civilians – Unspoken Politics

Both sides in the Gaza conflict are ill-defined

There are certain issues that I don’t often write about; this isn’t due to apathy but rather the toxic nature of the debate. Guns are one, abortion is another. The discussion has calcified, and most writing gets subjected to the same, predictable criticism and vitriol. Best avoided when possible.

Currently the focus is on another landmine topic, the State of Israel, the Palestinian territories on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and who’s right, who’s wrong, and who’s justified doing this or that. Take a look at #Gaza on Twitter for about thirty seconds and you’ll be incensed in some way.

No conflict currently active today has more history and nuance around it. By necessity, commentary about it has to be highly simplified and compressed.

A continuing issue when discussing Palestine-Israel: people conflate groups and ideas together.

Even prior to 1948, Judaism and the idea of Israel have been locked together and equated. This despite a long history of Jewish rabbis and academics who were skeptical or against a new, physical state in the Middle East. Because the two are seen as the same, any criticism of Israel must also stand as valid criticism of the Jewish community. If this is maintained and applied, very few arguments against Israeli conduct can exist that are not attacked as antisemitic.

What this can do, and appears to be doing as I write this, is create an anti-Israel movement where legitimate antisemitic elements are not isolated from the swath of regular people. Yesterday the New York Times published a piece on rising antisemitism in Europe. Supporters of Jewish rights and for tolerance in general could use an ally to collaborate with. Unfortunately, people of such a disposition have been lumped together with vandals and thugs, and they rightly resent such association.

Regarding Palestine, there is the conflation of Hamas with the Palestinians in general. When used, this has a serious impact on how civilian causalities are viewed. If everyone is part of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, that means they share moral culpability with rocket attacks and tunnel ambushes. Such thinking is dangerous, as it’s clearly not the case, and a similar merging of Israeli citizens and the Israeli military has the same problems. Some civilians are incapable of supporting terrorists, including children. Given that civilians have been over two-thirds of the casualties in this conflict, we can see the danger of a mindset where armed militants and unarmed civilians are merged together under the same banner- Hamas.

All people in Israel are not served by these links. Jews, living in Israel or elsewhere, are not served when any criticism of the State of Israel is spun and treated like a personal insult. Palestinians are not served when criticism of Hamas, or armed attacks on Hamas, falls on civilians because of perceived equivalence. To solve any problem, the first step is to define terms. In this case, it is: what is Israel? how does it relate to Judaism? what is Hamas? how does it relate to other groups in Palestine, and the Palestinian people in general? If there is no definition, the very parties in the conflict are uncertain and inaccurate.

Syrian carnage: If it stops hurting, we are all lost [explicit photograph]

UNICEF has announced their photo of the year, part of a set by Niclas Hammarström about Syrian children caught in a warzone. Hammarström quit news photography for a decade- his return as a freelancer matched the breakout of civil war in Syria. It is good to have him be able to bring such haunting portraits to us.

Syrien: Das vergessene Leid der Kinder. © Niclas Hammarström/Kontinent — Syrian child after an attack in Aleppo

Not that long ago I made a post- “Regarding Syria: Be horrified, continue to be horrified“. I wrote:

All aspects of the Syrian conflict are terrible- the shooting of unarmed protestors, the shelling of civilian centers, the millions of refugees fleeing to countries that want nothing to do with them, the civil wars among the “rebels” themselves, the use of violence to make religious and political statements.

It makes sense to become acclimated, to see this as just more torture, more murder, more war. But that is an injustice to those that suffer and die. Be horrified, be disgusted. It’s how things get changed.

Few Americans have to directly confront the horrors of war. Soldiers, charity workers, contractors. The scars follow these people back, as we see so many soldiers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and commit suicide at an alarming rate. Most of us have the luxury, the fantasy of detachment. How many people have truly thought about and comprehended the civilian death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan? How many treat that number as an essential concern?

Syrien: Das vergessene Leid der Kinder. © Niclas Hammarström/Kontinent

This is what a photographer helps. They photograph people, and through them their stories. The first photo in this story- that girl has a name. Dania Kilsi. People love her. Or they once did- before they died. Her injuries were not severe but they were preventable. And for every Dania Kilsi that lived there are those that died- and they had names and lives too. The hospital she and hundreds of others were treated at that day was later destroyed. This picture cannot be replicated, because the reality now is even worse.

I am not a pie-in-the-sky pacifist. And I know that this civil war- this senseless, stagnant butchery- is not just about the factions of the Levant and the innocent people who were dragged into slaughter by their hatred. It’s about all of us. The reason Bashar al-Assad gained power, stayed in power, was able to use heavy arms and chemical weapons- this comes back to countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and China. There is seldom a conflict that does not at some point lead up to the permanent members of the UN Security Council. Part of the same international organization as UNICEF, who selected these pictures to show to the world. “It’s not my fight” is just wishful thinking. That doesn’t mean arming the various rebel groups to the teeth. But if war came to where we live, the places we travel, where friends we keep from all over the world live- we’d be appalled if those with the power to help said it wasn’t their fight.

Syria and similar conflicts should rip out a piece of our soul and make us hurt. Because that kind of hurt can only be stopped by getting that piece back- by regaining the empathy and compassion we need.

Prelude to the end: the Homs Truce

A UN-brokered truce in Homs is near (or past) its original end time, though evacuations have continued. I wrote about the situation as it existed last week. Over 1,000 civilians have moved out of the last rebel-head pockets of central Homs. Tuesday the flow of aid and refugees stopped entirely, and men near fighting age have been detained and their ultimate fate is unknown- whether a brief interrogation or an accusation of being a rebel fighter. International groups have reason to be concerned, given abundant evidence that civilians and fighters alike have suffered state-sanctioned torture and execution.

With the last remnants starving and vastly outnumbered, the bloody government victory in Homs could have larger implications. With Homs ‘pacified’ and depopulated, resources could be used to retake other cities that have split control. Whether the various anti-government factions can prevent Assad regime gains remains to be seen.

What we all lost in Iraq

A new, more rigorous and well-structured study about the civilian death toll in Iraq has been published, a successor to the controversial Lancet studies of 2004 and 2006. Taken in 2011, it used a more representative sample and was able to survey most of the country- the Lancet studies had to deal with serious amount of violence and parts of the country that were a no-go for researchers.

Ultimately it puts the combined deaths of the conflict and the huge migration in and out of the country at just over 460,800. Three-fifths of the non-migratory deaths were violent in nature, the rest caused by the breakdown of services and infrastructure, like hospitals. The figure is contrasted with the second Lancet study, which put the number at over 650,000, and the Iraq Body Count, which relies on confirmed deaths, in in the 100-125,000 range. As in most surveys, a simple count will miss certain groups and regions. The new survey makes well-founded estimates and will be the standard by which any future evaluations are measured.

Americans are aware the American lives lost, but have very little idea of the massive amount of Iraqi civilians who perished as the result of the invasion and multi-pronged insurgency that followed. A 2007 poll (PDF) found that the a majority of Americans thought less than 10,000 civilians had been killed- only 15% thought it had reached six figures.

Of course, this new study reminds us once again how incredibly pointless the Iraq War was. What little was accomplished (such as a more democratic Iraq) seems to be crumbling- the exit of the last troops was followed by the arrest and trial in absentia of the Sunni vice-president. A great many lives could have been saved by using the hundreds of billions of dollars spent to create infrastructure and eradicate disease. Universal healthcare could have been a reality years earlier. Using the Cost of War site, one can calculate what portion of war spending your town contributed. By their calculations, the money spent in Iraq was enough to supply every household in the city with solar power for forty years (obviously more, given falling solar prices).

So it is a good point of meditation. And it asks- if Iraq was such an expensive, bloody, pointless war, how did it happen? And how can people, in outrage and solidarity, keep it from happening again?