On Palestine: Empathy Changes Zero Facts

logic, like nature, is indifferent

---

This essay is intended to provide a description of reality, not a prescription for what the people in authority, either in Israel or her allies, should do. I am grateful that I have the good fortune of writing about these things from my safe, comfortable home instead of being faced with making the least-bad choice from a set of terrible choices with universally awful consequences. My interest here is in a clear elucidation of the reality and logic involved, nothing more.

---

Mathematical Reasoning: Logic and Game Theory

In number theory, my favorite branch of mathematics, one way of tackling a hard problem is to create a smaller version of it and solve that first. Instead of trying to first prove that there are infinite prime numbers, for example, proving that the set {2, 3, 5, 7, 11} are not the only primes is a good start.

The principles that apply to a very small version of a logical problem can almost always help solve a bigger logical problem with more wide-ranging implications.

What Is Game Theory?

Game theory is the branch of mathematics concerned with strategy—with the consequences of choices made by rational agents. If you’re not into mathematics, that may not mean very much to you, so here’s both a general and a specific, personal example of game theory.

The idea of “mutually assured destruction” is a good example of game theory. During the Cold War, the US believed that the USSR wouldn’t drop a nuke because they knew that we would drop nukes in return. Each side counted on their understanding of the other side’s rational desires to predict responses, and strategized accordingly.

Here’s a more personal example, and one that shows why considering the other person’s morality and circumstances is important, to whatever extent you know them. Ceteris peribus (“all things being equal”) is almost never the case.

My senior year of college, I was taking a 400-level statistics class, and we had an exam coming up. The professor uploaded study guides to Blackboard, the interactive system my university used, before each exam. I was taking all math courses that semester and in a constant state of panic, given the homework and exam load of five math courses, so I checked Blackboard about every thirty seconds when waiting for the study guide to be available. When it appeared, I downloaded it instantly. When the PDF opened, I realized that he had not uploaded the study guide—he had uploaded the actual exam.

I closed it at once and sighed, since an extremely tempting moral dilemma was nothing I had the energy to fight. I was on the B-/C+ border in that class, and an A on this exam would do wonders.

I cogitated for about five minutes. I was pretty sure I could get away with it. I was a diligent student who had perfect attendance; I was well-known for haunting both the office hours of the professor and the tutoring hours staffed by the students in the statistics PhD program. An A from someone who worked as hard as I obviously did, even after lackluster grades so far, would have a null hypothesis (in statistics, a synonym for “the explanation that gets the benefit of the doubt”) of the hard work finally paying off. I was tempted. Very, very tempted.

The game theory of the situation provided an immediate nudge to indulge my darker impulse. If other students were also sitting on Blackboard, reloading to get the study guide ASAP, then by deleting the exam I would put myself at a disadvantage relative to my classmates. Would any of them delete it? I didn’t know any of them well enough to be sure, but I guessed not. They were all going to have the questions in advance, most likely—why shouldn’t I?

But I didn’t want to get a good grade by cheating. I wanted to understand the theory, and to be sure I understood it by successfully implementing the theory on the exam. More than anything, I didn’t want the anxiety burden of wondering if the professor—who I genuinely liked and respected—secretly knew I had cheated. I also recognized my lack of confidence, the source of a great deal of distress, was an ongoing and serious problem that would be exacerbated if I improved my grade by cheating.

I made the right choice, but not from virtue. I wish I could claim that personal integrity was my motivation, but it was not. From the selfishness and self-interest of not making my own problems any worse—an interest of mine that outweighed the game theoretic notions of all my classmates potentially having an advantage I did not—I deleted the PDF and emailed my professor to tell him what he’d done.

He got my email almost instantly and had deleted the PDF from Blackboard within a couple of minutes. His reply email thanked me and asked me directly: “Did you delete the exam you downloaded?”

I answered honestly. “It took me a couple of minutes of wrestling with both my conscience and my understanding of game theory, but yes, I did. It’s gone, and I only read the first two problems. I closed it once I was sure I was looking at the exam.” I got an 88 on that exam, five points better than I’d done on anything in that class so far. Most of my classmates did better. Did they cheat? I don’t know. You only take a 400 level statistics class if you’re both deeply interested in and reasonably skilled at math, so there’s no reason to expect a normal distribution of grades. Maybe some did. Maybe they all did. I didn’t care. Game theory was a consideration, and an important one, but I had other considerations that mattered more.

Let’s now consider a small version of the problem that Israel is presented with, and look at both the logic and game theory involved in possible responses.

Consider A Hypothetical From A Possible Future

If the flavor of libertarianism whose adherents are most influential on social media — anarchists who believe in capitalism, known as “ancaps” — get their way, we will have a future in which the government does not exist. The last couple of years have taught me that the seemingly unlikely is something we have to consider. So let’s consider it.

Imagine that there is no more government. No ruling authorities to whom you can appeal. 911 reaches a volunteer who will mass-text a team that includes a few medics and an ambulance driver or the volunteer fire department—but no police, because there are no police. Your private property rights and all your other rights are up to you to enforce. You’ve made a loose confederation of allies among your neighbors, but they have to take care of their own families and interests, too, so in the case of anything perceived to be a threat to all of you, they stay home to care for their own.

You have a wife and seven children, and while of course the world is a lot harder than it was in the days of laws, you and yours have managed ok, mostly.

A neighbor moves into the empty house on your street, bringing with him three or four women and the children he’s made with them, eighteen children from babies up to about fourteen.

Within a few days of his moving in, he starts going on what would, in the days of governments, have been called a crime spree.

He straps infant carriers to his chest and back, puts a gurgling baby in each, and heads out. At first he sticks to property crimes. He breaks into homes, steals what he wants, and smirks as you and other neighbors, despite being well-armed, watch in horror. Sometimes he brings his children, having them grab what he points at while he grins at you.

He moves fast; it’s much more likely than not that if you shoot, you’ll hit a baby, not him. Even if you got him with a perfect head shot, one or the other baby would be hurt when a running man fell atop them.

You’d rather give up your TV than hurt or kill a baby, so you let him have your TV.

And your laptop.

And your lawn mower.

And your children’s laptops.

And your emergency supply of medication.

And all your cash.

It gets bad enough that you consider moving, but your exploration of the idea is quickly shut down. The new, post-government, anarchist world is, predictably, set up into small regions ruled by ruthless, well-armed men. And in order to get to one that would welcome you, you have to apply, and travel through some of their territories. Thanks to your neighbor, you no longer have the resources it would take to pay off the neighboring rulers to allow you and your family safe passage.

You’re stuck, and forced to consider the possibility that you must eventually either lose everything or kill an infant.

The next time you leave your house, when you come home you find him raping your wife — your well-armed wife — with two babies strapped onto his back. Her hands are tied above her head and the infants are gurgling at the up-down motion and the ride they’re getting as his back goes up and down with every thrust.

He finishes as you rush to the wall where your guns are kept, quickly pulls his pants up and rotates one baby to his chest. Laughing, he leaves, knowing you won’t do a damn thing.

And you don’t. You won’t kill an infant.

Two weeks later, you have to leave to barter for some of what you need at the local market.

When you come home, he’s kidnapped three of your children. Your wife, still traumatized from being raped, is curled up in a catatonic horror. She can’t tell you what happened, but one of your other children, who managed to hide and not be taken, tells you what happened.

Your phone goes off. It’s your neighbor, sending you a video in which he laughs while he rapes your 8-year-old daughter.

You’re frozen in horror when your friends and neighbors start appearing. He kidnapped several of their children, too, and they received similar videos.

You discuss your options, and someone points out that they have both the ability and the knowledge to rig a bomb that could, via drone, be dropped on his house, killing everyone inside.

He goes home that night and rigs them, returning in a few hours to turn the drone and bomb over to you.

It would take out your own kidnapped children—for whom, given what’s on that video—you’re now convinced that death would be a mercy.

And it would, of course, take out his wives, who have done nothing to you, and kill all of his innocent children.

But it would end his reign of terror.

What would you do?

Can you see that, whether you would rig the bomb and send the drone or not, you’re already making a choice for the deaths of children? That your neighbor will not stop until he is dead, and that he counts on your ethics and morals to force you to allow him his reign of terror?

Can you see that your own restraint is the reason why your children are doomed, either way — your not-yet-kidnapped kids in the future if you don’t bomb, your kidnapped ones in the present if you do?

Many of you who see that this is a small version of the larger problem that Israel faces are now thinking up counter-arguments that involve justifiable and laudable empathy for Palestinians, especially those who lost their homes when Israel was founded in the late 1940s.

Expanding the small version out into a larger one—how many children would it take for you to refrain from sending the drone with the bomb?

Would you let his tactic work indefinitely if he had only one child? Two? Ten? Thirty? A thousand? Two thousand?

There is surely a point where it would be too many children, and most of you probably can’t explain why or where. Why would you drop the bomb on his house if he had one child, but not ten, or a hundred, or a thousand?

If he had one more child in there than your personal limit, might you commit murder-suicide of your own family, to spare yourself having to make this choice?

Some may not blame you for doing so, but surely no one would feel they had the right to insist that you do….right?

The Limits of Empathy

Empathy for people who have been wronged, who then take revenge, is natural. But what are its proper limits?

Imagine you are serving on the jury of a murder trial.

The defendant grew up in a religious cult, one that taught literal interpretations of the Bible, including “Blows and wounds scrub away evil, and beatings purge the inmost being” and “Withhold not correction from the child: For if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, And shalt deliver his soul from hell.” (Proverbs 20:30, 23:13-14).

The defense attorney presents a compelling case, convincing you entirely that the defendant had a monstrous childhood, brutal on every level, and is deeply, terribly, and profoundly damaged by it. You have zero doubt that he was wronged, profoundly and terribly, as a result of the injustice.

The defense attorney doesn’t even pretend that he isn’t guilty. This is about trying to convince you that the victims had it coming so you’ll either jury-nullify or convict of a lesser offense only.

Would you be tempted to show mercy to someone who killed their childhood tormentors painlessly? Who broke into their house while they were sleeping and shot them in the head? I know that I would.

What about someone in this defendant’s shoes who tortured their tormentors to death, slowly and agonizingly, over days? You may agree that the world is no worse for losing the monsters he killed, but still—are you eager to set that person free?

What about someone who paid for an army of thugs and broke into the church who taught his parents their theology, raping all the women, burning the babies in the nursery alive, and slitting the men’s throats?

You probably wouldn’t want to let that person go, under any circumstances, no matter how much sympathy you felt for the legitimate anger that drove them.

What if the injustice was done, not to them, but to their grandparents?

Would you have any sympathy?

It’s an imperfect analogy, of course, and I’m not claiming otherwise.

My only point is to ask you to consider what the limits of empathy are. At what point is a person or group of people required to move on from a past injustice and stop seeking revenge? What kind of trauma justifies barbarism in response?

Or to put it another way — how much sympathy would you have for the grandchild of Holocaust survivors who, after a lifetime of real and serious anti-Semitic persecution, went on a rape-and-murder spree in Germany?

Choices, Consequences, and the West’s Response

In my opinion, intersectionality is behind the West’s horrifying responses to what happened in Israel. The West is full of cheerleading, from college professors smugly asking, “What did you think decolonization involved? Filing paperwork?” The screenshots below are just to give you one example; academic Twitter has many, as do the campus protests. Many of the pro-Palestine protests have signs reading, “Decolonization is not a metaphor” and other such messages. They mean it. They see what Hamas did to Israelis as righteous resistance.

To, even more appalling, chants of “Gas the Jews!” and college campuses chanting, “They’ve got tanks! We’ve got hang gliders!” (Note the “We” there, allying specifically with the rapists and murderers, not Palestinians in general.)

What Intersectionality Has To Do With It

Here is my primer on how intersectionality got us to where we are. Short version: once intersectionality as a worldview has been inculcated, all “oppressed” people are automatically and instantly justified in any response to their “oppressors". If even one case of an “oppressed” person being unjustified is named, the whole intersectional house of cards comes tumbling down. This is why the most prominent intersectional organizations in the West have firmly applauded what happened and call for America to be similarly decolonized. Believe them—they mean it.

The Middle East was always a hotbed of anti-Semitic hate. The West has become a place where anti-Semitic hate is accepted because the intersectional lens demands it. The Palestinians are poor, brown, and practice what is perceived by the intersectional set as the most “marginalized” religion. If anything the Palestinians do, either directly or through their elected government, Hamas, is wrong and unjustifiable, then the whole intersectional house of cards comes tumbling down.

(Note: Hamas was elected in 2006, and to be fair it’s unclear how much genuine popular support—vs terror of reprisal if opposition is expressed—they enjoy.)

One thing that’s being said repeatedly, as Israel begins its military response, is that it’s commiting “genocide.” Some have even said that Israel has always wanted to commit genocide and was just waiting for this event as an excuse. Israel has been a nuclear power for decades—decades during which the population of Palestine has grown tremendously, so if they’re interested in genocide they kind of suck at it.

Israel’s game theoretic choices are now pretty damn stark, and they must consider the morality and situation of the people involved.

Israel can do whatever it takes to prevent another attack where their people, including children and other civilians, will be kidnapped, raped, murdered, and subjected to barbarism like we saw during this—livestreaming these atrocities to inflict maximum trauma and horror—trying to minimize civilian casualties, but still inflicting many. Yes. Many, many children will die if Israel does whatever it takes to end Hamas.

There is simply no way to protect children whose parents and government are perfectly willing, in many cases eager, to see them martyred for a cause. People who proudly declare, “You love life, we love to sacrifice ourselves” should be taken at their word, especially when they prove it over and over.

This is all-or-nothing; the tactic of using children as human shields is either a trump card, protecting against serious military reprisals, or it is not. We may not like this reality, but it is the reality with which Israel is presented.

So Israel can do whatever it takes to end Hamas….or it can use restraint and not do so.

As far as I can tell, there are only two benefits to Israel of not ending Hamas. It will prevent the trauma of knowing that their enemies forced them into violating their own morality and ethics by killing children, and it will prevent handing their neighbors a fresh round of material to use in stoking more anti-Semitic hatred.

Given that their neighbors—and, to my personal shame as an American, quite a lot of Americans—have already shown that they are burning up with anti-Semitic hatred, I really don’t see why Israel should consider world response in its calculus. What is the world going to do if they end Hamas, even with a lot of civilian casualties? What do they have left to fear—that the world will chant “Gas the Jews!” and hold pro-Hamas cheerleading rallies? Have marches down the streets of London declaring that the Jews will be found and their blood spilled? Seize and beat Jews in the streets? We’re already doing all of that in the West.

The West is not directly responsible for the complicated and complex history that created this imbroglio, but the West’s embrace of intersectionality as a de facto cultural religion has put Israel in a situation where their own assessments of what they’re willing to live with having done are their only restraint.

Because the West started criticizing Israel for cutting off power to the region where the rapists, kidnappers, and murderers were holding the Israeli hostages—instead of demanding Hamas surrender and return them—Israel is now in a position where they may well be thinking, “We're well past issues of conscience and into the territory of pure pragmatism here—Hamas has turned our conscience into a gun pointed at our head for two generations now. If we continue to allow ourselves to volunteer for that game, we have lost."

They have to balance their willingness to live with having killed civilians against setting themselves up to lose more of their children to kidnapping, rape, and murder.

I don’t know what I would do, if the choice were up to me. I am grateful that the choice is not mine. I would die at my own hand, peacefully and with a sense of honor, if my choice was to do so or kill your child.

But if my choice was to kill your child as an inadvertent consequence of killing you (particularly after repeatedly warning you that I was coming and advising the UN to help you evacuate, to which you responded by daring me to go ahead, insisting you would prefer to die), or to set my own child up to be kidnapped, raped, and murdered by you? I suspect I’d rather kill your child, even if to do so I must murder my own soul, than assure such a future for my own child—and surely the Israelis will feel the same, and act accordingly.

This is the choice Israel is forced with, and we in the West are largely responsible for it. Our embrace of intersectional bullshit created the celebratory response to Hamas atrocities, and our refusal to admit that our house of cards is exactly that—that intersectionality, our cultural worldview and religion, is a farce—means that it will only get worse. All the institutions of the West, particularly the elite ones, are now just a bunch of people constantly viewing themselves and others through lenses of “power and privilege” to the exclusion of morality.

It will only get worse.

It can only get worse.

Terrorism Will Get Worse

The easiest prediction imaginable in this situation is that terrorism is going to get a lot worse in both the short and long-term future. Other “oppressed” people are watching this and seeing how much support Hamas is getting from elite circles in the US. If livestreaming barbarism is acceptable “resistance,” then there is no restraint required from the “oppressed,” period, under any circumstances. This is, of course, the logical consequence of intersectional analysis, and we deserve what we’re going to get.

We Have Done This To Ourselves

We have swallowed intersectional bullshit to such a degree that all of us are affected by it to some extent, and most of us much more affected than we realize. The primacy of identity and the baseline assumption—that certain identities are de facto justified in their behavior towards people with certain other identities in the progressive hierarchy—has created this situation, where the kidnapping, rape, and murder of children is something that requires nuance, rather than immediate condemnation. Why? It’s as simple as it is asinine, as plainly obvious as it is tragic: because the kidnappers, rapists, and murderers were brown and perceived as oppressed.

Nuance is what they demand here—as opposed to in situations like college students choosing Halloween costumes or the use of terms like “blacklist” or “master bedroom,” which require immediate and forceful responses.

There are no winners here, and there will be many losers.

The people, in both Israel and her allies, who must decide how to respond have my sympathy as much as every innocent person involved does—the children of Gaza, the kidnapped babies crying for their mothers, the raped hostages who would, by now, prefer to be dead.

There are no good choices here, but there is a very stark reality.

Reality doesn’t go away when we refuse to look squarely at it.

The situation is a tragedy and a moral catastrophe, but it is important to recognize the reality of it, to see it directly and clearly and without flinching.

The psychopathic neighbor who loves terrorizing you more than he loves his own children gets to use your principles against you, hold you to your own standards of morality while bound by no standards himself, and therefore set all the terms and control everyone for as long as he lives.

Or he doesn’t.

---

I expect to lose many subscribers over posting this, as it will be perceived as carte blanche supporting Israel’s response, though it is nothing of the kind. I’ve got other things going on now that require my emotional energy so comments are now closed.

---

About Me and My Substack: I’m a data scientist whose great love is mathematics, but I also enjoy writing. My posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.

Paid subscribers get access to occasional creative writing posts, special features, and can leave comments.

I used to be poor, so this Substack has a standing policy: if you want a paid subscription but cannot afford one, email me at hollymathnerd at gmail dot com and I’ll give you a freebie.

---