People who defend Israel like to play a numbers game. They like to talk about how insulting and absurd it is for people to make comparisons with the Nazi genocide of us Jews. They bring up the six million number and talk about how nothing compares with it. They talk about how what’s happening in Gaza is a drop in the bucket when taken in context. You can hear this argument made all the time by all sorts of defenders of the Israeli-American siege of Gaza. Here’s a quote from something someone wrote on Substack that got some traction:
“…people have no concept of the scale of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a killing machine. Over 10,000 Jews were murdered in a single day, on many days. In one 100 day period 1.5 million Jews were murdered. Jews were lined up and shot into pits or crammed into rooms and gassed. The lucky ones got a shelf to sleep on, a piece of bread and a few months of labor until their bodies gave out. Don’t compare anything to the Holocaust.”
My initial reaction to reading something like this is to think, well…Israel is killing hundreds of people a day, every day, and also horribly disfiguring and crippling as many or more. Lots of people are also dying from disease, infections, malnutrition, and ultimately succumbing to horrible injuries from the constant carpet bombing that Israel is carrying out. Is that nothing? Is this a morality contest for racking up bodies? Does this person think that unless Israel surpasses 10,000 a day or whatever arbitrary figure they come up with, Israel (and they themselves) are in the clear? That unless it is 10,000 a day, they’re not like the Nazis — that they’re moral and right?
But today a secondary thought appeared in my mind. If you are doing comparative accounting of mass slaughter and using the Holocaust as the gold standard for evil, six million doesn’t mean much when talking about the number of people Israel has killed in Gaza. That’s because the sizes of the two political entities being compared — Israel vs Germany — are vastly different. During its genocide, Germany had at least ten times the population that Israel has today. For this numbers morality game to have any meaning, you need to readjust your figures — instead of absolute sums, you need to work with something that gets closer to a per-capita genocide rate.
In our hyper-information age, people are obsessed with numbers. Numbers are everything. Without numbers, things don’t have meaning for many of us. It’s a bit of an unhealthy obsession I think. But since it’s so vital to people, I want work with the numbers a bit to see if we can put things into perspective.
Hellbound and Down 