The Israeli response to the Hamas massacre on Oct. 7 has exacted asymmetrical terrorism on innocent Palestinian civilians living under occupation. The only solution is a ceasefire in Gaza to end the ongoing bloodshed.
According to Israeli sources, the atrocious Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas in southern Israel claimed roughly 1,200 Israeli lives including civilians and children, through planned incursions into nearby towns, kibbutzim, military bases and a music festival. In response, Israel has chosen a policy of destruction on the Palestinian population.
After Oct. 7, Israel immediately called for the evacuation of North Gaza, home to around 1.1 million Palestinians. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been migrating through Israeli-sanctioned humanitarian corridors to the south of the Gaza Strip.
Defence Minister of Israel, Yoav Gallant, in no uncertain terms called for a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip just days after the Oct. 7 attack. After announcing Israel would be shutting down the electricity, water, food and fuel to the whole of Gaza, Gallant stated that “we are fighting human animals.” There is no semantic ambiguity due to the contiguity of the statements as to whether Gallant is referring to Hamas or the Gazan population writ large: the Palestinians are the “animals” in this statement.
It remains a topic of contention as to how trustworthy the reported numbers of civilian deaths coming out of the Hamas-affiliated Gazan health ministry are due to their being under Hamas governance. While one should not entirely eschew skepticism as to the exact figure, it is not hard to imagine that the number of casualties being reported from the Ministry — around 11,000 — is accurate.
First of all, the Gaza Health Ministry (GHM) is a civilian-run organization that has reported accurate numbers related to the conflict that were verified by multinational-alliance organizations such as the UN and W.H.O. in the past. Second, if you’ve been following the images that have circulated from reputable sources on sites like X, the seemingly endless number of new videos featuring charred and mangled children speak for themselves.
In Aristotle’s Metaphysics IV, the philosopher conducts a sustained meditation on skeptical thinking that is quite helpful for working through the particular issue of taking seriously the estimated numbers and kinds of casualties being reported from Gaza and elsewhere.
In a section of the book, Aristotle makes a distinction between being incredibly skeptical to particular classes of things instead of having a general principled skepticism to all received knowledge. In laying out this distinction, Aristotle makes the prescient point that denying knowledge of some things over others entails a certain knowing something about that class of things being especially scrutinized that justifies a pronounced skepticism in place of accepting them as accurate.
Therefore, skepticism shown towards certain types of received knowledge needs to be backed up with a reasoning that doesn’t lead to hypocrisy in analogous situations. It would be hypocritical, for example, if some received information by the type of skeptic in consideration didn’t go through the same scrutiny to be adopted as remotely factual, despite having the same qualities that warranted the skepticism of the rejected class of information.
Simply stated, unless the same hyper skepticism to the endless stream of video evidence of bombed hospital corridors and dead children in Gaza posted online is applied to the reporting from Israel on Oct. 7 — which any reasonable person should accept actually happened in roughly the numbers reported by Israeli officials — then one has to explain what knowledge they do have about the Gazans that justifies the belief that all video evidence and civilian reporting is completely untrustworthy.
The response at this point is usually that Gaza is governed by Hamas, which is a terrorist Islamist group. And while it’s certainly true that one should not take any numbers directly from Hamas officials as being accurate without more legitimate corroborating voices, the GHM is still overwhelmingly civilian run. There’s also yet to be any evidence for a substantial Hamas-led PSYOP for flooding social media and major Western press with video evidence of dead and severely injured civilians.
It should also be mentioned that there was hardly an everlasting mass skepticism of Israeli-reported figures on the conflict after 2008’s Operation Cast Lead which killed 1,400 Palestinians, most being civilians and over 300 being legally children, and of which Israel was the primary aggressor.
Furthermore, the sketchy details that have surfaced regarding the Israeli justification for the recent Al Shifa hospital takeover are further proof that skepticism is being unfairly applied to Gazan officials.
The hospital’s invasion was based on the pretext that it served as a Hamas military “command centre,” which is still unconfirmed. Meanwhile, the Hospital’s director has said that as a result of the Al Shifa siege, three premature babies have died, and the fuel is running out.
Finally, those who remain skeptical of the Gazan numbers in terms of some mythological record of Israeli humanitarianism should have to grapple with the UN-conducted and reported statistics from Statista. These figures show that in the last 15 years alone the ratio of received deaths and injuries between the two dependent variables from each side is well above twenty-to-one just in terms of deaths which, mind you, is the more condensed ratio when compared to the ratio of injuries.
To be clear: Israel has an absolute right to defend itself against Hamas.
However, a question arises here that leading progressive commentator and co-host of The Young Turks, Ana Kasparian, made explicit on the PBD podcast a few weeks ago. Namely, why is Israel using collective punishment (illegal under international law laid out in the Fourth Geneva Convention, one should add) instead of special operations to target Hamas militants and leaders specifically? After all, special operations were ordered by the United States which were successful in killing founder and leader of al-Qaeda Osama bin Laden in 2011.
The answer is because Israel has never considered there to be a rightful claim to ownership for the forcibly displaced Palestinian population of what is now Israel. This was the case far before the recent conflict with the two defining wars in service of Israeli occupation and settlement, the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 Six-Day War, seeing large swaths of Palestinians exiled from their land. Furthermore, settlements in the remaining occupied Palestinian territories continue to be developed illegally under international law.
It should be sufficiently clear that what’s happening in Gaza now is tantamount to an ethnic cleansing, the birth of which goes back a hundred years now.
Therefore, it should be incumbent on all governments and populations around the world to call for Israel to stop its illegal siege on Gaza.
For decades, Israel has prided itself on being the only true democracy in the Middle East, oftentimes using this “fact” as the key token for receiving Western support and trade. A true democracy, however, can’t be an ethno-state and must follow international human rights codes.
It’s also important to grasp that explanation is not justification.
One can hold two truths at the same time; what Hamas did on Oct. 7 is abhorrent and unjustified, but that doesn’t mean a condemnation of the Israeli response is out of bounds. The strict taboo around talking about the geopolitical history of Israel, viz-a-viz the recent outburst of violence on both sides, is a rhetorical tool meant to cast all Palestinians as essentially terroristic and sub-human. This taboo should come as no surprise as egregious ethnic essentialism that is founded on the current status quo, or at the very least convenient slices of time, has always been a rhetorical device in the arsenal of the far-right.
The antidote to this fundamentally right-wing framing of “dangerous” ethnic groups should always be historical supplementation that focusses on material conditions as a subversion of naturalisation.
And to that effect, Israel for decades has controlled movement within the occupied Palestinian territories, has used advanced security technology to surveil the Palestinian people, as well as having at their discretion the flow of resources into Gaza, as Gallant’s announcement of the cutting off of such resources made palpable.
One also should mention that the Strip remains one of the most densely populated places in human history, with a roughly five-by-twenty-five square-mile border. And within that border the following facts are true: the median age in Gaza is 19; over half the territory’s population is children; over 90 per cent of the water isn’t potable in Gaza; and unemployment hovers around 50 per cent and jumps even higher than that when considering youth unemployment in the territory.
All of these material factors are important to consider in terms of why many commentators, scholars and activists have accurately called Gaza an open-air prison, including former US president Jimmy Carter.
To reiterate, the Oct. 7 Hamas incursions and mass slaughtering were unequivocally wrong, but they weren’t the expression of an entire people’s natural dispositions, which is how Israel is treating it with their policy of an active ethnic cleansing of the Strip.
What is desperately needed now is a ceasefire in Gaza if there is to be any hope for future peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.