Not all deaths count
Ultimately, Palestinians are outsiders to West
Betrayed at crossroads of history, forced to compare
Political analyst
War casualties are usually reported using prepositions such as “about,” “around,” “some,” “near,” and “over” that approximate numbers. This is especially true for printed publications, where, by the time the reader stumbles upon that sentence, the number has definitely risen.
I’m personally of the opinion that we should do away with these prepositions and let the readers become comfortable with reading “as of writing this piece”. The reason is simple: people cannot be reduced to numbers, more so if they are civilians who have just been denied of the right to live and give meaning to somebody’s life.
So, as of writing this piece, 20,915 people have lost their lives in the Gaza Strip at the hands of Israel, directly or indirectly, in a bid to avenge the deaths of 1,139 in Israel, killed during Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7, 2023. Even though they were killed by dumb bombs that may well have had “to whom it may concern” written on them, these people had names and families, learned valuable lessons, harbored hopes and dreams, and demonstrated a partially realized potential to change the lives of others for the better.
This is not the only war in the 21st century — a relatively peaceful century — that left a lot of casualties in its wake. What this war had in common with its contemporary wars is that the United States was heavily involved in all of them in one capacity or another. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Ukraine, and Palestine have seen devastating wars. These countries will never be the same; how can they be when their innocent civilians and brilliant minds were either killed, scarred for life, or displaced?
This recklessness in starting new wars comes from a country that, domestically, believes in the sanctity of life. Much internal strife in the US stems from the collective significance that Americans place on minimizing American casualties. But in practice, we clearly see that the US is as war-hungry as a country can be. Cries of war can still be heard the loudest in Republican debates. In the 21st century, the Democratic Party inherited some wars and provoked some others. So, overall, they have been just as eager to fulfill their country’s role as a self-appointed sheriff of the world.
Americans are quick to take personal offense to small-scale conflicts and the loss of lives elsewhere. So far, so good. However, when they take action, they lose sight of what was once their justification for entering a conflict — the loss of lives and violation of human rights — and commit the same abominations, only multiple times worse. The disproportionate force they bring to any war turns them from heroes to villains in no time. As much as it probably hurts an American to hear this, this is not a strange sentiment to have for the peoples whose lives were seemingly “saved” by the US.
Gaza ultimate test of human rights
War is plain terrible in nature. It’s understandable but still unforgivable for a shell-shocked soldier to commit war crimes. War crimes get less and less understandable and more and more unforgivable the higher up we go in the chain of command because officers, commanders, and commanders-in-chief are supposed to be further and further removed from the horrors of war and focused on pre-determined goals and rules of engagement.
It’s becoming more and more apparent that American commanders-in-chief are able to claim a moral high ground only when they are the opposite party to ultimate evils like the Nazis or Daesh (ISIS). But hey, who can’t? That’s why, before going to every war since the Second World War, American media heavily propagate the idea that the leader of the other side is “the next Adolph Hitler”.
No war in recent history has questioned the true intent behind propagating exclusive ownership of humanitarian “Western” values as much as the ongoing Gaza war has. The world is getting wise to the fact that all the American and European talk about defending human rights is merely a façade just by looking at this war. The US hammered the final nail in that coffin by vetoing a watered-down UNSC resolution that called for a humanitarian cease-fire in the Gaza war on December 8, 2023, and pushed to drop all talk of a cease-fire in the next UNSC resolution on Gaza, which is essentially a different tactic that achieves the same result.
More, however, can be gained from comparing similarities and differences between the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip and other wars of the 21st century.
To make the comparison more feasible, one need not look further than the Ukraine War to find the most similarities. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are still ongoing. Both began during the presidency of Joe Biden in the US. The US purportedly took the side of the defenders — even though it provoked the Ukraine War by persuading Russia’s neighboring country to join NATO, and Israel’s subsequent disproportionate response to Hamas’s October 7 attack dwarfed Israeli casualties to the point that it’s now called “the Gaza War”. Washington has sent both Ukraine and Israel massive arm shipments and stood in the way of achieving cease-fires, prolonging the wars and killing more people.
While the US barely managed to evade the responsibilities of the Ukraine War — which allowed it to gradually abandon the Ukrainians scot-free to do what they should have done in the first place: talk it out with the Russians — it is being repeatedly slammed around the world for its inexcusable support of Israeli brutalities in Gaza.
Not even consistent in words
It’s already known around the world that when push comes to shove, whether it be in domestic politics or foreign policies, the United States will only think about its own national interests, not about righting any wrongs or rectifying its mistakes of the past. However, the fact that the same US administration can’t react the same way to the loss of lives in Ukraine and Palestine is not doing Washington’s reputation any favors.
Commenting on the targeting of a hospital in the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, President Biden was quick to describe the attack as “injustice” and a “disgrace to the entire world,” but failed to show the same level of urgency and care for the continuous bombardment of patients in numerous hospitals throughout Gaza. In a speech at a rally on April 12, 2022, Biden called mass graves found in the Bucha region of Ukraine “genocide,” but one year later, he deferred to reporters when asked about the Israeli war.
Biden was not alone in showing double standards. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that he agrees with Biden that “war crimes are being committed in Ukraine.” However, in a news conference on October 20, 2023, Blinken did not address the issue of “war crimes” regarding civilians who died in Gaza and only held Hamas responsible for the deaths of civilians killed in Israeli attacks. Blinken also once understood that hitting heat, water, and electricity facilities in Ukraine is wrong but simply forgot the fact when it came to Israeli moves to deprive Gaza’s two million residents of food, electricity, drinking water, and fuel.
Progressive thinkers of the American left, such as Noam Chomsky, applauded Putin for waging war in a more “humane” way than the Pentagon. Overall, I’d say there’s nothing completely humane about a war. However, there are indeed better and worse ways of engaging in a battle. The United States has been involved in all the major wars of this century, but none has been as inhumane as the war in Gaza.
Ukrainians insiders, Palestinians outsiders
Washington’s inability to see and befittingly respond to Israel’s clear and very serious transgressions of international law, human rights, and common decency begs the question: What happened to those lofty ideals in over a year? How are Gazan lives different from Ukrainian lives?
The Western world has taken more practical, sincere steps for Ukrainians in almost two years since their war began on February 24, 2022, than it has ever taken for Palestinians in almost a century since at least 1948, when an entity called Israel came into existence. It’s not like the West did not have enough time to exhaust all humanitarian and politically sound options. Many US presidents, UK prime ministers, and officials throughout the world ran specifically on the platform of solving the issue of Palestine. Even the isolationist, arguably cold-hearted Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that his business-minded approach would be the be-all and end-all solution, only to fail miserably by ignoring every principal demand and right of Palestinians in his plan, making it dead on arrival.
Circling back to explore what difference between Ukrainians and Palestinians justifies this disparity in reactions, it’s worth employing Occam’s razor. Occam’s razor is a principle that says that if you have two (or more) competing ideas to explain the same phenomenon, you should prefer the simpler one. Essentially, the first simple answer that comes to mind is probably the correct one.
The simplest answer to our question is that Ukrainians are predominantly white-skinned European Christians, while Palestinians are considered brown-skinned West Asian Muslims. As unrefined as that seems to be — which is the point if we are to adhere to Occam’s razor — many Western officials have had slips of the tongue and said something along the same line.
The refined version of that answer is that Ukrainians and Israelis are insiders — that is, “one of us” — to most Western administrations, while Palestinians are outsiders. In the end, if the West has to choose between the two, it will go with what it considers to be its kin. If the language of race seems crass to you, you should put yourself in the shoes of Middle Easterners who have felt and experienced this racial discrimination at the crossroads of history. Even African-Americans and other minorities in the US, UK, France, and other countries of Europe have been fighting a similar ingrained racism for decades now. Compared to Christian African-Americans, for example, Palestinians naturally have a higher hill to climb.
Just look at how often the Palestinian death toll since October 7 gets eclipsed by the Israeli death toll in statements from US and EU officials, even though it is nearly 20 times higher. I hope we will see a day when the violent loss of one life will demand immediate explanation, but until that day, it will always be bitterly amusing how the magnitude of casualties from one group gets spotlighted by a government even though the magnitude of casualties from the other side is multiple times higher.