Israel-Gaza: a question of numbers

Gwynne Dyer

Opinion

When Radio Kol Berama asked Israeli Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu whether an atomic bomb should be dropped on Gaza, he should not have replied: “This is one of the possibilities.”

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu promptly suspended Eliyahu, but not before the latter “clarified” his statement, saying it was just a metaphor. “However,” he added, “a strong and disproportionate response to terrorism is definitely required, which will clarify to the Nazis and their supporters that terrorism is not worthwhile.”

The Nazis? Yes, they’re back, and the Spanish Inquisition is also on its way. The Crusaders haven’t checked in yet, although they massacred all the Jews in Jerusalem when they conquered the city in 1099. Maybe they can’t decide which side to pick, because they massacred all the Muslims in Jerusalem at the same time.

But enough of history. We have a big symbolic moment to observe, because Monday or Tuesday is the day the death toll of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the great majority of them civilians, reaches 10,000.

It is a purely symbolic moment, because there must be at least another thousand or so people still buried under the debris from the buildings they were sheltering in. But it’s a powerful symbol, because Hamas has made it so.

Hamas controls everything in the Gaza Strip, including the Health Ministry which announces the daily death toll, but the latter has established a reputation among the international media for being as accurate as possible in its numbers.

Why? Because Hamas’s leaders know that a number which is credible has more power to persuade than a number that is exaggerated and disbelieved.

Persuade whom to do what? Persuade the “international community” to revolt against the spectacle of so many deaths and force Israel to accept a ceasefire.

It has succeeded a number of times in the past, and it will probably work this time too. Everybody knows that Hamas militants are included in the count, but everybody also knows that the great majority of the casualties really are innocent civilians. Indeed, about half of the dead are women and children.

Israelis might reasonably object that this international pressure is unfair. After all, nobody minded much when Allied bomber crews destroyed 60 German cities and killed about half a million people, mostly women, children and old men, during World War 2.

What we now have — and it makes all the difference — is vivid, constant images of the killing process. The images of Israeli families at breakfast are last month’s news; the slaughtered Palestinian families are today’s news, and the number of days we have been seeing them is mounting up.

I used to make a lazy rule-of-thumb calculation that international pressure would force the Israelis to stop when the kill-ratio hit 10-to-one in their favour, but in this particular case that would be over 14,000 dead Palestinians. I couldn’t believe that, so I went on the “Jewish Virtual Reality” website to check the ratios.

It’s more complicated than that. During the early wars, when it was soldiers against soldiers (the Israel Defence Force against Arab armies), the reality more or less matched my mental image: 12-to-one in Israel’s favour in the 1956 Sinai campaign, more than 20-to-one in the Six Day War of 1967, about eight-to-one in the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

But in the later campaigns, against guerillas, terrorists, and incidental bystanders, it goes off the scale: Operation Cast Lead (2008-09) 100-to-one, Operation Pillar of Defence (2012) 150-to-one; Operation Protective Edge (2014) 30-to-one, Operation Guardian of the Walls (2021) 20-to-one.

So we probably shouldn’t expect the current operation to close down tomorrow.