Rogan, Murray, Smith and The Parable of the Five Arrows.

The parable of the five arrows found in ancient tales from Asia to the Americas teaches that unity is strength. As told in the Secret History of the Mongols, a mother gives her quarrelling sons one arrow each, which they snap easily. She then wraps five arrows together and gives her sons the same instruction. None can break the bundle. The lesson is learned: Alone, each brother is weak, but together the brothers are invincible. This lesson echoes in the Iroquois Confederacy, where five Native American tribes united under a common goal to live in harmony. This in turn inspired the founding fathers vision of a unified republic and the democratic principles within it. Today, Douglas Murray and Dave Smith share a common goal in their desire for peace in Israel and Gaza, yet their dialogue concentrates on their differences, rather than this common goal, rendering their debate, and the wider debates springing from it, moot. Like the brothers in the parable, their–and our–strength lies in unity, not division.

Joe Rogan may have intended to have “an intelligent conversation between two people who disagree,” but the episode only deepened the divide between Murray and Smith. Despite their shared centre-right alignment and mutual desire for peace, neither of them leveraged this common ground to propose a unified path forward. Murray correctly framed the starting point of the current debate as beginning with the October 7th 2023 massacre. This was the flashpoint that ignited Israel’s military response and created the ensuing plight of Gazan civilians, which Smith rightly highlights as a humanitarian crisis. It is an indisputable fact that one event directly led to the consequence of the other. Had the events of October 7th not occurred, Murray and Smith wouldn’t even be sitting across from each other in Rogan’s studio, each clutching a broken arrow of their own making.

Smith’s insistence on kicking the ball into the long grass of history derails the debate and could be seen by many as justifying the October 7th atrocity, a morally unconscionable conclusion for all reasonable people. While the past can offer context, it cannot dictate the present or justify the massacre. Those people were primary targets not collateral damage in a military operation. Smith points to Israel’s historical role in facilitating Hamas’s creation in the 1980s, as it was hoping to counter the more radical Palestinian Authority—a fact that’s true but incomplete. What Israel didn’t foster nor could have envisaged was the Hamas that later wrote a 1988 covenant stating its intent to kill all Jews and destroy the state of Israel, a genocidal mission that defines Hamas today. That is the Hamas Israel faces now, and it’s the Hamas that carried out the October 7 attacks. By dwelling on historical grievances, Smith sidesteps the urgent reality of the present conflict, missing a chance to align with Murray on a shared starting point and a shared goal: stopping the violence and securing peace for both Israelis and Palestinians.

• Point of agreement missed: a massacre occurred which started the current Israeli assault on Gaza. Let our debate start here.

For his part, Murray, also derailed the debate with tangents of his own. His decision to begin with the Churchill debate—a historical sideshow involving another Rogan guest, Darryl Cooper, and his revisionist take on World War II—was, I believe, a mistake. Murray’s focus with credentialism also muddled his argument. Primary sources do matter, and Murray had them, having spent years in the Middle East researching his book, On Democracies and Death Cults.

Smith, relied entirely on secondary sources like World Bank reports, and hence did lack the on-the-ground perspective to match Murray’s depth, a flaw that weakened his analysis. But Murray’s gatekeeping—who gets to speak and who doesn’t—shifted the focus to an irrelevant elitism contest, not the urgent crisis at hand. Rogan only really interjected to defend Smith and they both dismissed Murray’s concerns about pro-Hamas sentiment, often sighing exasperatedly, “no one is saying that.” No one in that room, sure. But in the wider world, this is undeniable. A quick scroll through X or a glance at campus protests reveals vocal radical pro-Hamas rhetoric—not just pro-Palestinian or anti-Zionist sentiment, but explicit support for a group whose charter calls for the extinction of Israel and the genocide of Jews in the Levant.

From the burning of synagogues in Australia to chants of “From the river to the sea” at campus protests in the US that echo Hamas’s genocidal aims, the evidence is stark—yet Smith and Rogan barely acknowledged it. It would have taken little for them to concede this reality, or to admit that such hatred is often cloaked as pro-Palestinian or anti-Zionist activism.

Instead, Smith doubled down on historical debates, revisiting the checkered origins of Zionism—a moot point in today’s context. Zionism, at its core today, simply means believing Israel exists and has a right to continue existing. By that definition, I’d expect both Rogan and Smith to call themselves Zionists.

To continue to frame Zionism historically as a dirty word is to implicitly endorse the alternative: the annihilation of a nation and its people. Let’s look at The Troubles in Ireland for a lesson: Unionists and Republicans, both once tied to terrorist factions, set aside appeals to the past to forge peace. That process would have failed if either side had clung to historical grudges.

• Point of agreement missed: There has been an increase of antisemitic rhetoric and violence around the world.

What’s happening in Gaza today is a humanitarian crisis, but Hamas’s primary responsibility for it cannot be sidestepped by appeals to history. The facts are clear: Hamas, whatever its origins, now exists to exterminate the Jewish population in the Levant. It uses Gazans as cannon fodder for its political and ideological aims, ruling with an authoritarian grip that suppresses dissent, restricts press freedom, and commits human rights abuses against political opponents, including Fatah supporters, journalists, and activists. Hamas justifies its actions with appeals to God—a logic that mirrors radical Jewish settlers in Israel who do the same. If one finds the latter absurd, as I’ve heard Jeffrey Sachs argue, then the former must be equally so. For peace to be possible, Hamas must disavow its genocidal charter. It won’t. This leads to a third missed point of agreement: the need to free Gaza from Hamas’s grip, a step that would serve both Palestinians and Israelis by dismantling THE fundamental barrier to peace.

• Point of agreement missed: Free Gaza from Hamas.

Murray, Smith, and Rogan, despite sharing common goals, each weakened their arguments by brandishing singular, brittle arrows that snapped under the stress of their own making. Their debate fixated on historical grudges, procedural jabs, and dismissals of inconvenient truths, rather than binding those arrows into a bundle for peace. Their shared desire to end the violence in Israel and Gaza could have been that bundle—unbreakable had they chosen unity over division. They might have called for a ceasefire to halt the bloodshed, paired with humanitarian aid for Gaza and security guarantees for Israel, while defending Israel’s right to exist and acknowledging its imperfections, showing a fractured world what collaboration can achieve. Instead, their clash on Rogan mirrors a broader failure in today’s discourse, where media, even unwittingly, often amplifies conflict rather than fostering solutions. In a world desperate for answers, the image of them in Rogan’s studio—each clutching a useless broken arrow—reminds us of the parable’s timeless lesson: true strength lies in what we build together, not what we tear apart.

I’m a big fan of Joe and he’s a subscriber to this newsletter. Maybe he can invite Murray and Smith back to bind their arrows together for a new conversation, one that focuses on the urgent issues of today: the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Israel’s right to exist, and Hamas’s degeneracy toward both Israelis and Gazans.

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