More deaths than Kishinev, Sharpeville or Bloody Sunday. Every Day.
Every week I link to the GoFundMe page for Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi, who live in Gaza with their four children and have been injured by Israeli bombs and displaced ten times since October 7, and are trying to leave. I know putting up a Go Fund Me for one family is totally inadequate given the scale of the horror in Gaza, and the millions of people there who need our help— and most of all, need an end to this monstrous slaughter. Still, it’s something.Please considering helping.Friday Zoom CallThis Friday’s Zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be Aharon Dardik, a Columbia University undergraduate with a remarkable story. The son of an orthodox rabbi, he spent part of his childhood in a religious settlement in the West Bank. After studying in yeshiva in Israel, he went to prison rather than serve in the Israeli military, and then enrolled at Columbia, where after October 7 he founded Columbia Jews for Ceasefire. Earlier this year, he was among the Jewish students who chained themselves to a gate to protest the university’s complicity in the detention of Mahmoud Khalil. How does someone so young challenge so much of what he has been taught and then endure the consequences of that rupture? We’ll talk about that this Friday.Ask Me AnythingLast week’s Ask Me Anything session, for premium subscribers, was rescheduled for technical reasons. We will meet this Wednesday, July 23, from 3-4 PM Eastern time.Cited in Today’s VideoHaaretz on Michael Spagat and Khalil Shikaki’s estimate that 100,000 people have been killed in Gaza.Things to Read(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Kim Phillips-Fein writes about Fiorello LaGuardia’s lessons for Zohran Mamdani.Omer Bartov on why he believes Israel is committing genocide.Adam Shatz on the 12 Day war.An interviewer challenges former Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren about Israel’s plan for a “humanitarian city” in Gaza.Hannah Habtu on the assault on the people of Tigray.For The Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked with Iyad El-Baghdadi about Israel’s vision of the Middle East.Imagine if every Democrat spoke this way about Israel and Palestine.Shaul Magid reflects on a “Nero moment” for Jews. See you on Wednesday and Friday,PeterVIDEO TRANSCRIPT:So, one of the most difficult and depressing things about this moment is that the slaughter in Gaza goes on and on and on. And yet, it’s been relegated, you know, to the back pages of the newspaper. Americans are now more consumed by our own catastrophes. And so, there’s this way in which we’ve normalized, you know, in Western media discussion in the U.S, there’s been a kind of normalization of just that is kind of routine, that every day Palestinians are dying more and more and more. And it doesn’t even really provoke that much conversation anymore. And I’ve been thinking about how you can respond to that. And obviously the people who have tried the most are the Palestinians in Gaza themselves, journalists and others who are desperately kind of recording what’s happening to them and trying to speak to the outside world. And I think one of the things that people have done very powerfully is to highlight individual stories of individuals who’ve died. Um, uh, in order to kind of humanize the people and remind us of them.But I also think there perhaps is a value in just trying to step back and look at the scale of this, and think about how desensitized we’ve become compared to other moments and places in history. So, there’s a British academic named Michael Spagat—I actually quote him in my book—at the University of London, and he basically counts death in wars. That’s his academic specialty. He did this very, very large study with the Palestinian political scientist Khalil Shakaki where they surveyed 2,000 households in Gaza in order to try to get a more accurate count of the death toll. Because the irony is that although people were constantly, especially early on after October 7th, claiming that the quote-unquote ‘Hamas’ health ministry could not be trusted, it was massively inflating the numbers, that I think overwhelmingly, the scholarly consensus is that the numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry are way too low. And it’s not hard to understand why, because they’re basically counting bodies that come to hospital morgues. But anyone who just looks at a picture of Gaza can understand that many, many people will have died and not made it to hospital morgues.So, Spagat and Shikaki do this very, very large survey, and they come to the conclusion that as of January 2025, that the number of people who were directly killed in a violent death was about 75,000, the vast majority of them killed by Israeli arms. But then people who study deaths in wars also recognize that there are going to be another group of people who die from disease, from hunger, and there are kind of various ratios that people tend to look at in terms of the numbers who die from direct attack versus the numbers who die from disease or lack of medicine.And obviously, in Gaza, where many of the hospitals have been destroyed, and there’s been many, many reports of widespread starvation that there would be considerable deaths from that as well. And so, of the overall death toll that Spagat comes to the number of about 100,000, which, as Haaretz reported in a piece about his research, is actually not very different from some other researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who’ve come to a roughly similar number.So, if one uses that figure of 100,000, that would mean that more than 150 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed per day since October 7th. More than 150 per day. And just if we step back, and think about those numbers, and try to put them in some context, in 1960, there was a very, very famous episode in the history of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa called the Sharpeville Massacre. A township called Sharpeville, where Black South Africans were protesting these past laws that denied them the right to move freely throughout the country. The police opened fire. And this was a turning point in South African history. It was actually the Sharpeville Massacre that produced so much outrage around the world that South Africa was kicked out of the Commonwealth of Nations. This massacre led the African National Congress under Nelson Mandela to move away from nonviolence and to turn towards armed resistance.This was one of the most famous episodes in the history of South African apartheid brutality. There were 69 people killed by the South African police in Sharpeville in 1960. Sixty-nine. One hundred fifty in Gaza are dying per day. If you think about the history of Northern Ireland, perhaps the most famous date in what’s known as the Troubles, the kind of modern history of Northern Ireland, is a day in 1972 called Bloody Sunday where Catholic civil rights marchers who were protesting detention without trial, marched through the town of Derry, where they were attacked by Protestant mobs with the complicity of the police. This is a very, very famous, kind of considered a turning point in the history of Northern Ireland. It was after Bloody Sunday, it was declared a National Day of Mourning in Ireland. The British Chancellery in Dublin was burned to the ground. John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and later U2, all wrote songs that referenced Bloody Sunday.As with Sharpeville, this also led to a turn to violent resistance, so it was a huge spike in support for the provisional IRA and their armed resistance campaign after Bloody Sunday in 1972. Twenty-six people were killed by Protestants and by British military forces and Protestant forces in 1972. Twenty-six people in that moment. That is, again, one of the most signature moments of the violence of Protestant forces and the British state in Northern Ireland. Twenty-six. One hundred fifty in Gaza are dying per day.If we think about the most famous moments of slaughter in the Civil Rights Movement. The Birmingham church bombing in 1963, where four girls were killed. The Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965, where the brutality by Southern racist police was so great that Lyndon Baines Johnson called it ‘a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.’ Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery was considered so important. In that march in 1964, four civil rights marchers died.In 1903, probably the most famous pogrom in Jewish history, in Kishinev in what’s now Ukraine, which sparked this kind of one of the most famous poems in Jewish history, in modern Jewish history, and indeed in Zionist history, Hayyim Nahman Bialik’s poem, ‘The City of Slaughter.’ In the Kishinev program in 1903, 50 Jews were killed.Now, I don’t say any of this to minimize the horrors of those events. Quite the contrary. The point is that even these episodes that we think of as so central to the history of brutality and oppression, many of them had death tolls that were far, far lower than what happens on a random day in Gaza when it doesn’t even make the front page. Now, obviously, of course, there are other episodes in history where the numbers of people killed on a given day are larger, even far higher than Gaza. But 150 people killed per day over 650 days is really just an astonishing level of death and suffering that has been normalized.Even if we think about the horrors, the horrors, the war crimes committed on October 7th, where roughly 1,200 Israelis, mostly Israeli Jews, were killed, right? If you just think in terms of the numbers, there is basically a close to an October 7th in Gaza, in terms of the number of people killed, every week, right? Every week for now 21 months. And the band just kind of plays on, right? It’s considered that this is just, this is noise now in the backdrops of so many of our lives. And I think this is what’s so chilling, so deeply chilling about this moment is that this is an experiment in how the lives of one particular group of people can be made to seem so cheap. That you can have 150 people killed per day, you know, over 650 days, and yet, you know, much of the world reacts with a shrug, and the world continues to give Israel the military and diplomatic support to make it possible.And I think that’s one of the things that people are going to be struggling to face and deal with, and contemplate, and understand about those of us who are alive in this moment. How—when there were other moments in history where far fewer people died, and it sparked the conscience of the world, and led to fundamental political change—how can it be that in this case that this can just be tolerated? I think all of us are going to be living with that question for a very, very long time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit peterbeinart.substack.com/subscribe
Österreich