, Pinker described the ‘genocide’ allegation against Israel in its war against Gaza as a ‘blood libel’ in the sense that, as an accusation of deliberate murder, it is ill-founded. He claimed that ‘it is a sign of how people’s moralising in the service of demonising and dichotomising, dividing the world into good and evil, can flatten their ability to analyse and think clearly’. The term ‘blood libel’ refers to the historic and malicious antisemitic myth that falsely accuses Jews of murdering Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals. Pinker himself is of Jewish heritage.
A transcript of the relevant section of the interview is given below:
Free Press: I think there's evidence of the thesis of your book when you see young people who have seen nothing in life but they're smart enough to get into very august institutions telling me that genocide is happening, um, with a small number of people relative to, say, Syria, where 500-600,000 people died. Is that because people just don't have a sense of what war has been in the past?
Steven Pinker: I think it's a case where the "myside bias," where just the drive to moralise, obliterates rational consideration. Not only in terms of magnitude was Syria much worse than Gaza. By the standards of measuring war, Gaza, at least so far, is what you would call a small war—it kills in the tens of thousands. Now, that's horrible, and each one of those deaths is a tragedy, but there have been wars that kill in the hundreds of thousands, such as the Syrian Civil War, and in the millions or tens of millions, such as the World Wars. So there's that dimension. But in addition, there's a huge difference between people getting killed in the course of a war designed to achieve other objectives and people being targeted for murder in order to murder those people as a group or as a lot of individuals. But yes, as a group, which is really what defines genocide. The application of the word genocide to refer to tens of thousands of war deaths is, I mean, I think it is a kind of blood libel. It's trying to import the moral approbation that we associate with genocide to the designated enemy, in this case, Israel. I think because of where I alluded to myside bias, the sides in this case being the sides that a lot of hard-left critical theory has defined, namely white oppressors against everyone else's victims.
Free Press: Which ignores the Mizrahi Jewish population in Israel, but yeah, among other things. But, I mean, you say it's a blood libel. I mean, it's pretty strong to say this is like a blood libel.
Steven Pinker: Well, it is a blood libel in the sense that as an accusation of deliberate murder, it is ill-founded. One could disagree with Israel's campaign against Gaza and say that this is not justifiable, it's not a just war, but it's still different from deliberately murdering as many people as possible. And we know there have been genocides. No, I think it really is a terrible blood libel and a sign of how people's moralising in the service of demonising and dichotomising, dividing the world into good and evil, can flatten their ability to analyse and think clearly.
Source
Steven Pinker: Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things – the above transcript is from 35.00-38.00.
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