The Scale of the Carnage: Palestinian Misery in Perspective

[Karmadillo]

For those interested in reading the entire article, there's a discussion of whether the Israelis are commmitting genocide against the Palestinians.

http://www.counterpunch.org/rooij06032004.html

The media usually focuses on the latest casualty and quickly forgets those who died even a few days before. The American media in particular has a Dracula-like predilection for warm bodies, and no interest in cases where blood has already dried. Unfortunately this ahistoric focus on the last victim hides the scale of mass crimes and the responsibility of various perpetrators. Whether in Iraq, Palestine, Colombia, or Haiti, it is necessary to locate human rights abuses in a wider context to appreciate the scale of what is occurring on the ground.

In the case of Palestinian casualties, it is all too evident that CNN, BBC, and most other major media are mostly interested in today's casualties: they seem to studiously ignore precedents, and above all, they will not refer to the pattern of killings as systematic in nature. Of course, admitting that such killings are systematic would imply that Israel is committing "crimes against humanity", a precursor to genocide. When the media seeks to whitewash "friendly" mass crimes, there is a tendency to fixate on specific instances to the exclusion of broad patterns. Even when a pattern of killings and other abuses is chronic and systematic, the BBC/CNN will tend to focus on specific cases without reference to broader trends. When referring to Palestinian conditions, what we find is that reports of casualties, house demolitions, and dispossession in these media outlets pertain to specific cases and not to general patterns <1>. Incidentally, the opposite is true when there is an incident of Palestinian violence; here lists and charts are available to highlight their context.

The chosen context can be used to obfuscate the reality on the ground. The tools at the media's disposal can be likened to an instrument of variable magnification ranging from a wide-angle lens to a telescope. Informative journalism requires using the most appropriate level of magnification for the story under investigation. On the other hand, propaganda requires contextual blurring and the use of inappropriate tools. Thus, it is best to use a telescope to view the stars, and clearly, a wide-angle lens is the wrong tool. In the case of Palestinian casualties, it is evident that the mainstream media are intent on presenting news using a telescope (preferably out of focus), when a wide-angle lens should be used.

The tables and graphs below put the Palestinian casualty toll into perspective over the course of the second intifada. These graphs speak for themselves, revealing a pattern that is all too evident. These graphs are meant to fill a gap in the available data pertaining to the casualty toll during the second intifada.

Average death tolls and an interpretation

During the course of the second intifada, the average number of Palestinians killed stands at 2.26 per day. The total killed between September 29, 2000 and May 31, 2004 is 3,023. To interpret these numbers one must scale these figures to make them comparable to understand what they would mean in the context of our own countries. This is the purpose of the table below.

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[The Magistrate]

1. Unfortunately, My Friend

This fellow's scaling up exercise falls rather flat. Translated into U.S. terms, it is roughly equivalent to a combination of traffic fatalities and accidental deaths or suicides caused by fire-arms. These are things our society accepts, and has long accepted, as a sort of cost of doing business in our present form. Few people would be so bold as to use them as a basis for charging automakers and gunsmiths with genocide against the people of our country, and if they did, they would meet only snorts of derision from the populace.

The fact is that the casualties siffered by the people of Arab Palestine in this current round of hostilities are trifling, and that the casualties suffered by the people of Israel are even more trifling in proportion.

[Karmadillo]

2. Not sure this is really an issue of traffic fatalities and deaths by fire-

arms. If Iraq or Al-Qaida were inflicting 277 deaths a day (the number proportional to deaths inflicted on the Palestinian population by the Israelis) on US soldiers and civilians (not to mention taking control of the East Coast and building a wall along the Appalachians to keep the rest of the US out), I can't help but think CNN et al would find the issue one for alarm.

[The Magistrate]

3. The Point, My Friend

Remains one of proportion. This rate of deaths falls within that which societies are willing to accept as a cost of doing business. It is certainly possible, were such numbers daily being killed by a hostile organization, that a tremendous hysteria could easily be whomped up in the matter, but the numbers would remain insignifigant, from the point of view of a life insurance company, as they would amount to an increase of less than one death per million of population each day, which could not be a noteable fraction of increase in the daily deaths per million from all causes. Hence, such figures make a poor foundation for any charge of genocide. For a society at war, they are are a very light toll indeed, by the standards of the last century, anyway....

[Karmadillo]

5. If footnote five is accurate, mass killings aren't necessary

to support a charge of genocide. Here's an excerpt from one of the articles cited that also suggests Israel's systematic oppression of the Palestinians (including ethnic cleansing) supports the charge.

http://www.mediamonitors.net/francis1.html

<edit>

Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention defines the international crime of genocide as follows:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Certainly, Palestine has a valid claim that Israel and its predecessors-in-law--the Zionist Agencies and Forces--have committed genocide against the Palestinian People that actually started in 1948 and has continued apace until today in violation of Genocide Convention Article II(a), (b), and (c), inter alia.

For at least the past fifty years, the Israeli government and its predecessors-in-law--the Zionist Agencies and Forces--have ruthlessly implemented a systematic and comprehensive military, political, and economic campaign with the intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnical and racial group known as the Palestinian People. This Zionist/Israeli campaign has consisted of killing members of the Palestinian People in violation of Genocide Convention Article II(a). This Zionist/Israeli campaign has also caused serious bodily and mental harm to the Palestinian People in violation of Genocide Convention Article II(b). This Zionist/Israeli campaign has also deliberately inflicted on the Palestinian People conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in substantial part in violation of Article II(c) of the Genocide Convention.

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[Gimel]

4. The injuries

By failing to compare the statistics compiled with those suffered by Israel, this author has gone to great lengths to justify aggression.

Trying to put in a lot of "background" into the conflict, and focusing on what the American media lacks, he takes a new approach. Making the conflict seem huge does not alter or justify the random attacks on Israeli civilians.

Ambulances have frequently carried terrorists disguised as patients, and that is ignored in the statistics. As the Red Crescent is often the means for this, I don't trust the accuracy of their statements.