Israel is lost.
Every day for the last three years, the decent people of the world — in our untold millions — have been sunk in a pit of moral despair, weeping, having breakdowns or being permanently enraged by the most extraordinarily depraved example of full-spectrum, live-streamed barbarism in our lifetimes — the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip by the State of Israel.
The trigger for Israel’s ongoing genocide was, of course, one particularly bloody day, October 7, 2023, when militants from the Gaza Strip, which had been maintained by Israel as an “open-air prison” for the previous 16 years, broke out through the perimeter fence and went on a killing spree in southern Israel in which 1,195 people were killed, and 251 others were taken hostage.
These are the bare facts, and, for anyone like myself who is an intuitive lifelong pacifist, they are, of course, deeply unpalatable. 1,124 Israelis and 71 foreign nationals, who all had hopes and dreams and loves and fears, were killed on October 7. 367 of them were members of the Israeli security forces, while the rest, including 36 children, were civilians.
We should mourn them all, but we cannot regard their deaths in isolation, because, in response, beginning on the evening of October 7, 2023 and continuing ever since, the Israelis have killed, at the barest minimum, 75 times as many Palestinians over the last three years, including over 21,500 children — at least 600 times as many children as were killed on October 7.
In total, according to statistics with which no one can seriously argue, 74,228 Palestinians have been killed and 175,188 injured (many very severely so) by Israeli forces over the last three years, although those figures are undoubtedly a serious undercount (see my notes at the end of this article). The remains of at least 8,000 Palestinians are still buried under the rubble, and untold numbers of others are unaccounted for, or are dying of secondary causes beyond the direct military attacks — of starvation and disease, and of everyday ailments, grievous wounds or chronic pre-existing health conditions, few of which can be adequately treated in a healthcare sector that has been deliberately destroyed by Israel, and from which it is still deliberately preventing the delivery of essential medical supplies and equipment.
According to an invisible assessment of the relative value of lives that Israel uses, and that has been shamefully adopted by most western leaders, we’re meant, today, to continue mourning those who died on October 7, 2023, while completely ignoring the genocidal carnage visited on the Palestinians ever since.
