Counting Costs

"What Happened in Gaza Might Even Be Worse than We Think," says the NY Times, perhaps not understanding how I would ordinarily use the word "worse." Whatever happened, I would regard it as a sad end to a lingering problem that was definitely going to end one way or the other. Hamas asked God to bring them into a reckoning with Israel through a titanic act of blood magic via human sacrifice; whatever happened to them was devoutly prayed for by them. I trust God's justice and mercy in such matters.

Indeed, even death in such circumstances can be a release from worse situations; if you do trust in divine mercy, as one might given that our entire heritage points at it as a thing we should believe in, thousands of years of men and women living and dying believing in it, you might hope for that.

But anyway, this piece is nonsense.

For many Americans, there might be a temptation to disbelieve the enormity of what has happened in Gaza. After all, it is a catastrophe funded by our money, made possible by our weapons, condoned by our government and carried out by one of our closest allies. It’s little wonder that some want to downplay the damage.

Their defense is to cast doubt on the numbers. It goes something like this: The death toll, counted by the Hamas-run health ministry, must be an exaggeration to court international outrage. If it isn’t, then most of those killed were Hamas fighters, surely, not civilians. Either way, it can’t be worse than other horrors elsewhere, in South Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which we Americans are blameless. Taken together, it’s a potent repertoire of deflation and denial.

That's definitely not what I said; what I said was that Israel wasn't being any worse than we usually are at conducting intense urban warfare in the Middle East. And definitely not, indeed, than other Muslims do in wars that don't get called "genocide."

I don't think the current war in Israel is an example of genocide because the Israelis don't really seem to be trying to exterminate Palestinians as such, nor so far even to expel them from Gaza (as I frankly expected they would) in order to create a larger buffer zone given the October 7th demonstration that they were currently very vulnerable. The 50,000 figure killed is a tiny percentage of the total population of Palestinians, and 2.5% even of the population within Gaza -- a pretty restrained bit of killing given the intensity of the fighting and Israel's clear superiority in weapons.

Likewise, it doesn't extend to conflicts within a group: in the Syrian civil war, for example, fourteen million people were forced out of their homes and many killed or harmed, but nobody thought it was a genocide. There was even a religious difference here and there, Alawites and Muslims, Shi'ites and Sunnis, and even ethnic differences between Arabs and Kurds (who sometimes appeal to ancestral faiths as well). It wasn't thought a genocide all the same.

That was in May. So her account of the "unusually rigorous" count by the Hamas-run health ministry and her proposed supplements to it amounts to this: "If de Waal is anywhere close to right, this conflict will have killed 7.5 percent of the prewar population of Gaza in just two years."

So that's three times the estimate from May, which I agree was shockingly low. As someone who has participated at length in wars in the Middle East involving large urban populations in tight spaces, though, that 7.5% guess remains remarkable for its discriminate limits. I don't know how you'd fight for two years in such a densely populated urban area without depopulation of half the population. Assad definitely didn't do that. The current population of Syria is ~25 million; 14 million people were displaced in the war. 

Seven and a half percent, at the top of the estimate, giving them every inch of the wiggle room they're asking? 

If the Jews had done no better than us fighting in Mosul or than Assad did in and around Damascus, we'd still have nothing to say. But in fact the Israelis did better, and fought cleaner, even with people who hated them more than Iraqis ever hated us. I had lovely chicken dinners with Iraqis who'd been trying to kill us not that long before, including officers of the Special Republican Guard. We got along great; I really liked that one former general I met while doing that. (We called him a Sheikh, but he wasn't really; he was urban, not tribal. He had been really a general.) It was nothing like the hatred that the Israelis and the Palestinians have going on. Yet the Israelis took much better care of their enemies than we ever did.