The mutual bloodshed is terrible, and, as a resident of Tel Aviv I'm personally affected, but there is one thing that has always perplexed me a bit, which is the perception of the actual ferocity of the conflict. Obviously, every death is a terrible loss, but this forum is fond of numbers, so while we're on the subject, here are some numbers:
The total number of deaths in the entire Israeli-Arab conflict over the past 70 years or so, is - according to Wikipedia - under 100,000. Out of which, about 25,000 are Israeli, a similar number are Palestinians, and the rest, I guess are casualties of all the other fighting arab countries combined, although the total seems to me a bit high. That's the total for the past 70 years.
By comparison, in the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, Wikipedia puts the number of deaths at about 30,000 in each country in the last year alone. And the Mexican drug war has claimed the lives of about 56,000 since 2006; some estimates go as high as 100,000.
So, not to compare suffering, but the entire Israeli-Arab conflict has claimed, over the last 70 years, more or less the same number of lives as the drug war in Mexico in the past 6.
I'm not sure what you wanted to say either but two things are notable about your comment: 1. you broaden the context to include the entire history of the Israeli-Arab conflict, 2. you make no distinction between military and civilian casualties.
Between 1860 and 2010 there were a reported (by Israel) 3,971 Israeli civilian casualties of terrorist attacks.[1]
Between 2000 and 2012 there were a reported (by Israel) 3,034-3,726 Palestinian non-combatant civilian casualties of IDF operations.[2]
Obviously, tank battles in Sinai are not going to produce the same casualty rates as wars of attrition fought at street level in densely populated cities. Air strikes on Gaza (10,000 people / km2) are precisely on the same order of devastation though. The broader you make the context, the more you mask that fact.
Well, I don't know how many non-combatants die in the cartel wars, but I guess I'm saying that the Israeli-Arab conflict is lesser in magnitude compared to past and present violent conflicts around the world, perhaps contrary to perception. So it's not Vietnam-big (where millions lost their lives); it's Mexican drug war-big.
Of course, while not a big conflict in terms of actual warfare, it carries a lot of political influence worldwide.
Because of the gross disparity in casualties between the two sides, attempting to minimise perceptions of the conflict as a whole (with a frame of reference chosen for statistical convenience) amounts proportionally to discounting the importance of the (overwhelmingly Palestinian) deaths.
This attitude of "it's bad but we can live with it" is directly reflected in the policies of the current Israeli government with respect to peace.
This is true but a useless statistic. Israelis do kill many more Palestinians than vice versa, but Hamas could end the violence at any time, and Israel can't. If Hamas would simply hold all fire, and publicly announce it, Israel would be forced to stop, both by internal and external pressure. If you mistakenly believe otherwise, you really don't know much about Israelis.
[Edit: This is only true of the violence, not about the political dispute. But you don't really need to kill people to have a political dispute.]
Hamas can only end 'the violence' [against Israel] by (a) violently suppressing competing militias[1] in Gaza (one wonders how many different ways that could play out), or (b) pointing to progress in peace talks to convince Gazans to hold the truce. Only Israel can end the occupation though.
So, far from being a 'useless statistic', the relative hardships and pressures faced by each side have a direct bearing on the longevity of the conflict.
BTW, it's not necessary to speculate about how little I know. Let's stick to the facts.
I don't think much of your comment makes sense, unless you think that it's worth the violence to end the Israeli occupation. I think it's clear that the violence is hurting that goal anyway plus killing Palestinians, so the only reasonable thing to do is to try to end the violence first, then worry about everything else. If the price is (a), well, policemen get shot everywhere. That's one (heavy) price Hamas has to pay to be a government.
Oh, no, that's not was I was trying to say at all. We most certainly cannot live with it. I also wasn't trying to discount the importance of the Palestinian deaths. I was just trying to give a sense of how violent this conflict really is.
I do think, though, that you really must take into account, when measuring the intensity of the conflict, its entire history. After all, the violence didn't start when the occupation began, and, sadly, it's not likely to end when the Palestinians finally get an independent state (as I hope they would). But let's not turn this into an endless political argument. This isn't the Daily Beast.
OK, I take your point. And really, I didn't intend to have a political argument, just to identify the political dimensions of statistics.
(Of course, the Israeli-Arab conflict doesn't encapsulate the 'entire history' of the Jewish/Palestinian-Arab conflict either, some of whose bloodiest events happened before 1948. But that doesn't alter its magnitude.)
There is actually some merit to the notion that this is one of the <least> violent times in Human History. But I wouldn't trust that intuition very far. The world is becoming a much more dangerous place as we speak. But for comparison, The US has been at war for 12 years, with under 5K combat deaths including the invasion of IRAQ and what-ever-u-want-to-call mess in Afghanistan. Thats comparable in order of magnitude the civillian deaths of the single day 9/11 in the US.[2]
The Iraq war alone has resulted in at least 100 thousand total deaths (including civilians) according to the most conservative estimates. How is the 5k figure relevant? That's like AlQaeda claiming 9/11 wasn't very violent, since they lost only a dozen combatants.
Like pron, you for some reason insist on taking the casualties of one side as representative of the scale of the conflict overall. He says, 25,000 Israelis killed puts the Israeli-Arab conflict on the same scale as the Mexican Drug War (30,000) when in fact the overall death toll puts it more on the scale of the Wars in Yugoslavia (115,000).
You say that the 'cost' of the Iraq war is a mere 5,000 deaths, coldly ignoring the deaths of many tens of thousands of people just because they're on 'the other side'.
I hesitate to ask exactly which historians you recommend that would justify this selectivity.
Oh, you've misread me. I wasn't comparing the number of Israeli deaths to the drug war, but the total number: 100,000 in 70 years, vs. 100,000 (highest estimate) in mere 6.
I hesitate to ask exactly which historians you recommend that would justify this selectivity.
The post-9/11 wars are not in (or near) the top 10 conflicts for the US. And, en-toto casualties are an order of magnitude lower than Iran-Iraq war, etc if you want to look at it that way.
I've certainly lost the thread of your argument since you've replaced the comment I replied to, about 'the cost of doing business', with statistics from the Iran-Iraq war.
I'm not really interested in whether certain wars are bigger than other wars. I am interested in how the trivialisation of ongoing conflicts tends to dovetail neatly with pro-war agendas ('cost of doing business').
The comment thread you are interjecting to is not of your interest, then. This sub-thread is explicitly about the quantification of violence, and comparing data accross conflicts. It seems clear you have not read either the earlier comments or much history very carefully.
Your repeated attempts to politicise (a/k/a dumb down) the conversation are also trivial and out of place.
Excuse me but it's not for you to dictate who is interjecting and who is merely participating.
What I have pointed out, and what your own comments clearly demonstrate(d), is that this exercise in 'comparing data across conflicts' as you so euphemistically put it, has a distinctly political edge which could be missed by the unwary reader.
Interjecting is what you call it when you disregard the topic being discussed, qualifications made to observations, you don't read the data in the footnotes...etc.
to which the counter=argument is somthing like this:
The biggest problem with [Pinker], though, is [his] overreliance on history, which, like the light on a caboose, shows us only where we are not going. We live in a time when all the rules are being rewritten blindingly fast—when, for example, an increasingly smaller number of people can do increasingly greater damage. (Scientific American)[1]
I don't fully dis-agree with this latter qualication. If you go back and read my initial comments, you will see this.
I don't accept that this minor qualification is the main critique of Pinker's thesis, which in the end has very little to do with the fact that violence has declined. (And, BTW, this qualification also serves a political agenda which regards terrorism as a discreet phenomenon that can only be dealt with by military means.)
But failing to acknowledge the circumstances surrounding outbreaks of violence as being intrinsic to the nature of that violence is, generally, a matter of choice.
[Again, the fact that you don't like what I'm saying doesn't give you the right to set the terms of the discussion, and condescending comments about my ability to read don't really help either.]
[Edit: Your reply below, which doesn't yet have a reply button, is not coherent so I can't respond to it anyway. (A? B? Bozos? What?) I don't think there's much more that can be usefully said at this point. Speaking of non-falsifiability though, ain't evolutionary psychology a hoot?]
If A->B there are a million (infinite) things C that may or <may not> follow from B. In terms of style you have a lot of "I don't accept..." and "XYZ...serves a political agenda" which are not counter-arguments, but rather non-falsifiable statements about your own beliefs. In particular, your beliefs about C=Politics. Its generally not helpful or interesting to jump the gun to C=politics, without working your way through the discussion of A,B first.[1]
I'm halfway through Six Days of War by Michael Oren, and I think the most obvious thing that social media companies have done to handle the conflict is simply to exist.
[Kindles suck for skimming back though a book, and I don't have an eidetic memory. My apologies if I get any of these facts wrong.]
On the first day of the 1967 conflict, based on glowing, but false, reports from the Sinai outposts, President Nasser and Egyptian military leaders thought that they had knocked out most of the Israeli air force, when in fact the opposite was true. The cascade of misinformation not only aided Israel's efforts against Egypt, but it also lead Jordan's King Hussein to commit to the conflict in the West Bank. Similarly, news of Egypt's success is thought to have emboldened Syria and lead to the battle in the Golan Heights.
Now, 45 years later, with the social media and other communications channels available, there is less chance that the conflict could escalate due to false information. (It could still escalate for other reasons, of course.) It's just a theory, but maybe Israel's in-your-face social media strategy is a blunt retaliation to any Baghdad Bob style reporting taking place within the Arab world. Their goal might not be to provoke the enemy, but instead to dampen any groundswell that might occur due to false reporting.
The system of independent reporters going to partisan press conferences really muddles the independence of reporters and gives a false air of legitimacy to the claims of spokesmen.
Things should be claimed publicly and then reporters should report, fact check, and reveal inconsistencies.
But next we need a global forum that no politician could credibly not see so we can force questions and make it politically damaging not to answer.
Then they will want their old media arraignments back. :)
Yeah, I certainly don't see it as a negative change. I think twitter is an informal (to the point of low-brow) place for this kind of information, but it is a broadcast messaging network. This is what it's made to do.
I agree. Technology and media over the past two decades have done more to sanitize war (and thus make it more palatable). It's good to see the oposite happening. As dickc says, "twitter brings you closer." The more we experience the reality of it, the better our decisions will be regarding it IMHO.
Goes back farther than that. German metal band Accept had a song on their 1986 "Russian Roulette" album called "TV War" basically lamenting the (already present) desensitization towards war brought about by bringing it safely into the living room while it remained "entertaining and far-far away".
Social media companies do not have the tools or the responsibility to "handle the Gaza conflict," particularly not by some unprincipled decision to selectively censor one party to the conflict. This isn't just a matter of Israel. Propaganda is inherent to war, and is nothing new on these websites.
It would be interesting to imagine social media companies behaving, legally and morally, as "common carriers" that don't censor any legal content, similar to the protections given to ISPs that comply with processes to remove illegal content. There's no serious objection to Google Search being able to find morally repugnant content -- people realize it's a "dumb" tool that will find anything that's out there. How could (and should) YouTube try to achieve the same thing?
I think these sites are already acting like common carriers because their users more or less expect this.
I suspect that is where a lot of the resistance to "promoted posts" is coming from. Most people don't object to promoting posts but feel like pushing a button on Facebook to do it would be "cheating" and hate that idea.
Anyone want to throw together a scoreboard while these idiots butcher innocents and each other?
You would need to scrape Twitter to get events, you could scrape EXIF data on the coverage photos and use D3 to visualize the results, and use HTML5 audio to run a reading of Twain's "The War Prayer" in the backgruond.
You could even expose a simple REST API to let the IDF and Hamas POST targets and PUT munitions/attacks, and then give some neutral body a key to confirm attack success or failure.
We could have badges. We could have freemium content--exclusive access to kill videos, or you could buy coins to sponsor your favorite charity for repairing the region.
It'll be great.
EDIT: Come now, sarcasm detectors. The above is meant in jest (mostly).
A scoreboard in the form of continually updated, and often publicized, kill counts is actually a pretty traditional part of warfare. Dispatches throughout WW2 announced how many Germans were killed vs. how many Americans in a particular engagement, and those were compiled to produce incrementally updated per-battle tallies. Newspapers and newsreels republished that kind of information regularly as well. Sort of the wartime version of baseball box scores.
Star Trek: TOS did it. Except after identifying which people were killed in the virtual attacks, those individuals were contacted and ordered to report to the collateralization center for the official results of the attacks to be consummated. Not particularly surprisingly, Capt. Kirk and the Jolly Enterprise Crew yet again violated the Prime Directive to set those silly savages' back on the True Path of All that is Right and Proper.
Apologies to PG if this thread degrades into a political discussion
when politics are clearly against the site guidelines (linked on the
bottom of every HN page).
The coverage by Peter Kafka of AllThingsD is also worth reading:
The social sites used to keep in contact with our families,
friends, fans, and favorites are now being used for this?
What side you're on is irrelevant; using the communication tech
we've created to celebrate and promote death and harm as forms
of propaganda and entertainment is just wrong.
It was wrong when the Syrian rebels posted video of the
execution of 10 Syrian Army members. It was wrong when the
Libyan rebels posted video of the execution of Kadafi. It
was also wrong for the Israeli Defense Force. And the list
goes on and on...
Maybe there's some minimal good in just knowing how violent others
can be, but when I wonder if our communication tech can be put to
far greater and more beneficial uses like promoting peace and
resolving differences, I remember the words of Douglas Adams:
"Meanwhile the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to
communication between different cultures and races, has caused more and
bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
> Maybe there's some minimal good in just knowing how violent others can be, but when I wonder if our communication tech can be put to far greater and more beneficial uses like promoting peace and resolving differences, I remember the words of Douglas Adams:
> "Meanwhile the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different cultures and races, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
That's a good quote, but I think modern society's take on violence is to make it highly scenarised. A Brave New World kind of violence, where you know where the good guys and the bad guys are. One could hope that increased media coverage would lead to less wars, because people would realize how disgusting it actually is. That is, until you realize the Romans watching the gladiators also got their violence along with the daily bread.
I think rather the opposite is true. People communicate about violence, especially warfare. As Twitter et al transition from 'businesses' to 'methods of communication' this sort of thing will become more and more common.
The alternative, of course, is irrelevance. (Or convincing people to stop being violent. Ha.)
Unlike in Europe and here in America, a war is happening in Israel and all Israelis under 45 are either active soldiers or reserve soldiers. I have family in Tel Aviv that was forced to run into a bunker earlier today. I have a friend from high school that is stationed at the Gaza border. It's not an abstract, far away event. The tweets are directly relevant to Israeli society.
Why not? It is quite natural to want your war enemies to die, and for the whole country (both soldiers and civilians) to celebrate destruction of enemy troops.
Think about the tweets and newspaper articles about the successful murder of Osama bin Laden, for example - it's the same concept.
The rule of law is important. Tit-for-tat exchanges like the ones that Israel and Palestine are engaging in solve nothing. It descends into monkey hindbrain us-against-them.
Another very similar scenario recently was Northern Ireland. That didn't get solved by the UK grinding Ireland into the ground or posting inflammatory things in the news - it was solved by both sides showing restraint and good will.
Currently neither Israel or Palestine are showing anything of the sort, but as the larger, more powerful party (eg. I doubt Palestinans have bunkers), it's up to Israel to show some restraint... but they aren't, they're still posturing about how tough they are.
I'm surprised that none of the reporting on this has mentioned the Kenyan use of Twitter to promote their military offensive in Somalia against al-Shabaab. That includes breaking the news first of the amphibious assault on Kismayu. Their spokesperson's handle is @MajorEChirchir.
I think this might a good trend, despite the (in my view unnecessary) brashness, as both Hamas and the IDF employ spokespeople for the sole purpose of getting their version of the story out and I believe it's better to get that directly via Twitter and other communications mediums rather than through press conferences.
As others pointed out, this also frees up journalists to spend more time doing actual investigate reporting and it changes the scope of a spokesperson's job from saying a lot of nothing to a room of journalists to making their country or organisation's case to the world at large.
There was a lot of internal criticism of Israel's media handling throughout the previous conflicts. Israelis consider themselves the defenders, and the policy of sparingly releasing information over the conventional channels just made it look like a sinister government that tries to hide something.
Personally, I find the tone of the current campaign a bit too brash but perhaps this is more effective than dabbling with the finer rhetoric and points of this conflict.
Israel's media activities won't make any Hamas supporter switch sides, but they are important for the wider neutral population which isn't aware of the details and isn't actively supporting one side or the other (it's the "Oh why can't they have peace" or "Let's nuke the Middle East and be done with it" crowd).
Overall it's a good step forward in the accountability of governments towards the common people.
But it's still incompetent. You'd expect the IDF to keep saying things like "We extend our condolences to the innocent people killed by our missiles. We wish we had a better way to stop the missles. We hold Hamas responsible for murdering their fellow Palestinians by creating this conflict." Instead we get "Ahmed Jabari: Eliminated."
> You'd expect the IDF to keep saying things like "We extend our condolences
The point of propaganda is to project strength, not to apologize.
The reason this conflict exists in the first place, is due to a vast lack of perception of strength on either side. A squirrel doesn't pick a fight with a bear. It just doesn't happen.
In short, Israel doesn't have the balls to end this and Hamas doesn't have the means.
The Disengagement plan was sold by Sharon to Israeli citizens: if they will attack us - we'll bomb them just like we bomb in Lebanon, when they start missile attacks.
In fact we still handle import/export taxes, provide food and energy to Gaza and can't bomb them same way as in Lebanon, since they considered under Israeli protection by international community. Or atleast this is the reason stated by Israeli minister Katz today on TV.
If you have no balls - no Air Force or nukes will help you.
If you have no brain and create a terrorist enclave inside your own state - nothing will help you!
Let's not forget who helped to create Hamas in the first place.
They talking about bombing Iran, but they can't handle terrorists living under their nose in the House of Glass.
Firstly, everybody knows that Israel has vastly superior forces than palestine. This in itself refutes your logic.
However secondly, if your country was invaded or occupied, would you surrender and convert to the invaders way of life on the basis of them communicating well that they have superior military strength? I know I wouldn't. A lot of people will side with what is right not what is more powerful and some will do so at the cost of their life.
That also easily refuted you, but to add a third argument, this twitter thing means being judged morally by the world. On a moral level, showing strenght pretty much never justifies a violent act. It's quite the opposite. Does it make it okay for a thug or mobster to intimidate or tax people if they have better weapons and strength? Should a man raping a women be pardoned of his act if he showed enough strength that the woman should have complied to his desires in the first place?
The type of 'morality' you are advocating here is actually not moral at all. It's the way of thugs and rapists. People behaving this way clearly make the world dysfunctional and violent.
Both sides have faults in this conflict but not showing enough strength or employing enough violence is clearly not one for either sides.
You're not texting your friends. Write in English.
If you don't understand something, ask for someone to explain. Don't assume random nonsense.
> Firstly, everybody knows that Israel has vastly superior forces than palestine. This in itself refutes your logic.
Yes, of course they have superior forces. They can wipe out everyone in Gaza with a single click of a button.
Now, pay attention. It doesn't matter what superior capabilities you have if you refuse to use them. When you do so, you are perceived as weak and it is as if you don't have those capabilities at all.
And yes, Israel has refused to use those capabilities. They could level Gaza. Instead, they keep poking it and they keep asking nicely for them to stop shooting rockets.
Some squirrels do pick fights with bears. That's what Hamas has been doing for its entire existence. There are enough people who would rather die on their feet than live on their knees.
Israel has already demonstrated its strength. Now it needs to convince its enemies that compromise is preferable to death and to convince the first world that its in the right.
Did the US defeating Japan/Germany/Italy/etc. in WWII involve genocide?
I think Western civilization as a whole has completely forgotten how to win wars. Now, they only know how to keep them going for decades.
Please spare me your genocide tripe. An overwhelming military victory saves lives in the long run. That's the truth. Constantly wringing your hands and freaking out over every little thing leads to this ridiculous ongoing violence which harms the quality of life for millions on both sides.
> I think Western civilization as a whole has completely forgotten how to win wars.
Two points here:
1. Guerilla warfare has become a lot more effective in the 20th century. You can't just drive in with tanks any more.
2. Winning wars in the past has been done with horrific casualties to civilians and troops on both sides, and structural and economic damage that took decades to recover from. That's not winning a war in any sense.
You need to realize what military victory is first. It is the annihilation of the old and the creation of the new. You destroy what you don't like and you create what you do like.
In WWII, we weren't terrible fans of fascism. It was annihilated and replaced with Western-style democratic cultural norms and institutions. In the case of Eastern Germany, Poland, etc. it was communism.
Regardless, there was never any debate that fascism had to go and what had to be put in place. And there was never any doubt that this must be done with force.
Today, the idea of forcing a political system and a way of life onto an occupied territory is unthinkable. As a consequence, victory is not achievable.
> How would you suggest achieving your 'overwhelming military victory' in Afghanistan, or Iraq?
By a sustained and overwhelming effort to turn the cultures of those regions toward American values.
Skip the bombing and the incursions. I would bomb them with DVDs of the Jersey Shore instead.
Look up Ataturk for effective strategies of modernizing large tracts of Muslim populations.
Yea it was really great when we were all macho and didn't give a shit and millions of people died when white guys wanted them to. We should bring that back.
Gaza is not a sustainable state: 1.6M (2M) on narrow 40km strip.
Interesting that population of Gaza exploded from 40K to 1.6-2M in just 3 generations. How many of them refugees and how many migrants from Egypt/Sinai?
Terrorism is by definition anti-civilian warfare. Welcome to the future. Now we get dis-inter-media-ted media-ted violence. A sort of Gawker.com meets 9/11. Ugly all around. Don't forget, the "News" media will show (and make money from) all the baby killing, too. That's part of the strategy of terrorism, too. The complicity of the media to distribute the "message", because they can't resist (the ratings).
I think it's more that Israel and Hamas have no idea how to handle the Gaza Conflict. Using "official" Twitter accounts to announce invasions? These are meant for small status updates of 140 characters or less, not full-scale assaults.
It is interesting that such conversations would be on private phone lines between the two countries. Though it is in many ways nicer for both sides to play with words than weapons. First side to challenge the other to a game of peace wins.
It is also worth mentioning that when a individual or group of start taking to social media in with such posturing intent that the countries goverments try and often suceede in closing them down. When countries do it then the moral echo of any form of standards becomes defining. Free speech is just that as long as it is just words.
Let them play chess or farmville, pixels alot easier to replace than people.
I can't tell if this is a good thing or bad thing.
Good = it will publicize and make the horrors of war very accessible. This is the biggest jump since Vietnam (the first war to achieve widespread broadcast on TV into living rooms daily.)
Bad = it will inflame the irrational players further.
The total number of deaths in the entire Israeli-Arab conflict over the past 70 years or so, is - according to Wikipedia - under 100,000. Out of which, about 25,000 are Israeli, a similar number are Palestinians, and the rest, I guess are casualties of all the other fighting arab countries combined, although the total seems to me a bit high. That's the total for the past 70 years.
By comparison, in the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, Wikipedia puts the number of deaths at about 30,000 in each country in the last year alone. And the Mexican drug war has claimed the lives of about 56,000 since 2006; some estimates go as high as 100,000.
So, not to compare suffering, but the entire Israeli-Arab conflict has claimed, over the last 70 years, more or less the same number of lives as the drug war in Mexico in the past 6.
I'm not even sure what I wanted to say by that.