The colonialism charge is the strangest to me, since this land is so tied to the Jewish identity that it is mentioned in Jewish prayers every single day, several times. Maybe they don’t realize that the Jewish people are the only ones that meet the U.N. definition of indigeneity, and have for 3000 years when Jews started living on the land. Nobody else has formed a state in Israel. Rather, there has been a non-stop series of colonists, including Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Alexandrians, Romans, the Byzantines, the Crusaders of the Holy Roman Empire, the various Muslim empires such as the Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, Mamluks and Ottomans, and finally the British. Fewer than half of Israelis have grandparents of European/American/Australian origin, partially because many are descendants of the 800,000 Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries in the late 1940s. I’m not sure where this idea of the overwhelmingly “white” Israeli comes from, but I’m tempted to blame Paul Newman’s blue eyes in the Exodus movie. Additionally, colonists by definition start a conflict, while Israel acquired Gaza in 1967 after Egypt moved its tanks to the border and announced its intent to eliminate Israel. It left Gaza in 2005, additional evidence that Israel is certainly not colonizing Gaza. If anything, the Arab states have repeatedly wanted to colonize Israel (and still proclaim their desire), not the other way around.

Apartheid is also a bizarre word to throw around. The word may have weakened in usage somewhat, but in reference to South Africa, it meant anti-miscegenation laws, separate legislatures, ID requirements, etc. None of these things are true in Israel. In contrast, over 25% of the Israeli citizens aren’t Jewish and have equal rights, including serving in the legislature and on the Supreme Court. Israel doesn’t govern Gaza or the West Bank, so any claims about those being apartheid would apply to Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

In Economic Sophisms, Bastiat famously wrote, “If goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.” Trade and jobs bring peace, both because of economic interdependence, but also because cooperation brings trust and understanding. Workers from Gaza brought in $2 million per day to their economy. Israeli companies opened factories in Gaza and the West Bank. Countless non-profits were fostering forums for Israelis and Palestinians to talk. Of course, all of this directly contrasts the media’s tendency to make Gaza seem like some kind of open-air prison and was the very reason that Hamas felt the need to attack. The world also seems loathe to include Egypt’s blockade of Gaza. Economic interdependence builds strong relationships, and that would go against their goals.

What will happen to innocent Palestinians in this invasion is painful, especially since Hamas puts weapons near populated civilian centers to inflate the casualties in the headlines. Something like 20% of the rockets end up misfiring and hitting people in Gaza. Hamas has shown repeatedly that they are more interested in inflating deaths in headlines than saving lives and use Palestinians as human shields to get more media sympathy. Already, Hamas has put up roadblocks to bar people from fleeing Gaza to safety. They do this to appeal to those same progressive friends that I mentioned, those who read only the headlines and denounce. For example, when a recent Islamic Jihad misfire hit a hospital, the media ran with the Hamas statement it was Israel without bothering to verify. Meanwhile, the major news outlets have been completely silent as multiple rockets hit Barzilai Hospital, including the children’s and maternity wards.

I really wish that this invasion didn’t have to happen. For the Palestinians and for the Israeli soldiers. But what is the other choice? Israel can’t leave the hostages to suffer, and plenty of videos have emerged confirming how horribly they are being treated. Israel can’t continue to live with rocket attacks. The trust that the negotiating table requires is gone, and I can’t imagine it returning for the foreseeable future. There may be hope if Hamas and other terrorist groups were gone, but there hasn’t been a democratic election in Gaza in over fifteen years, and their removal doesn’t seem likely to happen peacefully.

I don’t know where this goes next. There have been non-stop rocket attacks against Israel for decades. I shudder to think what the United States would do to Mexico if they were firing rockets at Texas, but Israel has been amazingly proportional, not that the world has given them proper credit. If history is a guide, in this conflict the casualties of the Palestinians will be higher than those of the Israelis. People won’t read further than the headlines and assume that Israel is solely responsible for those casualties and judge the side with the most casualties to be the victim.

Which brings me back to, “What next?” Every single peace deal has been rejected. I am aware that Hamas will not support peace, through their own charter, “initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement…there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.” Of course, this is the same organization that sent suicide bombers when Israel tried to implement the Oslo Accords and whose founding document calls for killing all of the Jews, not limited to just those in Israel. 

I (wrongly, in retrospect) supported the unilateral disengagement in Gaza eighteen years ago. Many in my life told me I was naive, “The terrorists will gain a foothold and use Gaza to attack Israel. This is a mistake.” “No,” I replied, “They will see this as a step towards peace. Somebody has to end this cycle. The world will see this and understand that we want peace.” I remember sitting on a bench in Central Square in Cambridge and saying to my friend, “The ordinary Palestinian is just like the ordinary Israeli. They are wondering where the hell their kid’s math homework went and what to make for dinner.” We are the same, I thought then and think now, we all want to be safe and for the fighting to be over. Give peace a chance. I have been a supporter of a Two State Solution since I can remember. For the first time, I’m doubting that. If pulling out of Gaza led to non-stop rocket attacks and now this, what would pulling out of the West Bank do?

My evidence is anecdotal, but I don’t think I’m alone. My American Jewish friends are done avoiding conflicts with progressives who support everyone’s rights…except the Jews. The next few weeks will be filled with horrible battles, but any other option is even worse. There is a moral duty for Americans to follow Biden’s lead and support Israel’s right and duty to defend itself. If people want to call for reforms in Israel’s government while doing that, fine (There might be almost as much to complain about with Israeli policies as there are with American ones.). But Americans also need to support the fight against a genocidal terrorist organization. A big part of this fight is perception, so silence is complicity.

And as I think about this more, I’m not sure ignorance is forgivable for the loud voices of the left supporting Hamas. There is no crime in not being familiar with the nuances of the conflict, but if someone is using their voice to support the side that is kidnapping, raping, and murdering, they better be damn sure they’ve done their research. Supporting Hamas because you support the Palestinians is like supporting the Taliban because you support the Afghanis. Thus, blindly supporting a terrorist organization intent on wiping out millions of Jews, well, that sounds a whole lot like anti-semitism.

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Consider, for example, proposed new NYC legislation requiring AI to be audited for bias before being used to make hiring decisions. Proponents argue that AI can be biased against certain classes of applicants. This is just one of many cases in which concerns have been raised about AI making biased decisions on a whole range of issues from loan decisions to granting parole. Of course, these biases may exist in the training set, because human agents have likewise been biased. AI is just perpetuating creator biases. Likewise, AIs can indeed miss qualified candidates with an atypical résumé, but so can humans. Of course, human biases can often be quite deeply rooted. When the algorithm is a jerk, we can fix it. We can change the training data. We can check that it is actually fixed before deploying into the wild. Control systems can be imposed on the decisions, including allowing a human to audit and override decisions. And if we can’t fix it, we can shut it off (this is discouraged for humans).

Similarly, people worry about a lack of transparency in the reasoning behind AI’s recommendations. Indeed, the best-performing algorithms are often those where there is very little clarity in how the AI made its decision. But humans are also opaque, and an entire field of psychology exists to explain the introspection illusion, detailing how bad we are at explaining our decisions. Suites of tools exist for understanding what happened in an AI algorithm, and why. For AI algorithms for which transparency is not possible, the models remain deterministic and explainable—give the algorithm a sample input, and the output is determined. A tween debugger would probably be The Killer App. Algorithms can be black boxes, but they are extremely clear when compared to the mushy black boxes inside humans. Even if they were audited in this legislation (which they are not), it’s not clear they would perform better. Given a résumé, you know how the AI is going to respond, although you may not know why. The same is rarely true of a human, who may not even respond the same if they were presented with it at different times over the day.

The manipulation done by social media algorithms is another popular source of apprehension. Social media platforms maximize the time that users spend on the platform by providing them with content that interests them. Judgmental people could argue whether people should want the content they consume. However, these platforms are just the latest iteration of advertising manipulating us, which dates back at least to papyrus. Humans have manipulated other humans since time out of mind. Social media manipulates, but perhaps even less than forces like family, religion, government, and other media.

Many people fear AI’s inability to understand ethics, regardless of whether that means that it does, in fact, act ethically. My favorite meme is about the Trolley Problem applied to self-driving cars, which probably could not decide whom to kill in an accident situation. But humans have this problem too. Most humans are likely not applying utilitarianism, duty-based ethics, or any other deep thinking in this situation. On the contrary, they are thinking, “Holy crap, I’m about to hit that thing. Must swerve.” Or at the very best, “Seems like fewer people to the right.”

There remain real concerns over AI. It was always possible for the neighborhood gossip to smear your reputation in your town, but now your secrets can be leaked to the world. Questions about informed consent are complicated with complex systems and use cases. While creative destruction has always fueled progress, the velocity of AI innovation has made it particularly hard for certain segments of the population to adapt. Even so, our concerns with AI should always be viewed through the lens of comparison to human failings. 

Sometimes the alternative to AI isn’t human, but nothing. In many cases, AI provides a service, often due to the scale of data that needs to be processed, that simply couldn’t be matched by humans. For example, while there are human translators, there is no way that the functionality of Google Translate could be matched by humans. Likewise, no human is going to curate all of the Spotify playlists or scan all credit card transactions looking for fraud. Even in areas where human experts are clearly better, e.g. psychologists, AI technologies have let the number of people who receive therapy expand. Even in areas of psychotherapy, where humans are clearly better equipped to provide the service, AI allows it to scale, as it has done since the days of ELIZA.

Often the same AI technologies are used both for evil and for good. Computer vision is used for surveillance, often encroaching on people’s privacy. But it is also employed in wildlife conservation efforts, such as monitoring endangered species and preventing poaching. AI algorithms analyze camera trap images, acoustic data, and satellite imagery to identify and track animals, assess population dynamics, and detect illegal activities. AI is a tool, and like all tools, it is its application that we should be judging, not the tool itself.

It can be difficult for many people to put AI transgressions into perspective because many lack a real understanding of the technology, and mysterious, complex systems scare people. The problem is exacerbated by sensationalized and deliberate misinformation on the part of Hollywood and the media, who want to manipulate the public into consuming more news. Taken together, these factors lead some people to think that the problem could be even worse than the headlines, the so-called slippery slope. Additionally, there is the issue of Frederic Bastiat’s “Seen vs. Unseen.” A headline tells us that a self-driving car hit a pole, but how many accidents by distracted humans would a generalized use of AI cars prevent? People see the wrong person sent to jail by the racist AI, but how many are sent by judges, some of whom have even more nefarious motives? Without comparing these AI misdeeds with the human alternatives, the default reaction is to hinder AI. In many cases, this is short-sighted and counterproductive.

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