The Arithmetic of Atrocities
Tamara Himani argues that we are asking the wrong questions about Gaza.
A man holds up an image of a child at a protest in Tehran. Mostafa Tehrani: Wikimedia Commons
Atrocities operate according to a certain arithmetic. If I want to get away with bombing a hospital, I do not need 100% of the world to similarly desire to bomb that hospital. I need perhaps 10% to agree, a small and effective coalition who want this as badly as I do, while the remaining 90% vacillate blandly between mild concern and blanket indifference. For this to work, the 90% needn’t believe that all Palestinians inside al-Shifa hospital, (or the scores of other hospitals across Gaza that have been targeted by Israeli military forces) are ‘human animals’ or ‘children of darkness’ who deserve to be killed; just that they are an acceptable price to pay to get to whoever does deserve to be killed. There is a difference between a mania for murder and a contentment with its costs. If I want to bomb a hospital, I do not need to spread the messianic mantle of religious ultranationalism across the globe. I just need to stoke the supremacism that classifies lives as crucial or collateral every day.
This has produced two brands of cruelty where the Israeli-Palestinian question is concerned. The first is the rather run-of-the-mill extremism: this faction’s belief is that Jews have an exclusive right to the entirety of their Holy Land, and the ‘Arabs’ (that is, Palestinians, plucked from their roots and stripped of their history) should build their settlements with gratitude when permitted, or run to Jordan. The ‘Arabs’ to which they refer are a senseless, abstract thing, inured to a lifetime of squalor and suffering. In Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s words, ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian’, and to parrot President Herzog, ‘an entire nation is responsible’ for Hamas. Whether construction workers from Ramallah or Bedouins near Hebron, they are indistinguishable, incendiary, and a threat to be neutralised: bundled into a camp, bussed in as day labour, or barred behind steel turnstiles. The innocent Arab does not exist; even the unborn foetus is a ‘demographic threat’.
“For it is a radical position, to watch the killing of over 26,000 people and not bat an eyelid…So how does a massacre become mainstream?”
This narrative is a horrific one, yet its grip on the Zionist right is explicable, catalysed by the attack of October 7th. If I am told that I am the chosen people and the Holy Land belongs to me, if I should encounter Palestinians only as the nameless, faceless creature lurking in an explosive vest or packed into a workers’ truck, and if I am told he hates me not because I put him in such a condition but by virtue of what I am - the superior, the righteous, the deserving - then I should be radicalised into violence, into supremacism, into the desire to dominate. That is the minority explained.
But what of the majority? Every insidious minority relies upon an indifferent majority to passively parrot their logic. Though Israel’s current far-right government has encountered fierce resistance from parts of Israel’s population, there exists a broad consensus that occupation of the West Bank (and now Gaza), if not a religious duty, is a security imperative: polls have indicated 77% of Israelis oppose withdrawal from the occupied West Bank while 50% support further annexation. Indeed, Israeli peace activists recount raising Palestinian flags at anti-government protests only to have them torn down by fellow protestors. For it is a radical position, to watch the killing of over 26,000 people and not bat an eyelid, to make peace with perpetual persecution. So how does a massacre become mainstream? How is one radicalised into indifference?
Firstly, by presenting the exceptional as elementary.
2.3 million Palestinians, 70% of them refugees, are penned into 1% of historic Palestine, much of them in 8 refugee camps. They depend heavily on 500 daily humanitarian aid trucks, which may be cut off at any moment (as they largely have been for nearly three months). They have no formal military, no freedom of movement beyond that 1%. 12-hour electricity and drinkable water is a tall order. There are two entry/exit points, neither of which are under their control. An 18 year-old today will have borne witness to six wars. The seas are not theirs to fish, the empty skies not a comfort but a looming threat. This is Gaza.
3 million Palestinians are penned within another 21% of historic Palestine (though largely confined to less than 8% of it), split into 165 policed ‘islets’ or ‘enclaves’. Military checkpoints and bases, Israeli settlements, bypass roads and a separation barrier isolate these Palestinians from one another. Their land and life is eaten up by a combination of recurrent military raids (via tanks, drone strikes and the like); house demolitions or forced evictions (commonly via bulldozer, though arson is seldom off the table); mass incarceration (via martial law presently detaining 2,070 Palestinians without charge); and nearly 700,000 armed settlers, along with the violence to which they feel entitled, if not fanatically obliged. This is the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
2 million Palestinians live in the remaining 78% of historic Palestine, labelled ‘Arab-Israelis’ and subject to dozens of discriminatory laws designed to dilute their presence to the very periphery of nationhood. This is Israel.Another estimated 7 million Palestinians - totaling ⅓ of the world’s refugees - are scattered across refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, or homes elsewhere. Generations have been born and have died in those refugee camps, knowing they are never getting out. This is the rest of the world. This is either not known, or not considered particularly exceptional. Successive Israeli governments’ treatment of the Palestinian - pushed twice or even thrice off their land, hemmed in by soldiers and settlers, the rifle barrel between their eyes and the tank’s turret at their back - is not an atrocity but a security necessity.
Israel’s founding, in displacing Palestinians and revising the territorial status quo, doubtlessly encountered military resistance from its neighbours, to which it sought to respond. Yet its practices of territorial annexation and ethnic cleansing preceded the 1948 war (also known as the Palestinian ‘Nakba’ or catastrophe, in which over 750,000 Palestinians were forced to flee their homes without the right to return) and endure today. Here, the distinction between Israel’s conflict with neighbouring Arab states over its treatment of Palestinians has been artfully blurred with its war on Palestinians within its own territory. The right to defend its state against regional opposition somehow translates into a right to herd Palestinians into ever smaller cantons of land to expand that state.
“Rather than question the government’s rhetoric, the world’s indifferent majorities defend it ad absurdum.”
This interpretation of security - one squeezing nearly 40% of its population into mostly 9% of the land - goes unquestioned when critiquing the Israeli government's arguments. The government explains refugee camps must be raided to target militants; it is not asked why militants exist in refugee camps, nor what they are militating against. Militancy instead becomes the Palestinian condition. Not because he is occupied, but because he is Arab, Muslim, heir to that intractable terroristic impulse attached to the umbilical cord at birth. This drives the Israeli government’s impunity in the occupied territories during war and peace. Militarily-guarded settlements are not land theft but security outposts; refugees are not forcibly expelled families but extremists’ crowd-cover. Security needs reflect not the nature of the state but that of the people it occupies.
Rather than question the government’s rhetoric, the world’s indifferent majorities defend it ad absurdum. Collateral damage is an unfortunate shame, yes; but if you are anti-terrorist, you must not mind however many Palestinians must be blown apart or seared alive in order to reach one. For under the overriding mandate of counterinsurgency, the two become co-extensive: the Palestinian can only be a terrorist, an avid supporter for a terrorist, or a human shield for a terrorist. And what do we do to terrorists? As Israel’s government has repeatedly emphasised, we wipe them off the face of the earth. Thus, the Israeli government is awarded the privilege of context: Is it really necessary for 2.3 million Palestinians to access clean water if terrorists might get a sip too? Can we be sure Hamas isn’t hidden inside Al-Shifa Hospital’s maternity ward? Are you certain the woman trying to drag her dead brother’s half-eaten corpse from the street isn’t a disguised militant?
Here the indifferent majority needn’t care the slightest about the 1967 lines or what-have-you; they simply need to entertain such dehumanising rhetoric for long enough to ask the above questions without batting an eyelid. We go through awful trouble recording evidence to awaken the world to our death. For this to work, the world needs to believe there is human life to be lost. This does not appear to be the case. To quote former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett when inquired as such: “Are you seriously asking me about Palestinian civilians right now?”
The role of the world’s indifferent majorities, in this context, is not neutrality or pro-peace. It is to imply: “Well, I’d rather you didn’t, but if you really need to - why, go on then. I shan’t stop you”. And then to pour themselves a tall glass of wine and get on with their evening.