Augean Stables

Hat tip fp.

The answer is, about .06% or 1 in 1700 deaths. Whereas 11 million Muslims have been killed in these conflicts, only .3% died in the Arab-Israeli conflict and over 90% were killed by fellow Muslims. The Arab Israeli conflict ranks 49th in the number of dead since 1950. (And if we were to average it out over years, it would rank even lower, is suspect since many conflicts kill large numbers in a relatively short period, whereas this one has spanned the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st with one long, unresolved conflict.)

So, ask the authors of the study that places Israel as 49th in a list of the world’s most deadly conflicts since 1950, why is it so prominent in people’s awareness that most people think that the Arab-Israeli conflict is

the world’s most dangerous conflict – and, accordingly, Israel is judged the world’s most belligerent country? For example, British prime minister Tony Blair told the U.S. Congress in July 2003 that “Terrorism will not be defeated without peace in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine. Here it is that the poison is incubated. Here it is that the extremist is able to confuse in the mind of a frighteningly large number of people the case for a Palestinian state and the destruction of Israel.” This viewpoint leads many Europeans, among others, to see Israel as the most menacing country on earth.

The contrast between Muslims killed by Israelis and those killed by Muslims offers the key anomaly — one might even say, disproof — of PCP: if we’re nice to them they’ll be nice to us; if Israel would stop oppressing the Palestinians we could have peace. As The authors of the piece — Gunnar Heinsohn, director of the Raphael-Lemkin-Institut für Xenophobie- und Genozidforschung at the University of Bremen and Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum — note, this outsized importance given to Israel and the emphasis on her aggressiveness,

flies in the face of the well-known pattern that liberal democracies do not aggress.

So is Israel an exception, a rogue Western democracy still rampaging through the third world pursuing the kind of messianic imperialist projects that the Europeans carried out with such wantonly lethal proficiency until the middle of the 20th century, or is it a civil democracy trying to survive in a belligerent world where killing is the norm, and peace is a pause between conflicts? And what implications do the answers (however nuanced one wishes to make them), tell us about the kinds of assumptions that underly the rush to negotiations now underway, and the advice of Walt and Mearsheimer that Israel is a burden to the West in its efforts to “get along” with the Arab and Muslim world?

These are numbers worth pondering. They can help us keep our thinking trimmed hard to the sail of the matter, help us decide between, say, the two narratives about Jenin (a culture where massacring the enemy is idealized (suicide bombing), accusing its enemies of massacring hundreds of their own people in gang executions; or a civil society where massacre is abhorred, claiming that it did everything it could (including sacrifice 23 of its men), to keep civilian casualties to a minimum).

One thing that it does highlight is the importance of the narrative in giving meaning to the killing. Somehow, deaths in the Arab Israeli conflict are more meaningful to the “world information system” than any other, an observation supported by the statistic that there are more international journalists per square inch in Israel than anywhere else in the world.

It also highlights the importance of specifically what Segev and Levy dismiss as irrelevant, and what Poller underlines: the story must be a libel. Alone, the tragic death of a child is not the issue as the Israeli moralists want to claim, it’s who killed that child. Muhammad al Durah, or Houda Ghalia’s family are not useful as an icon of war if they were killed by their own people. (Which does not mean they are not meaningful — on the contrary, they reveal the real tragedy of the region.)

Right now, only if Israel is viewed as the perpetrator, does this conflict carry the moral charge that takes it from 49th place to such singular prominence that it eclipses all other conflicts. The media may not have created that situation — certainly not singlehandedly — but it has contributed mightily, almost as much, one might say, as the Arab elites have contributed to their own people’s suffering. And it blinds us.

Balaam’s ass, where are you?