The Killing You Pay For (War in Gaza, pt 2)

On Israeli atrocities, U.S. hypocrisy, and the blindness of bothsidesism

(Note: I scheduled this post before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, which I condemn. I assume that story will take all the air out of the room for the foreseeable future. But it feels odd to interrupt parts 1 and 2 of this post with another on unrelated subjects, and I don’t envision the election doomscrolling slowing down from here. So I’m keeping it on schedule. Read this if your brain needs a break from that story.)

Picking up where my last post left off, here are three more truths on the war in Gaza that offer moral clarity without reliance on ingroup values.

3. Though some military response from Israel was understandable, its actual response continues to be outrageously excessive and indiscriminate, such that it has become a far greater tragedy than the initial attacks.

Israel has the right to defend itself, yes. But what this means in practice is extremely contextual. Like every nation, there are some things it may morally do, and others it must not do, in the course of defending itself.

One thing it should not have done is kill vastly more innocent people than its enemies realistically threatened. My own country committed this sin in the course of its war on terror, and I excoriated those choices for over a decade.¹ When Israel made similar choices, it deserved similar criticism.

Specifically, Israel’s imagined need to kill every single Hamas member, and related choice to precede ground movements with withering bombing campaigns in densely populated areas, was foreseeably both a strategic blunder and a moral atrocity.² It warranted our leaders’ strident condemnation from the outset, not nauseating pledges of unconditional support and funding.

The mission was strategically counterproductive for all the same reasons America's war on terror backfired, and the same reasons even Israel thought it infeasible before October. Terrorism is not a fixed pool of people you can hunt down and eliminate. It is not even a named affiliation you can chase from a territory. It is a strategy resorted to by the desperate, outgunned, and radicalized. Heavy-handed foreign militaries pummeling people who already have cause to resent them causes more of this, not less. The invasion likely killed more Israelis than it saved, even in the short term.

The approach is even less defensible when you weigh Palestinian civilians equally, as moral decency demands.³ Even if the IDF tried as hard as it should to discriminate, there was never a way to pursue such maximalist aims without killing more civilians than it was worth.⁴ And of course, the IDF did the opposite. It deferred bombing decisions to AI; accepted 20:1 civilian-to-militant casualty ratios; weaponized starvation; tortured (lots of torture) and degraded prisoners; and filmed an assortment of war crimes for fun.⁵

I can empathize with Israelis scarred by October 7th, in the same way I felt for Palestinians in my last post. My own country’s response to 9/11 was just as bellicose as Israel’s has been: I get it. It’s human. But as with Hamas, the empathy must be paired with condemnation, especially since the United States is also complicit in Israel’s case.

This is why the calls for a ceasefire—so mocked and marginalized by Congress at first—only grew louder and proved more prescient as the bodies mounted. As fear and shock subsided, brains regained function, and the horror continued to mount, so too did cries to end the futile, senseless violence in civilian areas.

Israel will have to stop its war long before everyone opposing its existence is dead. Before long, it will face a very similar risk of terror attacks as it did on October 8^th. It was all for less than nothing. It has accelerated a cycle of violence that ultimately weakens everyone’s security, and caused unfathomable suffering in the process.

4. Both sides-ism ignores the power dynamic that should inform your moral and discursive priorities.

So, both sides have done very bad things. How should we respond to this?

Here is an example of how not to respond that you may have heard a few hundred times:

“Look, this atrocity that my side just inflicted on the other side was really caused by their own actions. We have no agency here—our response is just the logical outcome of the situation the other side brought about. It sucks, but hey, they should have thought of that before they chose to do the thing that totally forced my side’s hand.”

This argument is bullshit. For months, dumb people on both sides made it. Slightly less dumb people decried the other side’s version of it, and only a handful were consistent enough to reject it in both directions.

The trouble is that almost none of the consistent people have actual power, but some dumb people do. And by virtue of the U.S.-Israel alliance, the dumb people with power are overwhelmingly biased towards Israel. So while actual Congressmen tripped over themselves to egg on the worst impulses of Israel's racist thug of a Prime Minister, even as he killed far more innocents than Hamas had, Congress got a fraction as much mainstream criticism as random Students for Palestine groups.

If you spent October dogpiling tankie Twitter and the roughly 11 people who attend DSA rallies, congrats: you were technically right. You also chose to direct your scorn at only the least influential idiots in the debate. You insisted all condemn the atrocity that had already finished before you’d condemn the one your own government was arming and greenlighting in real-time. You sneered that the least relevant voices in U.S. politics had “lost the plot," and lost sight yourself of the story the rest of the world saw unfolding.

If you spent April more outraged at the ideological excesses of powerless 20-year-olds camped outside Columbia than you were with the lethal excesses of the military you fund and arm, you probably weren’t even technically right. You probably just used overbroad definitions of antisemitism to deflect needed criticism of war crimes, which were by then apparent. You were probably rich and safe and mostly happy, and cheering for violence against people who aren’t.

“Woke” ideologies have taken a lot of criticism in recent years, some of it for good reason. But social justice movements deserve credit for at least one important insight, to which both-sides centrists remain infuriatingly oblivious:

Two sides can be similar in every respect but power, and still that difference will tell the story.

There is a superficial symmetry to the cycle of suffering and revenge that Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in. But it’s dwarfed by the asymmetry of that suffering’s quantity, an imbalance that persists each time the conflict flares up. There are 38,000 corpses on one side against 1,600 on the other. There are two million homeless, starving people without healthcare, electricity, plumbing, clean water, safety, political representation, or hope for the future on one side, against 125 hostages on the other. To amplify the plight of the hostages in 2024 is to turn your head away from the bulk of this tragedy; to zoom into a picture that’s 99% red until you find enough blue pixels to pretend it is purple. Caring about everyone equally means prioritizing suffering in proportion to its quantity, not imposing a false equivalence on either side of a line in the sand.

5. The United States’ unshakeable support for Israel not only makes it complicit in atrocities, but exposes the base hypocrisy of its foreign policy’s purported values. This will undercut U.S. interests for decades to come.

Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration has been on a world tour championing a “rules-based” international order rooted in respect for human rights and international law. He’s tried to rally democracies into a new Cold War against autocratic regimes, in part by highlighting human rights abuses in China and Russia. Congress accused China of genocide in Xinjiang, and Russia of genocide in Ukraine. Though the United States never joined the Rome Statute (and in fact, threatened to invade the Hague if Americans were ever detained there) Biden justified the ICC’s arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin on grounds that he’d committed international crimes.

Now that the ICC arrest warrant is for Netanyahu’s crimes, though, the administration seems much less concerned with those pesky little rules.

Forget international law; even U.S. law expressly forbids arms sales to human rights abusers. We’ve simply declined to enforce this rule on Israel for decades, through a combination of double standards, plugging our ears, and baldfaced lies.

Robert Wright

of

Nonzero Newsletter

put it well in his post at the end of May:

For years, American leaders have lectured the world about the importance of upholding the “rules-based international order,” and for years America has been a leading violator of the rules. And for years the fact of this hypocrisy has barely penetrated mainstream discourse. Though the gap between America’s words and deeds does get mentioned occasionally, the US foreign policy establishment’s immune system—honed by eons of evolution to fight off ideas that could cause cognitive dissonance—has tended to marginalize people who get very exercised about the gap.

So it’s always noteworthy when a prominent mainstream voice dwells on this hypocrisy, and last week Gideon Rachman, chief foreign policy commentator of the Financial Times, devoted a whole column to it. “America’s own actions are undermining vital parts of the rules-based order,” he wrote. As a result, “In large parts of the world, America’s claim to be upholding the rules-based international order is treated with derision.

As Israel’s abuses gain notoriety, derision is joined by anger, at increasing damage to America’s reputation and competitiveness vis a vis China. Since October, polling suggests America’s popularity has declined sharply in the Middle East and Indo-Pacific, while support for China, Russia, and Iran has risen. Even a report from the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy admitted: “America is losing compared to its opponents because of the war in Gaza.”

Similarly, our refusal to do anything meaningful to advance Palestinian self-determination, or even to punish Israel as it transparently tries to prevent Palestinian statehood, exposes our leaders’ indifference to democratic values wherever they do not happen to overlap with preexisting U.S. power interests. The same goes for our support of Saudi Arabia, rumored to soon include explicit defense guarantees, so long the Saudis also promise to ignore Israel’s abuses.

President Biden’s policy, tragically supported by most politicians in both parties, has been to arm, fund, hug, cover for, and “stand with” Israel without conditions—no matter how many innocents it kills, how much life-saving aid it blocks, how many settlements it expands, how many homes it demolishes, how many independent NGOs charge it with apartheid or genocide, how much outrage it engenders in the United Nations, or how much its once-proud liberal democracy backslides into a violent ethno-nationalist cult.

Combined with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Libya, drone strikes all over the world, the assassination of foreign officials, CIA torture, and indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, this is making our “liberal, rules-based” international order very difficult to take seriously. Most of the world now sees those terms for what they are: a euphemism for naked American power aggrandizement.

1. In 2014, I wrote a senior thesis on the U.S. drone program. Averaging five independent studies, I estimated that U.S. drone strikes at the time were killing about one civilian per six or seven enemy combatants—and I argued that this was far more collateral damage than killing the combatants was worth. Reports now indicate that early in the war, Israel was accepting a ratio of 20 dead civilians for every one, low-level enemy combatant. By Israel’s admission, at least two-thirds of the Palestinians killed have been civilians, which likely counts all adult males as combatants; other estimates exceed 90%. The idea that Israel’s critics are holding it to a higher standard than other nations is absurd.

2. Relatedly, do not talk to me about “human shields.” Yes, Hamas hides in tunnels instead of politely walking into an open field to be killed. And yes, some Hamas go to sleep at night in their apartments with their families. This does not excuse the conscious choice to bomb these packed civilian areas. Even if Hamas were tying civilians to windows as literal shields, what to do about that is Israel’s choice. See point 4: the moral responsibility for killing lies with whoever pulls the trigger.

3. Reasonable people can debate how many Israeli lives are saved, in expectation, for each member of Hamas Israel kills. But the answer is no greater than a tiny decimal, and it may even be negative. Let’s do some napkin math…

Hamas was founded in 1987. In 37 years since, the sum total of Israelis killed by both intifadas and all Palestinian terrorism, political violence, and military conflicts in the region is about 3,314. This pace is inflated by the recent outlier of October 7^th (i.e., it assumes no defensive hardening on Israel’s part moving forward). It also includes Israelis killed by other terror groups (i.e., in the West Bank) and Israeli soldiers killed in conventional conflicts Israel initiated. But to be conservative, let’s attribute them all to Hamas terrorism.

Let’s also assume the fighting lifespan of a Hamas militant alive today is a generous 40 years, as if they were all just 20 years old and would stay active until age 60. Mapping the trend from the past 37 years onto the next 40 years would predict 3,582 more dead Israelis at the hands of Hamas.

Finally, let’s pretend that Hamas somehow cannot recruit any replacements for militants that die; that there is no blowback for collateral damage; and that there is a linear relationship between the number of Hamas militants and Hamas’ ability to kill Israelis. Again, all dubious assumptions, but in a direction that inflates the protective benefit of killing Hamas fighters.

Last October Hamas claimed to have 40,000 militants; but the CIA estimated 20-25,000, so to again be conservative, let’s say it was 20,000. That would mean each Hamas militant could be expected to contribute to the killing of 0.18 Israelis over the next 40 years – or 0.004 per year. By Israel’s own admission, it is happily killing at least two Palestinian civilians for every Hamas fighter, from direct conflict alone - to say nothing of those killed by starvation and disease and impoverishment, etc. Experts estimate the full death toll of Israel’s campaign to date will be closer to 186,000 Palestinians, which (subtracting the 13,000 of these Israel claims are Hamas fighters) would be about 6.85 Palestinian civilians killed for every Hamas fighter killed.

So using a series of assumptions extremely generous to Israel, it’s conduct suggests it is valuing each Israeli life over the next 40 years as being worth somewhere between 11 and 76 innocent Palestinian lives today. If you want to defend Israel’s conduct in this war, I need you to tell me: how many Palestinians is one Israeli worth, and why is that answer not racist? Nationalism is a disease, engineered to switch off the little voice in the back of your head that tells you mass killing is wrong.

4. The closest analog may be the effort to drive ISIS from Mosul, which killed roughly 11,000 civilians. But Gaza is much denser and harder to evacuate, so the toll was always likely to be higher. And the international community was always going to have less patience for it. Arab nations hated ISIS, but sympathize with Palestine. The Iraqi coalition was greeted as liberators; Israel, as conquerors. They had no possibility of winning hearts and minds and no articulable exit plan. As late as June 2024, they still had no exit plan, causing Benny Gantz to resign from the war cabinet and accuse Netanyahu of intentionally prolonging the war to extend his tenure as Prime Minister.

5. I take no position on whether Israel is also guilty of genocide. The ICC case relies on technical legal definitions which, although important, do not much change the underlying immorality of Israel’s choice to bomb 370,000 housing units because a few Hamas were hiding inside.