Counting the wounds

My longtime Israeli friend Jeff Gabbay told me something on the third day of the war, Oct. 9, when I was in Israel. Gabbay was simple and cutting. He was responding to my observation: “Hamas’ hostages include American citizens — that will capture the attention of Americans.” Gabbay: “Yes, but America has a short attention span.” 

If evidence were needed, fast forward to an AP story of Dec. 6, under the headline, “Nir Oz Israeli kibbutz embodied Hamas’ strategy.”

 The story is written by Lori Hinnant and Sam McNeil. They go into great detail how Hamas captured the hostages, why they aimed to take hostages, what their strategy was. It was “an operation unprecedented both in its scope and execution,” they write.

The story is filled with timelines and quotations from both Hamas operatives and those whom they took hostage and did not take hostage.

The story includes the collapse of Israel’s vaunted security apparatus on the morning of Oct. 7 and Hamas’ response.

“We were shocked by the colossal collapse (of Israel’s army),” the AP writers quote Ali Barakeh, a Hamas official in Beirut, on Oct. 9.

The writers go into fine detail as to how Hamas penetrated the kibbutz and how members tried to protect themselves. “Hiding in his safe room in Nir Oz,” the writers record, “Eyal Barad reconfigured his security camera to see what was happening outside. A white pickup truck pulled up in front of his house, and a group of armed men jumped off and walked off-screen. The screen filled with the movement of motorcycles, bicycles, stolen farm  machinery and gunmen.

“One attacker emerged from the left, firmly pulling a clearly reluctant unarmed man by the hands. They disappeared off-screen.”

The horror unfolded, revealing an Israeli with a  cap covering his face, a house across the road, a gunman near a closed window, a second man yanking open the metal shutter and pulling out a woman, whose face they covered. 

“It looked very rehearsed,” Barad said. “It looked like this was the plan.”

The planners proceed to another house in which, among other things, a young Israeli pleads not to be taken. “Don’t take me. I’m too young.” At which point the line went dead.

A Hamas video ending up showing in midafternoon light a procession of stolen cars, motorcycles and farm equipment headed across the fields back to Gaza. And, on two wheels and four, hostage after hostage.

The AP story included the response of one of the first hostages to be freed. “They prepared for this. They were prepared for a very long time.” Another Nir Oz resident feared it was a practice that Hamas would see as relatively successful and potentially worth repeating.

Despite the review of hundreds of messages among Nir Oz residents “shared exclusively with The Associated Press,” despite the AP’s “direct interview with 17 and accounts from many more, security camera footage and Hamas’ own instruction manuals,” and despite AP’s consultation with “four experts in hostage situations,” this very long AP report of Dec. 6 on the events of Oct. 7 on Kibbutz Nir Oz never once mentioned —or even hinted — that some 20 members of Nir Oz were murdered by Hamas on Oct. 7.

A short attention span, indeed.

The world selects which wounds it counts and which wounds it doesn’t care to count — such as the premeditated mass murder of 20 civilians by Hamas terrorists.

In a world in which “context” suddenly looms large as a criterion in which to measure anti-Semitism, an Associated Press report on the taking of hostages from Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7 neglects to mention the context: mass murder.

•       •      •

Now we come closer with a front page story in The New York Times of Dec. 14, under the headline, “Civilian Dead Not Sole Issue in Law of War — Idea of Proportionality and Response by Israel.” It is written by Steven Erlanger.

The article lays out the complexities in the laws of war, beginning with the author’s proviso that these laws seem “unfeeling. They give more precedence to military advantage than to civilian harm. They do not consider comparative numbers of dead or wounded. They ask commanders in the field to judge, often very quickly, the military advantage of an attack, the nature of the threat they face, what means they possess to counter it, and what feasible measures they can take to reduce the expected damage to civilians the civilian infrastructure.”

All this is called “proportionality.” Again, it is not a measure of the number of casualties on each side.

It is, the writer tells us, a “deeply flawed” calculus. The author notes that Israel’s response to Hamas’ attack of Oct. 7 may fit the legal definition of “proportionality” while also being asymmetrical: 1,200 Israeli dead as over against many more Gazans dead. “In war,” Erlanger writes, “symmetry and proportionality are unrelated.”

This especially may be the case when an enemy embeds itself in civilian infrastructure. Many more civilians may die in an attack than if the attack were in an open field or some other place where only combatants are in play.

Erlanger does a good job presenting Israel’s case by reporting that nearly every Israeli military unit has lawyers, ready to rule whether the laws of proportionality actually apply in a planned Israeli attack — that is, is the strength of the attack proportionate to the anticipated military gain? If so, Israel’s lawyers allow the attack to proceeds, but if not, the attack must be cancelled.

Erlanger also does a good job in exposing the loose logic of Human Rights Watch, which maintains that Israel’s attacks on Gaza are illegal because the overall death toll in Gaza is much higher than Israel’s losses on Oct. 7. HRW also says that Israel’s use of powerful weapons in dense neighborhoods raises serious questions about whether Israel has committed war crimes.

Here, Erlanger provides a critical context: The appropriate definition of “proportionality” is dependent on the nature of the military campaign. Israel regards its campaign against Hamas a struggle for its very existence. This is based on three criteria: 1. the stated intentions of Hamas in its charter to destroy Israel; 2. the dimension of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack; and 3. the statements from Hamas that it would repeat Oct.7-like attacks if it can. For these reasons, Israel maintains, as Erlanger reports, that it has the right of self-defense on a scale that can militarily destroyHamas.

Human Rights Watch, however, refrains from judging the legality of the entire Israel campaign. It takes a pass on that. HRW does not opine on whether Israel has a right to defend itself, to the extent of destroying Hamas. Then, outside that context, HRW only judges individual Israeli operations, based on Hamas-provided numbers of Gazan casualties.

Erlanger reports these casualties (as of Dec. 14) as 15,000 Palestinians. This figure includes the deaths of Hamas fighters,  and it includes the deaths of women and children without specifying how many of them are Hamas fighters. 

Upon his reporting of Hamas’ reporting of the 15,000 casualty figure, Erlanger adds, “and perhaps thousands more.” This is how Erlanger counts wounds. It is at least equally possible to count the wounds as “perhaps thousands less,” given Hamas’ standards of morality (rapes, beheadings, body burnings, murder of civilians, including children, etc.). 

Either way — casualties in Gaza as more or as less than 15,000 —HRW will not judge the overall self-defense context within which Israel is bound under international law to define proportionality. Out of this context, HRW portrays Israel as in violation of the law. 

Erlanger also counts the wounds out of context — in a much more dramatic way. Erlanger reports 15,000 Gazan casualties and in that framework writes an extensive analysis of the applicability of the laws of war. It’s like counting a batter out for swinging three times without, however, establishing that the pitcher actually threw the ball.

Now, in another current war of self-defense, Ukraine has killed some 360,000 Russian soldiers (the latest available figures, which themselves are nearly a year old). Those wounds, neither Erlanger nor any other NYT reporter counts within a report analyzing the laws of war. 

How do the military practices of Russia and Ukraine measure up under the laws of war? That question, with at least 20 times the number of casualties in Gaza, the newspaper does not address. Those wounds, it does not count

It is only the 15,000 lost in Israel’s war of self-defense that Erlanger counts. The 360,000 lives that Ukraine has taken, and the context in which they are taken, are not  analyzed as to whether they meet laws of proportionality. Apparently, some wounds count more than others. 

This much we can say for Erlanger: At least he counts the Israeli dead. That is more than can be said for AP reporters Lori Hinnant and Sam McNeil. They don’t count the dead Israeli victims of Hamas aggression in Nir Oz on Oct. 7 at all.

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