Hierarchies of suffering

At the end of October, The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect said, “The latest hostilities [in Gaza] are unprecedented [sic] in terms of the number of civilian casualties in recent decades and the scale of destruction of protected civilian objects in both Israel and Occupied Palestine.” On March 18 the Secretary-General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, said, “1.1 million people in Gaza are facing catastrophic hunger — the highest number of people ever [sic] recorded – anywhere, anytime [sic].” “It’s unprecedented [sic] the speed with which this crisis has gripped Gaza,” David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee, told Yalda Hakim on Sky News on 20 March. “We are about to witness the most intense famine since World War II [sic] in Gaza,” Alex de Waal wrote in The Guardian on March 21.

What do all these statements (and there are many more like them) have in common? Their compassion for the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, of course. But two other things. First, they don’t mention Hamas — or its sponsor, Iran. Second, perhaps more interesting, is the hyperbole. Words like “unprecedented”, “the highest number of people ever recorded – anywhere, anytime”, “the most intense famine since World War II”.

For months now, critics of Israel have been saying that the suffering in Gaza is worse than anywhere else, or indeed ever before: either since World War II, or “anytime” at all. Their compassion for the Palestinians is boundless. But they don’t make comparisons with other people who are suffering around the world, whether from famine or war crimes. They don’t say: what’s happening in Gaza is terrible, but I feel the same compassion for Christians who are massacred by Muslims in Africa or in the Middle East, for all the Jews who were been driven out of Muslim countries in the Middle East, for those suffering from war, rape and famine in Eritrea or Sudan, for the Kurds or even for the Ukrainians, still under assault from Putin’s crazed war of aggression, for women fighting for basic rights in Iran and Afghanistan or for Assad’s victims in Syria. For many of these commentators, Gaza seems to be a special case.

Many politicians and spokesmen and women for NGOs and international organisations like the UN, UNWRA and the EU seem to agree that as many as 30,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed in Gaza. Oddly, these figures apparently don’t include the 10,000 or more Hamas terrorists the IDF claim to have killed or the thousands of Palestinian civilians killed by Hamas missiles misfiring.

More recently, this consensus on casualties in Gaza has come under attack by a number of statisticians. See, for example, @Aizenberg55’s “close review of Gaza casualty figures reported by UNOCHA based on daily Hamas ‘Ministry of Health’ numbers proves they are FALSIFIED. Women & children are grossly inflated.” Or see a piece in the Tablet online magazine on 7 March by Abraham Wyner, a professor of UPenn Wharton’s Department of Statistics and Data Science, in which he examines the available evidence to argue that the Gaza Health Ministry, a front organisation run by Hamas, has been “faking” casualty numbers.

But even if you were to accept the figures provided by the Gaza Health Ministry — and note that no mainstream newspaper, TV news network or NGO has claimed to have access to their own independent figures — they are not “unprecedented” or like nothing we have seen since World War II. Instead, they are dwarfed by a number of terrible recent conflicts, including the Second Congo War, the Syrian Civil War (in 2022 the UN themselves estimated that 300,000 civilians lost their lives in Syria), Darfur in 2003, where according to The Guardian up to 300,000 people lost their lives, the Second Iraq War (where estimates for the numbers killed vary between 150,00o according to the Iraq Family Survey and 600,ooo according to the Lancet survey), the Russian-Ukraine war, with 14,000 killed in eastern Ukraine before 2021, and at least 40,000 Ukrainian civilians and approximately 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed and perhaps 340,000 Russian troops killed or wounded. In each of these conflicts estimates for the numbers killed vary, but most sources speak of over 300,000 dead in each case, at least ten times the numbers killed in Gaza, even according to what are increasingly disputed figures.

It’s not just the figures which are unreliable. So is the language used, in particular, the word “genocide” which has become increasingly widespread. According to one source, “Seven UN Special Rapporteurs also jointly warned on 19 October that in light of recent statements made by Israeli officials, there is ‘a risk of genocide against the Palestinian people’.” Then there are the emotive and misleading comparisons with the Holocaust, such as the comparison between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto by the Russian-American writer Masha Gessen in The New Yorker. But did Gessen and others rush to compare Homs in Syria or Mosul in Iraq with the Warsaw Ghetto or the bombing of Dresden?

The same human rights organisation quoted above goes on to say, “It’s is also important to note that there is no hierarchy among the atrocity crimes of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity [my emphasis]. Brutalities perpetrated through the commission of all atrocity crimes result in unconscionable suffering among protected populations.”

This is the point. The Guardian, NGOs and the UN should not use the language of “unprecedented” deaths when they are not, and should not create a “hierarchy” of “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”, when tragically terrible losses of life have been widespread in recent decades. The humanitarian organisation Action Against Hunger said that in addition to Gaza, several other countries also have “very concerning levels of hunger”, including Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia’s Tigray region, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. And yet Secretary of State Anthony Blinken recently said, “100% of the population in Gaza is at severe levels of acute food insecurity. That’s the first time [sic] an entire population [sic] has been so classified.”

So why has Gaza become such an object of fascination for academics, protesters, journalist and TV correspondents, NGO spokesmen and women and politicians? Why do they speak this language?

In a fascinating paper for the London School of Economics Middle East Centre, Omar Shahabudin McDoom, a political scientist at the LSE, chose a number of often-cited explanations for why the conflict in Gaza “is so widely engaging and so deeply polarising”. First, is the conflict’s death toll particularly horrific? He rightly concluded “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not unique for its civilian destructiveness”. Second, how important is “the imbalance in military power between Israeli and Palestinian armed actors”? He concluded that “asymmetric loss and suffering does not distinguish the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”, though it “does inspire sympathy and anger on behalf of the weaker party”. Third, the conflict is not distinctive for “the indiscriminate violence committed”. Fourth, is “the continued occupation and continued settlement of Palestinian land” unique? Hardly, if you think of the Chinese occupation of Tibet, Russia’s occupation of Crimea and Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara, to take just a few examples. But, according to McDoom, what is “remarkable” is the fact of so many issues coming together in one conflict, contributing to its polarising effects, its intractability and to the emotions it triggers.

But the question then is whether journalists at leading newspapers, experienced broadcasters, heads of NGOs and even the Secretary-General of the UN have the responsibility to avoid emotive language like “unique”, “unprecedented” and “genocide”, whether they should speak implicitly of hierarchies of suffering, when hundreds of thousands around the world are suffering from famine and fatalities caused by conflict, and whether they should be more careful in their use of statistics?

The answer, in my opinion, is clear, perhaps one of the few things that is most clear in the debate about Gaza. They should all be more careful in their use of language and data and they are not. Antonio Guterres often says, the world is watching. What he forgets to say, is that the world is watching him and the UN and many do not like what they see.

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