On the one hand, even if the statistical figures of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry are true, there is a ratio of civilian to combatant dead that is roughly two combatants for every three civilians, that is unprecedentedly low in modern urban warfare by quite a margin. It means that even the Gaza Health Ministry can't disguise Israelis are generally fighting this war with extreme care.
On the other hand, there are a total of roughly 100,000 Palestinian casualties - casualties is a term that's widely misunderstood, it doesn't mean total dead, it means total dead + injured, and when you add the two, it's roughly 100,000 people. That's almost 5% of Gazans. And this is just the figure at the beginning of Rafah, which, for all we know, could double the figure in just a month or two. It does not include those about to die or get injured, it doesn't include those who are currently starving, or worried about how their routine infections could worsen, it certainly doesn't include those who are psychologically damaged for life, and it can't possibly include all those who are missing.
Even if Israelis are fighting this war with extreme care, even if, as American military observers note, they are using all kinds of safety precautions the US never used in Iraq or Afghanistan, they can't hide the fact that they've also deployed a level of weaponry the US never did in Iraq or Afghanistan. You read that correctly. The level of weaponry deployed is greater than Iraq or Afghanistan: not just relative to the size of the areas, but in real terms: in six months, more weaponry's been dumped on Gaza than were inflicted on two countries in twenty years that are 1500 times Gaza's size.
On still the other hand, the vast majority of these bombs are not dropped on civilians. They're dropped to destroy Hamas's tunnel network, which is forty percent larger than London's subway system in a territory less than a quarter the size. Tunnels built so deep that even the biggest bombs struggle to reach them. You cannot possibly expect that Israel will allow the tunnel system to remain in place, and if it means destroying Gaza to do it, well... nobody was calling Gaza that great a place to begin with, and even now, Israel is far from the sole author of Gaza's shame (we'll get into that another day).
On the other hand again, even with the extreme care taken for human life, there are no guarantees in war, particularly war of this scale. Areas that are planned to be safe turn out to not be safe: sometimes due to incompetence, sometimes due to competent people's margin of error, and occasionally because war crimes are committed - not by the Israeli military, 'Israel' has, thus far, neither planned war crimes nor committed them. Even now, Rafah will be unspeakably bloody, but depending on how the invasion is conducted, it can still be within legitimate rules of warfare. But individual Israeli soldiers? Even individual units? You'd have to be incredibly naive to not guess that war crimes are committed every day, just as individual soldiers do in every asymmetric war since the beginning of warfare. And if Israel does not eventually prosecute those soldiers who commit them, Israel itself will have committed war crimes.
But more often than not, and this is why Israel is in such serious trouble, part of the reason Israel's experienced so many PR disasters is not because Israel has succeeded in its military objectives, but because the cost of Israel's success is so high - and people can't help wondering if success can be procured at a lower price. Even if a 1/1.5 ratio is unprecedentedly low, all combatant to civilian ratios are too high, and any civilian murder will call an army's tactics into question.
There is all sorts of evidence of a trigger happy Israeli army, the World Central Kitchen episode is just one case study among dozens. It would appear that 142 journalists have been killed, 224 humanitarian aid workers, and more than 350 healthcare professionals. Israel can justify it by saying that many of these workers made a decision to embed themselves with Hamas, and must therefore be suspect of collaborating with Hamas - and in a sense they're correct, but surely nowhere near a majority of these workers are Hamas collaborators in any sense. If in six months they can kill so many professionals with so little regard for their collateral damage, how many outright civilians can they kill under a similar calculus? How many children?
Whatever the position about the Gaza war, we on Israel's side are going to have to get as serious about the cost of our beliefs as we wish people on Palestine's side would, not just the cost of our international esteem, but the actual human cost.
It's always tenuous to talk about morality when statecraft is involved, because a more moral world is only attained through immoral acts. But even if you don't want to view the human cost morally, you have to view the human cost politically:
We haven't annihilated a people, but we've annihilated whatever little society we allowed them, and if we don't leave the door open after this for some kind of negotiated settlement, we will have erased whatever chance we had to make this struggle not last generations longer, maybe centuries longer. If, after all this, we simply expect that we can make Gaza into an eternally occupied territory, basically an open air prison for millions requisitioned in an area 1/3rd the size of Philadelphia, we are delusional. If we expect that half the entire world won't rush to their side, do everything they can to subvert Israel's continued existence, and rush to judge every Jew as preemptively guilty helping these Israeli 'jailers', we are delusional. If we expect that Israel can perpetually occupy Gaza without Russia and China exploiting the turbulence it causes in the US to create a larger scale conflict that can topple the political power of democracy in favor of totalitarian dictatorships all over the world, we are delusional.
In history, in politics, moral absolutes are what get people killed. Leave chants and memes to the idiots. There is a far more complex morality at work, and it urgently needs more people to decode it.
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