“We absolutely cannot and should not ever be cheerleading and wishing for the deaths of Israeli children…”
–Sue Altman

Sue Altman and Adam Hamawy are both Democratic candidates for Congress in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District. A controversy has recently erupted over Altman’s response to comments Hamawy made in an interview with Hasan Piker. The basics of the controversy are nicely captured in this short piece in Jewish Insider. I’ll quote the first few paragraphs, but urge readers to read the whole thing.

Sue Altman, a progressive organizer and former top staffer for Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ), who is running for Congress in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District, slammed her anti-Israel primary opponent Adam Hamawy for “cheerleading and wishing for the deaths of Israeli children” with his comments opposing Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system.

Hamawy said last week in an appearance on far-left streamer Hasan Piker’s show that he does not support Iron Dome because it insulates Israel from the consequences of war.

“When we talk about the Iron Dome or any kind of defensive weapons, what it is doing is insulating Israel from having to make decisions to make peace, and it really isolates them from having to deal with the consequences,” Hamawy said. “It’s like giving a bully body armor to go bully people some more. We need to be able to have them feel the effects of war, and then they’ll stop and actually have a conversation.”

He also said that he supports financial sanctions on Israel, asking “what makes it different than Russia or Iran?”

Altman, speaking to Jewish Insider on Monday, pushed back forcefully against Hamawy’s comments.

“Reasonable people can agree that the U.S. doesn’t need to be subsidizing military spending for a prosperous ally. And reasonable people can agree that we should be treating Israel as the same as all other prosperous allies,” Altman said. “But where I draw the line is — and where I feel like progressives need to draw the line is — that we absolutely cannot and should not ever be cheerleading and wishing for the deaths of Israeli children.”

She said that she believed that more Israeli civilian deaths are Hamawy’s goal.

The ensuing controversy about this dispute has in my view, been less-than-enlightening. Hamawy’s defenders have, in response to Altman’s claims, defended his humanitarian credentials as a trauma physician, and his patriotic ones as a former service member in the U.S. Army. Altman seemed at first to be doubling down on her claims, but has since tried to flee the controversy by issuing a conveniently unwritten “apology” to Hamawy, which he has (in my view inadvisedly) accepted. It’s unclear what the apology actually said, or what part of her statements, if any, she rescinded. Many of Hamawy’s defenders seem to me to be missing the point, and also missing an opportunity to score some easy points against Altman. Meanwhile, Altman’s apology strikes me as an opportunistic evasion by a fundamentally unscrupulous person who could stand to be confronted a little more directly than she so far has.  

Hind Rajab, a non-Israeli child actually killed by Israel (photo credit: Maktoob Media, Wikipedia)

There’s a basic distinction in ethics–and in life itself–between action that’s foreseen or foreseeable and action that’s intended or wished-for. Action of the two types can overlap, but can also diverge. When they diverge, they invite or involve fundamentally different types of ethical assessment. A moral agent can avoid intending harm to the innocent, but can’t entirely avoid unintentionally but foreseeably doing so. To equate the two is to deny obvious realities, causal, descriptive, and moral. 

Consider some stock examples: 

(1) A teacher can give a student a bad grade in the knowledge that doing so will produce a loss of self-esteem, but though foreseen or foreseeable, the loss of self-esteem need not be the point of giving the grade, or the wished-for outcome. 

(2) A medical practitioner can perform a procedure in the knowledge that doing so will cause the patient a great deal of pain, but need not–and usually does not–intend to cause pain, much less serve as a cheerleader for it. 

(3) Military action can be regrettable and regrettably cause death and/or injury to non-combatants, but even in cases where the latter is foreseen or foreseeable, it need not be the intended or wished-for outcome of the action. 

And so on; it’s pointless to multiply examples. In a quarter of a century of teaching ethics to some 5,000 students at a dozen institutions on two continents, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a student who had trouble understanding this distinction. In fact, college students aside, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a human adult who had trouble with it. The distinction is too obvious and too central to human life to be missed or dismissed by anyone of moderately high intelligence and moderately robust experience of the world. I’d like to think that a candidate for Congress satisfies both criteria, and I’m inclined to think that Sue Altman does.

So the best explanation for her having ignored the distinction in this instance is cynicism and bad faith. Altman knows that if she manages to paint Hamawy–a dark-skinned Arab-Muslim male–as a bloodthirsty anti-Semitic terrorist, she might win the votes of people as cynical and dishonest as she is. And I’m sure she knows (and has calculated) that apology notwithstanding, she still might. Once you say something like this, the damage is done, and can’t really be undone.

If you want examples of that truism, consider the 9/11 celebration rumors that brought Donald Trump to office in 2015-16, a topic I’ve studied since they emerged in 2001. The rumors were false, even absurd, and were refuted for decades. But the refutations didn’t matter. Trump knew that people wanted to believe them, and did. So he was elected.

Curtis Sliwa’s “Hummus Summit,” designed to rebut Trump’s 9/11 celebration rumor. Donald Trump and I were both invited, but only I showed up. At Al Basha’s of Paterson, New Jersey with Noam Laden. November 2015 (photo: Irfan Khawaja).

When I first started studying the 9/11 celebration rumors, I had in mind the Israeli rumor that the Palestinians of Mandate Palestine fled their homes because they were ordered by the Arab leadership to do so. That, too, has been exposed as a lie. But people still believe it, and still regularly invoke it as a “gotcha” against the Palestinians. “Their leaders told them to leave, so they left. We owe them nothing.”  It’s not clear what’s worse here, the non-sequiturs or the falsehoods. 

Closer to home, consider the Central Park Five, falsely accused of rape but eventually exonerated. It didn’t matter for electoral purposes that they were exonerated. People wanted to believe that a bunch of black youth would rape a white woman in Central Park. So they did. More than a decade after the Central Park Five were exonerated, Trump repeated the false charges made against them. No matter how many times those charges were rebutted, they were widely believed. Trump never apologized or shifted ground. He was elected president twice over.   

Though it’s not a racialized case, consider Mikie Sherrill’s wild, defamatory murder accusations against Jack Ciatterelli in the New Jersey gubernatorial election of 2025. Ciatterelli had previously owned a PR company for opioid manufacturers; Sherrill, a former federal prosector, accused Ciatterelli of killing tens of thousands of people by virtue of owning the company and producing pro-opioid PR through it. This unhinged claim, unelaborated beyond the sheer assertion, was left uncriticized by bien pensant Jersey liberals, who were only too happy to indulge in Trumpian gaslighting if and when it suited their purposes. In short: Sherrill disgraced herself. Excuses were made. Now she’s governor.*

Whatever her “progressive” pretensions, this is the political camp to which Sue Altman actually belongs: the camp of cynical opportunists who’ll say whatever they need to say to get elected, pretending to be the friend and ally of the minorities they’re selling out to win elections.“I am not for recreating the dark and violent dynamics of the Middle East in our Democratic primaries,” she tells us with great piety. I would suggest looking directly into a mirror: she is herself the darkness to which she refers. It’s called racialized defamation, and we don’t have to go to “the Middle East” to find it. We have a whole homegrown history of it right here, from lynchings “at the hands of persons unknown” to the Scottsboro Trial to Emmett Till to the Central Park Five and beyond. Hers is just the latest entry in this roster of moral darkness. 

The Mikie Sherrill campaign, back when I believed in it (Bloomfield, New Jersey, June 2018) [photo: Irfan Khawaja]

Hamawy’s point about Israel’s Iron Dome is almost too obvious to be belabored–and too obviously true to require much defense. In military affairs as elsewhere, there’s such a thing as “moral hazard,” a condition in which people are incentivized to take risks they wouldn’t otherwise take because they’re insulated from the consequences of taking them. There’s an enormous literature on the subject, familiar to specialists, which has trickled down in one form or another to ordinary laypersons. Altman is neither a specialist nor an ordinary layperson, but certainly closer to the former than the latter. She was (among other things) educated at Columbia and Oxford, and has served as the State Director for Senator Andy Kim. So ignorance really can’t be an excuse here.  No one of her vaunted background is as ignorant as that. 

The concept of moral hazard has obvious and well-recognized application to military affairs, and to defensive weaponry in particular. It’s really not controversial to say that the possession of a defensive shield can and often does function as an incentive to aggression. When I studied international relations in college, the textbook example was the potential for military escalation that would arise from the adoption of the so-called Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the U.S. version of the Iron Dome.* While the United States never adopted SDI, few would be dishonest enough to say that our non-adoption of SDI reflects a “wish” to kill American children. I invite Altman to sound off, however. She may well be the exception that proves the rule. 

An argument against SDI? Or a pro-Soviet manifesto for killing American children? Let’s ask Sue

The current U.S.-Israeli war against Iran is a painfully obvious and more proximate illustration of the same point: Israel is one of the aggressors against Iran in that war, and its possession of the Iron Dome is what’s incentivized the aggression. Deprived of the Dome, it’s extremely unlikely that Israel would have accepted the risks of ballistic missile retaliation by Iran. The extensive damage done to U.S. military bases in the region, and the high vulnerability of the Gulf countries (including their oil-producing infrastructure), are further illustrations of this fact. Both are correctly seen as miscalculations arising from over-confidence in existing anti-missile systems. The damage suffered on both counts has served to moderate U.S. aggression and incentivize U.S. desire for a ceasefire. 

The United States, of course, is the other aggressor in this war. It lacks a national missile defense system, but makes up in physical remoteness from the conflict what it lacks in defensive weaponry. The oceans are our Iron Dome. I think it’s pretty obvious that if American towns and cities were being hit by Iranian ballistic missiles–Lambertville or Bridgewater, New Jersey, let’s say–Americans would be clamoring more loudly against the war than they currently are, Sue Altman among them. That’s the underlying meaning of the now-forgotten New Jersey drone controversy of the late fall of 2024. The drones in question turned out to be home grown ones, with some speculative suggestions that some were being flown out of Picatinny Arsenal, a military base in north Jersey. But no one knew any of that at the time. They evoked widespread alarm because people thought New Jersey was under attack by Iran, which suggests that the underlying fears were and are there. 

Lambertville when it’s not under Iranian ballistic missile attack (photo: Irfan Khawaja)

In cases like the preceding, the removal of a defensive shield can deter aggression by the party previously with the shield. Hamawy’s point is that that’s what’s true of Israel’s anti-missile defense. Altman offers no response whatsoever to Hamawy’s claim, and no recognition of the well-documented facts behind it. She proceeds as though she’s never encountered the phenomenon of moral hazard in her life, and never encountered the idea that a defensive system can incentivize aggression. What she’s done instead is to poison the well and evade the issue. It’s a fair inference that she’s chosen this option because she has no actual, responsive rebuttal to offer. And it’s a further fair inference that she has no responsive rebuttal to offer because Hamawy’s point is too obviously true to be rebutted. 

As for “wishing for the deaths of Israeli children,” the response to Altman is straightforward. She provides no evidence at all that Hamawy wishes for anyone’s death, and his thesis about the Iron Dome doesn’t require him to do so. He’s saying instead that Israel has to be restrained, and that one way of doing this is to stop paying for its so-called defensive systems, because these systems are intrinsically tied to and therefore incentivize the aggressions Israel has undertaken over the course of its existence from inception to the present. Arguably, even “from inception to the present” is an understatement, since the State of Israel was preceded by a pre-state Zionist community, the yishuv, that has plausibly been accused of systematic aggression against Palestinians even before Israel formally came into existence.

Hebron: the progressivism of segregation and dispossession (photo: Irfan Khawaja)

Contrary to Altman’s suggestion, there is no causal necessity at all between removing Israel’s Iron Dome and bringing about Israeli death. Notice that what Hamawy says is that we need to be “able to have them feel the effects of war” (my emphasis) not that we should hope that they actually feel them. It’s certainly possible that if Israel stops its aggressions and rolls back its (many) military occupations, its adversaries will stop attacking it. If that happens, the removal of the Iron Dome will not result in Israeli death. It’s compatible in principle with net zero deaths.

It’s also possible that if Israel is forced to stop its aggressions and rolls back its military occupations, its adversaries will at least attack it less, so that Israeli deaths will be minimized relative to the baseline that exists with the Iron Dome in place. There’s no a priori reason to think that more people will die under a restrained policy without an Iron Dome than under an adventurist policy with one. And Altman has not given a single reason to the contrary. In either case, Hamawy is right: by forcing Israel to face the possibility of harm, we force it to adopt a more restrained posture, which we’re entirely justified in doing. In neither case do we have to hope that Israel will incur harm after adopting an unrestrained posture. That misses the whole point of Hamawy’s argument, something Altman seems really eager to do. Apparently, the idea of holding Israel responsible for its actions is too radical an idea to entertain. 

In any case, suppose that the Iron Dome is dismantled and Israel is attacked, whether in retaliation for its own aggressions or even in a case of pure aggression by some adversary. Israeli deaths might well occur. But by the terms of Hamawy’s argument, those deaths would be forseeable, not intended or wished-for. There would be no “cheerleader” aspect to them, and Altman has given no reason for thinking that Hamawy would be committed to one. Hamawy’s point is that given Israel’s aggressive tendencies, the deterrent effect of removing the Iron Dome is to be preferred to keeping it in place.

There may be casualties either way, but Altman ignores the non-Israeli children killed by the Israeli aggressions Hamaway hopes to deter. Remarkable how little of an impression the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza, or dozens of children in Lebanon, or hundreds in Iran have made on her.  Clearly, hypothetical Israeli deaths register more deeply for her than actual Arab or Iranian ones. Eighteenth century American slaveowners acquiesced in treating African slaves as having 3/5ths the value of a white person. Altman treats Arabs and Iranians as having roughly 1/20,000th the value of a non-existent Israeli–which is to say, as having no value whatsoever. Multiplication by 0 yields 0. 

Lebanon, May 2026: don’t worry; no Israeli children were harmed in the commission of these war crimes

Indeed, Altman ignores the wholesale, wanton destruction of all of southern Lebanon and clearly expects the rest of us to follow suit. Both The New York Times and Ha’aretz have reported in excruciating detail that Israel is now engaged in destroying both the population and infrastructure of south Lebanon in a wholesale way without distinguishing combatants from non-combatants (itself a pointless distinction to draw in what is obviously a war of aggression by our “ally”). So far, no one has called her a “cheerleader” for, say, Lebanese death. She should be grateful that fewer have stooped to her level than might otherwise have, but the fact remains that her glib, handwaving blather about our “prosperous ally” leave unchallenged the implication that Israel’s destruction of south Lebanon would be fine if it were done on Israel’s own dime. The underlying assumption seems to be that Israelis matter, but Arabs and Iranians do not. Israelis must never die, even if Israel is the aggressor; Arabs and Iranians can permissibly die in droves, even if they’re the victims of aggression. This is the Animal Farm-inspired “line drawing” at the heart of Altman’s “progressivism”–a progressivism that proudly shares a lineage with segregation, eugenics, and imperialism. 

If Altman thinks she can rebut what I’ve said here, I invite her to try, but the more obvious fact right now is that she’s made no such attempt. She’s simply used Israeli children as a convenient rhetorical shield to make stupid and irresponsible comments. This rhetorical maneuver is a perfect illustration of the very point Hamawy was making. Take the rhetorical shield away from her, and she’s left with nothing. Deprived of such a shield, she might be less apt to say things of the sort she has. We need not wish or intend to expose her as a fool or a fraud to foresee that that’s precisely what would happen in that case.

If Altman refuses to respond, I think her defamations should be met with a response in kind–by which I mean not reciprocal defamation, but open denunciation, ostracism, and interruption designed to neutralize evasion and force engagement with the issue. As someone who has herself disrupted other peoples’ speeches, she can hardly complain if someone disrupts one of hers.*** And though Hamawy himself appears to be too genteel a person to do what needs to be done, perhaps Altman should be put on notice that others are not. At a certain point, people–particularly those of us who have had to deal in a first-hand way with the Israeli military (like being shot at by it)–get tired of listening to preening, privileged assholes like Altman mouthing off with impunity to the acclamation of the ignorant. Eventually, the impunity has to end with something like accountability–not just for Altman, but for her supporters, and for all the organizations now backing her.  They, too, should be put on notice: no shield will protect them from what they have coming to them. 

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*The standard text is Robert Jervis’s The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy, published a year after Ronald Reagan’s famous public declaration of support for SDI. I was a TA at Princeton for Angelo Codevilla, a major proponent of SDI. Every now and then, when Codevilla was challenged on SDI, he’d retreat to the insinuation that his opponents secretly wanted to see Americans die at the hands of enemy missiles. Unlike Altman, he lacked the chutzpah to come out and say that. Not that he lacked chutzpah generally. 

** Ciatterelli had accused Sherrill (plausibly, in my view) of complicity in a cheating scandal in the Naval Academy. In response, Sherrill had said: “I think you’re trying to divert from the fact that you killed tens of thousands of people by printing your misinformation, your propaganda.” Sherrill made no attempt to explain (a) which claims were “misinformation,” or (b) how these claims killed anyone. She also made no attempt to acknowledge that opioids are FDA-approved medications for pain relief, a condition suffered by far more people than suffer from addiction or otherwise misuse opioids, or die from opioid abuse. She also made no attempt to acknowledge that some opioid deaths are suicides committed voluntarily by people who wish to die. As someone whose spouse died by opioid overdose, I honestly wish ignorant politicians like Sherrill (and Anita Greenberg-Belli) would stop exploiting the deaths of our loved ones, and maybe try shutting the fuck up on this topic. 

As regular readers of this blog know, I voted for and publicly endorsed Lily Benavides, not Jack Ciatterelli. I don’t think anyone could mistake my views for Ciatterelli’s.  

***Altman accused her opponent, George Norcross, of resorting to force in throwing her out of a hearing because he, Norcross, had “lost the debate over ideas.” If I show up at one of her events and interrupt her in the same way, will she have me thrown out in the same manner as she was? It’s not as though she’s won the “debate over ideas.”