A cynical explanation for why so many minors are dying in Israeli strikes on Gaza has been offered by a respected American outlet.
The Economist has published a piece pretending to answer why Israel is killing so many Palestinian children, or, as the British journal puts it, why “children are a very high proportion of the victims of war in Gaza.” The authors note that “in Ukraine, a conflict between two much bigger powers, children account for fewer than 550 of roughly 9,800 civilian fatalities over a much longer period.” Hence, they venture, “Gaza’s enormous child death toll reflects, among other things, its especially youthful demography.”
Brazenly, the article removes the actual killers from the picture (the children fall victim to “the war,” not to the Israelis), gives just enough room to US President Joe Biden’s mendacious doubting of Palestinian victim figures (in reality certain to be under-counts) to make the reader wonder, and never mentions the true answer: so many children are getting killed because Israel commits one war crime after another against civilians, in pursuit of a strategy of collective punishment that amounts to genocide and ethnic cleansing (though these definitions, as is often the case with Israel’s actions, are being debated at various official levels). And also, because it can, due to the West’s complicity. In sum, an ordinary example of much Western mainstream coverage.
Yet there is more to this spin presented as cool, English-style level-headed analysis, complete with statistics and a chart. Inadvertently, the article opens a wide window on something ugly but important: The point where narratives about who has how many babies, or demography, meet the dehumanization that facilitates atrocities against fellow human beings.
As Khaled Elgindy, the director of the Middle East Institute’s Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs, has explained in Newsweek, dehumanizing rhetoric conveys the idea that “the lives, suffering and humanity of Palestinians are less worthy than the lives, suffering and humanity of Israelis.” And as the genocide and Holocaust expert Raz Segal has found, the Israeli assault is a “textbook case” by the criteria of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, while making others appear less than human is a typical element of genocide.
This devastating weapon of mass misrepresentation makes perpetrators, such as many Israelis now, feel willing to kill and righteous about the result. It also motivates and protects accomplices, many of them in the West’s political, media, and intellectual elites. For bystanders, those merely silent and passive in the face of the Palestinians’ desperate need for protection, dehumanizing language, which caricatures Palestinians as “animals” and “savages” and any calls for resistance as support for “terrorism” without nuance, at least suppresses empathy, numbs whatever is left of a conscience, and rationalizes flagrant moral failure.
The Economist is, of course, careful to (barely) maintain appearances by wrapping its nasty points in plenty of Sociologese about average income, fertility rates, and secondary education. But its message still comes through loud and clear: Gaza’s children are dying in droves not because Israelis are murdering them, but because there are so many of them. Dehumanization step one: Stop thinking of children as children, with names and faces; instead think of them as numbers. And on top of that, excessive numbers.
Step two of dehumanization: The fact that there are so many young Palestinians, in turn, is, we learn from The Economist, not a normal outcome of human life. By comparing Palestinians with even poorer populations in the world, the authors conclude that their high birthrates are an anomaly to be explained, they argue, by militant politics, namely the pro-natalism of Palestinian leaders, from the PLO’s late Yasser Arafat to Hamas. In short, Palestinians are depicted as people who weaponize, as we now say, their own reproduction and, thus, children.
The implication is clear if vicious. Recall that in the eyes of the US, Israel’s main Western ally, the attack on Gaza, including the starving and killing of civilians, is Israel exercising its right to self-defense. (Let’s leave aside that, under international law, Israel is a military occupying power and thus “self-defense” is not an applicable justification for use of force against the occupied territories.) Combine that with what The Economist says about Palestinian children being part of a strategy of long-term demographic warfare “by the cradle.” From here, you only have two dots to connect to arrive at the conclusion that if children are a “weapon,” it’s acceptable to exercise “self-defense” against them. Even if no one at the magazine, from authors to editors, managed to think through to the moral abyss their own argument opens up, that failure alone would be shamefully revealing.
In reality, Palestinians have had to learn to understand their children as their future with an urgency that people not historically subject to systematic ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide may not know. To then, in effect, blame the massacre of these Palestinian children by Israeli perpetrators on the Palestinian victims because they dared have so many in the face of relentless oppression, is abjectly cynical.
Jews, of course, also know this kind of urgency, above all due to Germany’s historically recent attempt to exterminate them. But the genocide of their own people has not translated into empathy from modern-day Zionist leaders. For them, the slogan “never again” means “never again to us.”
Palestinian leaders, moreover, are not the only ones with thoughts about demography. Indeed, demographic policies have been at the core of the Zionist project from the get-go in the late nineteenth century, in two shapes: as a constant pro-active concern with increasing the number of Jewish settlers and then Jewish Israeli citizens; and as an equally persistent fear of growth of the Palestinian population. Since the first ethnic cleansing of the vast majority of Palestinians (at least 700,000), begun before and continued through the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, reducing their number and keeping it low has been one of the principal reasons why Israel has always denied the Palestinian right of return, affirmed in the UN General Assembly resolution 194.
That, in turn, has been a prime factor that has made a lasting peace settlement impossible. In other words, Israel regards Palestinians and their children as a fundamental threat to national security, and that is one of the worst obstacles in the way of a settlement that would bring justice to the Palestinians and free the world from a never-ending, extremely dangerous crisis that should long have been put to rest.
How can it happen that a prestigious, opinion-shaping publication like The Economist gets away with such an article – and not just at any time, but during an ongoing assault on Gaza in which over 10,000 people have been killed, almost half of them children? The answer is that the systematic dehumanization of the Palestinians, their rhetorical reduction to “bare biological life that can be extinguished without any moral doubt” – as explained by American journalist and author Ali Abunimah – has a long history.
Acute observers are pointing out that the West’s support of Israel’s actions is costing it whatever prestige it still has in the rest – that is, most – of the world. That is true and richly deserved. For what is even worse than the language of dehumanization is that it is not at all a fringe phenomenon: in the West, one can take part in this genocide-promoting practice and find resonance and recognition, rather than opprobrium and censure, as long as the victims are Palestinians. The West, while hallucinating itself as a “garden” of “values” has a long record of staggering violence combined with stunning hypocrisy. But at this moment in this ongoing history, the horrific abuse of the Palestinians – in word and deed – is its single most egregious depravity. And humanity won’t forget or forgive.
Gaza has been a self-governing district since around 2007. Israel completely withdrew and Gaza elected it’s own rulers, Hamas. That big wall around Gaza is to protect Israel from the kind of slaughter we saw on Oct 7th. Oh, and the thousands of rockets fired into Israel daily that aren’t targeting military but civilians. There are no Jewish living in Gaza let alone ‘occupying’ it. So what are you talking about?
Or is your accusation of ‘occupying’ about the existence of Israel itself?
The dehumanisation is a problem, I agree. It’s horrifying that little ones are killed and hurt, irrespective of their race or faith. I only wish Hamas had not DECLARED WAR on Israel by deliberately targeting Jewish civilians for barbaric slaughter! You want to talk about “de-humanising?” OK, so let’s talk about what it takes to put a Jewish baby in an oven to kill it! How about slitting a pregnant woman open to tear out her unborn baby? That IS what the barbarians did on Oct 7th.
This is SS level psychologically messed up. It’s psychopathic and chilling! A ‘normal’ person would recoil at those facts. If you somehow see this as justified because the kids were Jews…? See above comment about being messed up and get psych help!
That is the footage most of us have been spared viewing. I think it’s been a mistake to withhold the real horror of what Hamas did on Oct 7th. It should be released even if it traumatises people. The invasion into Israel was designed to be so, so repugnant that Israel would have no option but to retaliate.The IDF are now determined to eliminate Hamas, not the Palestinian people. So the accusation of genocide is stupid. 20,000 Palestinians would cross into Israel daily for work. A quarter of the population in Israel is Palestinian.
So now we have the awful reality of civilians in the way as those cowards, Hamas, wage their religious war and use their own people as human shields. Why would you launch rockets from a school knowing full well that Israel’s tech would trace and target the point of launch?
You want to talk abut the kids?
The very best article I’ve read that tackles this kind of ‘article’ is written by Brendan O’Neill recently. In The Absolution of Hamas, https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/11/06/the-absolution-of-hamas/. O’Neill writes,
“Make no mistake: Hamas has always treated the Palestinians like dirt. Since it seized power in Gaza in 2007, it has ruled as one would expect it to – as a brutal, oppressive, theocratic regime. It has tortured and killed those who deviate from its strict ‘laws’, and who dissent from its quasi-fascist ideology. Homosexuals have been regularly persecuted, tortured and killed. And political opponents have frequently been murdered, sometimes under the cover of its intermittent battles with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).”
Well, that would explain why so many Palestinians like to live in Israel, particularly LGBT.
“the memory-holing of a massacre. Just as the Soviets would doctor photos to erase inconvenient commissars, so woke influencers now hold forth on ‘Israel’s war’ while erasing the inconvenient fact that the war was started by Hamas.”
This is why they should disseminate widely the footage of what Hamas did on Oct 7th!
“The pardoning of the pogromists is clear in the global rage with Israel everywhere from NYC to London to Stockholm. The marchers never make demands of Hamas. Israel must lay down its arms but Hamas, apparently, doesn’t have to do anything. It doesn’t have to release the hostages, stop firing missiles and disarm in order that it can never again murder Israelis. Hamas isn’t even called out for its horrifically cavalier attitude towards Palestinian lives. For putting Gazans at awful risk by building tunnels under refugee towns, storing weaponry near hospitals, spiriting its leaders around in ambulances. We know Hamas doesn’t give a damn about Gazans. Ghazi Hamad said as much. ‘We are proud to sacrifice martyrs’, he said. Hamas is the lowest of the low. Its leaders live luxuriously in Qatar while ‘proudly’ allowing Gazans to perish in the vain, demented war they started.”
From the very beginning is israhell a terrorist state. So Israhell gets what it sow.
You can blame Hamas’s actions etc, but oppression of the palestinian has been going on for 75 years. Hamas is just like viet cong : a liberating movement.
And attrocities are not only commited by Hamas but also mostly by israhell
One must be blind not to see that indeed genocide and ethnic cleansing is going on at the moment in Gaza.
As for the western countries, most of government key positions are occupied by jews ( for ex. france) as well as most main stream media. You cannot talk about it without being accused of the unlawfull ” anti- semitisme” and be condemned and fined.
Furthermore, the palestinian cause has not been served by the many terror attacks on european civilians by muslims.
You are another dehumanizer. Just as Stuff today runs a story about some Hamas captives spilling the beans on how they use ambulances as cover. The ambulance convoy that was bombed by the IDF, the red crescent had notified the IDF that it was them, and the IDF bombed the convoy. There is video evidence of the aftermath. More women and children killed. So the IDF release this story as cover. Even if the people on it (the video)are real, it does not change the fact that those ambulances were legitimately moving sick and injured.
Isreal could have gone about their aims to eliminate Hamas in a completely different way, that the international community supported, but instead they are commiting war crimes and genocide.
Take a good long look at yourself. If you really believe what you have posted, you may be as sick an individual as Netanyahu himself
The IDF won’t release that footage because then it will be scrutinized. Media have had to walk back their claims of children being beheaded because they can’t show proof. Meanwhile there are video testimony of IDF helicopter pilots admitting they were just shooting everything and anyone. How many Israeli’s did they kill. And video testimony from people in the kibbutz’s saying the IDF tanks shelled them. How may did they kill that day? And video testimony from eyewitnesses that the IDF killed many Hamas and Israelis near the festival site.
If the IDF lie about some things, what else might they be dishonest about? Are you really sure what they say is the truth. They have lied many times before.
They don’t care about their own people dying from “cause unknown.” You really think they care about people in Gaza?
They say a picture paints a thousand words. The sheer size of the wall around Gaza and the pictures of Gazans at checkpoints on their way to and from work and school being corralled and hounded like dogs by the IDF says it all. Anyone who believes a ‘music festival’ set up right nest to this border wasn’t a big false flag needs to go take a pill.