They were dancing (very awkwardly, I might add) in the streets in Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square on Thursday.
In Gaza, they were… well, trying to find potable water and some scraps of food, first and foremost. But also celebrating. Cautiously.
“I feel a bit of relief, but not hope,” a thirtysomething from Nuseirat, a refugee camp which abuts the Netzarim Corridor, told The New York Times, as the first phase of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas officially went into effect.
Unlike previous deals to stop the fighting, this ceasefire is supposed to presage an actual end to the two-year war. Hamas is set to release some 20 living hostages as well as the remains of dead captives, while Israel will free thousands of Palestinian hostag– oh, wait. Sorry. Prisoners. Israel will free thousands of Palestinian prisoners. I always forget: When they’re brown, they’re “prisoners.” When they’re pale, they’re “hostages.”
Do note: The asymmetric nature of such exchanges is a fixture of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It’s leverage (figuratively and, in a numerical sense, literally) for Palestinian extremist elements, including and especially Hamas, in that it means capturing just one Israeli can secure freedom for scores of jailed Palestinians. Recall that Yahya Sinwar himself was among 1,026 Palestinians released in exchange for a single Israeli soldier in 2011.
That asymmetry’s also a form of psychological warfare. The message to Palestinians in such wildly lopsided prisoner swaps is that their lives are essentially worthless. If one Israeli “equals” 1,000 Palestinians, are Palestinians even people? The implication’s clearly “no.” No, they aren’t people, and that mindset was on full display in Gaza in the two years since the October 7 attacks.
There’s no way to know how many Palestinians are buried in the rubble, but the semi-official death tally from Gaza’s Health Ministry — which doesn’t discriminate between combatants and civilians — is north of 65,000. That’s 65,000 “officially” dead Gazans in retaliation for an attack which killed 1,250 Israelis.
Most of you are racist. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. That doesn’t mean you’re virulently, or even intentionally, racist. It just means that instinctually, you feel less comfortable around minorities. Don’t be offended. That’s pretty much all white people. It’s not a partisan thing, it’s not a geographic thing and it doesn’t have to be a “good” or a “bad” thing. But it is a thing.
With that in mind, my guess is that a thin majority of the readership here believes Israel was justified in adopting an approach to the war that resulted in an asymmetric death toll, which is to say more than 1:1. Indeed, the logistics of the fight to decimate the Qassam Brigades guaranteed that any kind of “victory” over Hamas in an all-out war would come at a significant cost to civilian lives. Sinwar not only recognized that, he welcomed it.
My question to all of you is simple: Does 52:1 — the actual death toll ratio — count as overkill? If so, and considering that if you could dig up and count every dead civilian entombed in the concrete remains of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, those dead would likely number in the tens of thousands, offsetting the combatants counted in the Health Ministry’s tally to leave the ratio unchanged at 50:1, is that genocide?
When you ponder that question, consider that Hamas isn’t, wasn’t and never has been, an army. The Qassam Brigades were a militia. A large one, sure, but a militia all the same with no conventional military capabilities whatsoever. Gaza was completely defenseless from the very beginning.
Suggesting the Qassam Brigades constituted a military that needed to be destroyed at any cost to the civilian population is loosely akin to the Pentagon saying the Sinaloas constitute an army which must be permanently dismantled even if it means killing 100,000 Mexicans in the cartel’s operational seat of power.
Notwithstanding that Donald Trump has effectively suggested as much vis-à-vis Latin American drug cartels, virtually no one would accept that proposition. And do note that far, far more Americans have been killed by drugs that originated with the Sinaloas than Israelis have been killed by Hamas.
In an article published last week, the AP ran through the numbers. Consider this passage from the linked article:
Out of every 10 [Gazans], one has been killed or injured in an Israeli strike. Nine are displaced. At least three have not eaten for days. Out of every 100 children, four have lost either one or both parents. Out of every 10 buildings that stood in Gaza prewar, eight are either damaged or flattened. Out of every 10 homes, nine are wrecked. Out of every 10 acres of cropland, eight are razed (more than three out of every four hectares). Roughly 11% of Gaza’s population has been killed or injured. Cemeteries are overflowing. Mass graves dot the strip. Israeli airstrikes have killed entire families in their homes. More than 2,000 people seeking food have been killed, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
You could go on and on and on with those sorts of unimaginably macabre statistics. Israel killed or injured roughly 220,000 people in retaliation for an attack that claimed 1,250 lives.
In what world is that justifiable? Only in a world where morality takes a backseat to notions of racial superiority. There’s just no other way to explain it.
I’m “fine” with it. Not with notions of racial superiority. Not with all the death, obviously. Not with the maiming. Not with the starving. But with the idea that morality’s a fiction we employ when it’s expedient and jettison when it isn’t. And make no mistake: That’s what we did here.
For all the admonitions, nobody, anywhere did anything to stop the massacre. Not really. And that’s a damning indictment of the international community.
There wasn’t much anyone could’ve done, I suppose. Israel’s a nuclear state with an extremely itchy trigger finger. That’s deterrent enough, but just in case, it also enjoys a US military backstop which, particularly in a Trump presidency, is stronger than American security guarantees for Europe.
Still, somebody should’ve done something. Or threatened to do something. Somebody other than “big, bad” Iran which — surprise, surprise — turned out to be a complete pushover. Hezbollah wasn’t a pushover, but — again, surprise, surprise — they did turn out to be a walkover, and in this context, that’s a distinction without a difference.
So, as we celebrate an apparent “end” to the war, let’s be honest: We collectively countenanced a genocide. A televised, internationally-broadcast ethnic cleansing.
I think it’s wrong to say Israel isn’t safer for all this. They are. Israel has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s ready, willing and more than able to destroy every physical manifestation of anti-Zionist sentiment within the IDF’s range. And with a disregard for collateral damage so callous that it borders on psychopathy.
No, you can’t “destroy an idea,” but you can kill everyone who espouses it. Then you can kill everyone associated with it. Then you can kill all of those people’s families: The wives, the grandparents, the teenagers, the toddlers, the infants. That’s what Israel’s just done.
I don’t know what comes next for Israel. The current government — an authoritarian ethnonationalist beholden to a faction of religious extremists every bit as fanatical as the religious fanatics who attacked the kibbutzim two years ago — is plainly guilty of war crimes. But no one will be held accountable. America will make sure of that.
I do know what comes next for Gaza. Nothing. Or nothing but more suffering, anyway. The same Times article linked above quoted a man who, prior to the war, “made a comfortable living” in Gaza City where he had an apartment. He and his family survived 10 Israeli airstrikes over the course of the war. Asked what they’ll do if the ceasefire holds, he said simply, “We’re here in a tent, and we’ll go back to Gaza City in a tent, too.”
Thank you H for always dealing in facts and truth, even the inconvenient kind. What you’ve written very much needed to be said. Sam Harris wrote a book awhile back, I think it was The End of Faith. In it he wrote of Selective Christianity, where one decides which parts of the holy book are convenient to follow and just ignore the rest. We live in a whole universe of ‘Selectives’ now. Pick which part of ‘love thy neighbor’ or ‘treat the least among you as you would treat me’ and conveniently ignore the rest. Select the parts of democracy you like and shit can the rest. Of course what happened in Gaza was genocide, but humanity will never figure out how to stop it until we first acknowledge it and shine a light into every crack and crevice. We’re trapped in a world where might, physical and economic, always make right for politicians.
On a secondary note, I can’t figure out how Israel with the indisputably best intelligence in the world was blindsided on Oct 7. Without that conflict where would Bibi be today.
I believe Bibi intentionally created the conditions for the Oct 7 terrorist attacks. It was reported, I forget where (probably MSNBC based on my viewing habits at the time), that shortly before Oct 7 security forces had a significant draw down along the Gaza border under the pretext of moving these forces to the West Bank for “police actions”. Bibi was losing grip on his seat (and freedom as he belongs in Israeli jail for his myriad crimes, the Hague is a whole separate set of crimes) with millions of Israelis protesting his widely known corruption. He needed a Hail Mary. Creating the opportunity for Oct 7 attacks was it. However, he probably thought it would cost 12 Israeli lives to secure his freedom. In his sick demented (likely psychopathic) mind this was a fair trade. As we know, it ended up being far worse then a “small” terrorist attack.
Hi H,
I hate semantic debates and I don’t claim to have a valid opinion on this conflict. However, I thought I would say this.
I don’t know about English but in my native language, also related to Latin from where the root of “race” is derived, “race” can ONLY be used to separate domestic animals of the same specie that were breaded to amplify a trait. This excludes, you will note, applying the word to homo sapiens. “Racist”, in that language, is define as claiming that there are races among humans (and implicitly that one of them is superior), in the accepted dictionaries; plainly nonsense.
That is why I don’t answer a census question that asks me what is my “race”. That’s offensive. Am I a milk cow?
So you will pardon me, with respect, for refusing the epithet of racist. I do agree more importantly with you that, I, like all of us, have some cognitive biases, very useful in the Neolithic, that makes my modern behaviour, from time to time, “racist” as you probably define it (and you can define words in your own blog whichever way you want!), I would use another word such as “xenophobic” or “prejudicial”.
Now that doesn’t do sh*t for the Palestinians, I realize. You are right, to be candid, that my first reaction after the Hamas attack was not sympathetic to the Palestinians. A week later, I was ashamed of my own thought process given the reaction of the IDF. That was a familiar feeling because this probably happened 20 times in the last 45 years of what seems to be continuous coverage of this conflict (my first memory is from the first Lebanon war). That’s my 2 cents from just another overwhelmed dude.
I’m willing to change my mind based on evidence or stronger arguments than mine, all the time (I can only hope).
Yeah, a lot of people will chafe at that racist sentence from the article. Which is (mostly) why I put it in there. I like to poke people’s nerves. But there’s a lot of truth to it. And I’d submit that the cognitive biases you mention do society more harm than they do you good, on average. For example, how many car jackings and armed robberies do you suppose white Americans’ cognitive biases have spared them versus the number of completely innocent black Americans demoralized and otherwise made to feel less human as a result of those same cognitive biases which white people mistakenly assume aren’t evident in their body language and demeanor?
Crash is wildly overrated, but it’s still a great, great film. It speaks both to the utility of our cognitive biases but also to how societally destructive those cognitive biases are.
Wholeheartedly agree and will check out Crash. Thanks
The war didn’t start on 10/7/23. Nor did it end this week. No one’s talking seriously about reconstruction, much less bringing back the dead. The survivors won’t have a warm and fuzzy feeling for the conquerors, and the next Yahwa Sinwar will leverage that. Add in the ongoing conquest of the West Bank. There won’t be peace there anytime soon. Not even when Israel reaches a final solution.
As I remember it “The War” actually started in 1967. I still see it philosophically as Israel’s birth cry in response to being born after its people suffered the great genocide of the Holocaust of WWII. That war has been continuous for nearly 60 years and will continue, unending for all time as far as I can see. No group seems to have any motive to quit. There is no cease-fire now, only a brief utterance of code words and a counting of the dead and other lost resources before the next round of revenge genocide.
One could make a case for “The War” starting in 1948. Or earlier (see: history).
I do not believe Bibi will actually stop. He might wait long enough to get the hostages out (which is all that Trump cares about), but he’ll go right back to it as soon as the last hostage is freed. Why wouldn’t he? There has been no push back to the genocide that has been obvious for almost 2 full years. He has personally benefited. And when it all stops, he will go down again, likely to jail. It took about a month or 2 for those who were paying attention (and not beholden to the false idol of any criticism of Israel is antisemitic) to realize that the what was happening was genocide. Yet, in America, it wasn’t until earlier this year that the institutionalist media started to admit it was probably genocide.
“ Shame”
The title and the photograph
Powerful! you would not have been faulted for exclamation points in the title.
“My God‘s better than your God and said I should kill you and have your stuff”
Me, as a 13 year-old explaining human history to my ageeing grandfather.
I always hoped I was wrong.
@ HB – would love your take on the Saudi and nuclear armed Pakistan, mutual defense agreement on Sept 17th… just 8 days after Israel sent that missile over Saudi Arabia in Qatar..
A small aside. When I was first introduced to the taxonomy of the animal kingdom my teacher was very insistent about defining the bottom of the ladder. As he pointed out the bottom rungs were labeled “genus” and “species.” What he also told us was that in some circles every species is divided into various “races.” My teacher insisted that there is no such thing as “race.” That was over 65 years ago. Since then I have marveled at the evolution of that term.
Damn, H. Definitely one of your more powerful pieces. Thank you.