Israel v. the Arabs: The Study of Comparative Slaughter
Comparisons with other military campaigns demonstrate that the injuries, Israel is inflicting on the Arabs, are not inhumane or excessive.
By
David Gottfried
All bloodshed is revolting, horrendous, ghastly – the vivid and provocative adjectives of our evocative English language cannot begin to convey the brutality of politically and religiously prescribed killing. Nevertheless, as unseemly as this may appear to many peace-loving people, some killing is worse than other killing, and sometimes killing is justified. To those of you ensconced in the safety of suburban America, I will seem heartless, and the succeeding calculations may appear to be the quintessence of crassness and coldness. However, even in suburban America, killing takes place all the time – every time a patient is denied medical care, every time an economic policy propagates poverty, and every time a policeman mercilessly clubs an innocent motorist, or puts someone in a chokehold, killing is condoned.
But enough abstractions.
I am writing this on Sunday, October 15, at around 10:30 PM. EST. The New York Times tells us, at this moment, that between 2600 and 2700 Arabs have been killed in Gaza. Thus, after about 8 and half days of fighting, the so-called Palestinians have lost fewer than 2700 people in Gaza.
A comparison between Gaza, and other war zones, reveals that Israel has nothing to apologize for:
1) The American Bombing of Dresden:
In February 1945, the Allies bombed Dresden, Germany. Dresden had no important military targets. Germany was well on its way to being utterly annihilated by February 1945. Nevertheless, in a mere two days, allied bombing killed about 30,000 people. In other words, we killed over 30,000 people, in a span of two days, while bombing a town devoid of military targets in a war that was well on its way toward being won. In Gaza, in 8 days, Israel has only killed 2600 to 2700 people, in a densely populated region, filled with military targets (thousands of rockets have been fired from Gaza in the past 8 days) in a war that could destroy Israel if other Arab entities combined against Israel given that the total Arab population of the world outnumbers Israel by about 100 to 1.
Why did America manage to kill so many people in Dresden, a city with few or no military targets, while Israel has killed so few people in a region saturated with military targets? The answer is simple: America wanted to maximize damage done and let the bombs rip, not caring who they fell on. (They called it “carpet bombing.”) The Israelis are trying so hard to reduce collateral damage to “civilians” in Gaza that they are foregoing taking out many of the rockets in Gaza. For example, rockets rained down on Tel Aviv in Israel today, the eighth day of the conflict. Tel Aviv is the greatest population center in Israel. But the Israeli government, I believe, refrained from taking out rockets aimed at Tel Aviv because it wanted to limit losses sustained by Arabs.
2) The April 1940 German bombing of Belgrade
In about three hours, the Germans killed about 30,000 people. Did Belgrade have any rockets aimed at Germany ? Of course not. It would not have dared to offend the great “blond beast” to its North.
3) As the media turns its Gaze from Southwest Israel to Gaza
In the first 48 hours of fighting, CNN focused, almost exclusively, on the carnage in Israel. However, our peripatetic news media does not like to focus on a problem and search for its solution. It flits from issue to issue like a butterfly, or a mosquito, and never explicates much of anything. Over the past eight days, the media has bemoaned the growing catastrophe that is Gaza. With each passing day, more and more attention is focused on the travails of that febrile and furious territory. No doubt, the media is setting the stage for their savage denunciations of Israel after the ground invasion is underway and the Gaza death toll escalates.
Israel will be compelled to kill lots of people in Gaza. Gaza is adjacent to Israel. So called “Palestinians” from Gaza recently invaded Israel and killed, in a day’s time, 1300 Israelis who were just rising from their nighttime slumber. (Adjusting for population, this is comparable to America losing over 100,000 people in a day’s time) Gaza might appear to be puny in size, but Gaza has behind it much of the larger Arab world which has often banded together to attempt to extinguish the Jewish state (1948-49, 1967, 1973)
Compare Israel to the way other nations defend itself:
4) Robert Kennedy noted that our armed forces were killing 150,000 innocent civilians, per year, in Vietnam
The United States saw fit to pulverize Vietnam, which was 12,000 miles away from America, because we feared that bands of communist guerillas, trying to win their independence from the colonial French, and later colonial Americans, might someday land in Santa Barbara and surge across the Rockies. Senator Robert Kennedy questioned American foreign policy, doubting that America had the right to create 150,000 civilian casualties, per year, in Vietnam because the communists were 12,000 miles from America and might soon be only 11,000 miles from America. Senator Kennedy’s incisive criticisms of our Vietnam policy occur at the end of this tape, from 19:00 minutes in until the terminus.
In the late 60’s, America’s population was about 170 million, we were the strongest nation on earth, and our airforce was rapidly gaining the accoutrements of stuff seen only on Star Trek. By contrast, the population of North Vietnam was well under 20 million, the nation had few military targets because it was essentially an agrarian, pre industrial society, and its airforce was so small it was virtually non existent. Although America spent most of the third quarter of the 20th century pillorying Vietnam, incinerating its people with napalm (essentially sticky burning gasoline), poisoning the land and livestock with agent orange, and aiding a regime which put 80,000 Buddhist and leftist activists in tiger cages, not one Vietnamese person committed any acts of terrorism, on American soil, at any time in the 20th century.
I should have perhaps refrained from mentioning Vietnam; after all, America is one of Israel’s strongest supporters. (Sometimes this makes me uneasy, and I think that Israel’s relationship with America is becoming more like Judea’s relationship with ancient Rome.) In any event, I will attempt to mollify the hurt feelings sustained by my fellow Americans by noting that many Americans have been pro Israeli and even philosemitic. Indeed, many theologians contend that the Reformation, in England and America, resulted in a rediscovery of Jerusalem and a new admiration for the ancient Hebrews because Protestants, while rejecting papacy and Imperial Rome, turned their gaze toward Jerusalem and elevated all things Hebraic. Indeed, some colonial Americans studied Talmud even though they were in all respects Christian, and some of our founding Fathers wanted to make Hebrew America’s national language. The Christian faith, which throughout European history had been tainted with antisemitism and the imperialism and sadism of ancient Rome (The terms Kaiser and Tzar are both derivations from the name “Caesar.”), arguably became an entirely new faith upon the shores of America. In any event, in honor of Americans who have loved Israel, I will give you this clip from the Weavers, who had, unfortunately, been persecuted for alleged communist sympathies.
5) Creative Destruction in Nation-Building as In Economics
Some capitalist economists say that as capitalism creates it destroys, e.g., more profitable enterprises surpass and bankrupt more feeble businesses. The same thing has transpired with nations. Frankly, almost every nation came to be because of another nation’s death:
a) America exists because the Native Americans suffered genocide at the hands of Europeans.
b) India and Pakistan exist because of the massive bloodletting, between Muslims and Hindus, that transpired at the close of British colonial rule.
c) Iran and Iraq are both held aloft by the grave of Kurdistan.
d) Lebanon is a Muslim state because the Christian Maronites, who once dominated that state, have been killed.
e) Turkey committed genocide against Armenia to express Turkish national aspirations.
f) In the Three Emperors alliance, the autocrats of Russia, Prussia and Austria suppressed the independence of Poles, Czechs, Serbians, Slovenians, Jews and many other ethnicities for the greater glory and untrammeled arrogance of the German and Russian Eagles.
g) The grandeur of France is a function of the debasement of the Hugenaut Protestant minority.
h) The British lion roared and ingested Ireland, Wales, Scottland and about one quarter of the land mass of the globe.
i) Nigerian nationalism, in the late 1960’s, was predicated on the starvation of Biafrans.
j) In 1994, Hutus expressed their tribal pride by disemboweling Tutsis, i.e., killing Tutsis wasn’t enough; they removed the small intestines from their bodies and wore them as necklaces.
And now, after 1900 years of Jewish statelessness, as the Jews try to defend newly liberated Zion, much of the world has deigned to change the rules and eject the Jews from their homeland.