And the Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris.

Well, it's been a month since Hamas attacked Israel,

killing around 1500 people and taking over 200 hostages.

And it's been a week since Israel's ground invasion of Gaza began.

Now, like many people, I'm concerned that the extensive bombing and now invasion of Gaza

could be a mistake.

I'm not saying Israel doesn't have to retaliate and destroy Hamas.

They clearly do. And I would say they have to destroy Hezbollah too and ultimately they and we have to

dismantle every jihadist organization that could impact our security in the future.

But there may have been other ways to have gone about destroying Hamas that would have better served

Israel's interests and produced fewer casualties on the Palestinian side.

As everyone expected, collateral damage in Gaza has convinced much of the world

that Israel is the real aggressor here.

Of course, many on the left began saying this before Israel had dropped a single bomb at a moment when it was clear that Hamas had committed atrocities of a sort that one scarcely imagines possible in the modern world.

The fact that millions of people can't do the moral

arithmetic here or have confidently produced the wrong answer is itself an enormous problem for open societies everywhere.

Because this should not have been confusing.

Hamas took a sadistic pleasure in torturing and killing non-combatants that should have made it instantly clear to everyone,

certainly to everyone on a college campus, that jihadist groups like Hamas are the permanent

enemies of civilization.

So Israel really does have a war to fight, but I worry that the ground invasion of Gaza could

be a mistake.

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