Gaza: This Shameful Media Coverage, Part I

Well, what do you expect from the Guardian, I guess.  But Seumas Milne's article is so poor and tendentious, beginning with factual "errors" that are most likely deliberate lies and concluding with outright support for Palestinian terrorism, that it cries out for a response.  In fact, there's so much wrong with it that this will need to be broken down into a series of posts.

For the third time in five years, the world’s fourth largest military power has launched a full-scale armed onslaught on one of its most deprived and overcrowded territories.

Oh, where to begin?

Let's start with the fact that as far as Milne is concerned, the Israel-Gaza fighting seems to have sprung, ex-nihilo, from the random whim of the Israelis.  No mention whatsoever of rockets launched from Gaza at Israeli civilians, landing on such military targets as kindergartens (repeatedly - here are examples from 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014).  No mention of the escalation of such rocket fire in the period leading up to Israel's response.  No mention of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's offer, in that period, to "meet quiet with quiet." No, for Milne, Israel simply "launched" an attack without reason.

Next we can move on to the factual assertions in his opening.

the world’s fourth largest military power

Is Israel "the world's fourth largest military power"?  The folks at GlobalFirePower, who rank the strength of the world's military powers by a variety of metrics, give an emphatic "no."

Not in terms of active duty manpower - it's 34th, with 176,500 active duty soldiers.  Fourth would be Russia, with slightly more - 766,000.

Not in terms of active reserve manpower - it's 19th, with 445,000 (less than Russia's active duty number!).  Fourth would be Russia again, with 2,485,000.

Not in terms of tank strength - it's 8th, with 3,870 battle tanks, light tanks, and tank destroyers. Fourth would be North Korea, with 6,600.

Not in terms of total aircraft - it's 17th, with 680.  Fourth would be India, with 1,785.

In total, Global Fire Power ranks the Israeli military as the 11th strongest in the world - after the US, Russia, China, India, UK, France, Germany, Turkey, South Korea and Japan.  That's plenty strong - and impressive for a country as small as Israel - but it's not the Superpower Milne would have his readers believe.  Check out each of the metrics Global Fire Power evaluates and see where Israel stands in each; the highest is in Armored Fighting Vehicles, at 5th in the world.

Those are the facts - so where does Milne get his "fourth largest military power" line from?  As no amount of Google research has identified a source, it appears that he just picked it at random - or lifted the assertion from someone else who did.

has launched a full-scale armed onslaught

Has Israel actually launched a "full-scale armed onslaught"?  This claim is laughable.  A "full-scale" assault would involve ground troops and a serious attempt to get at Hamas leaders in their bunkers, such as the one under Shifa hospital in Gaza City.  A "full-scale" assault also would not include attempts to avoid civilian casualties, such as roof knocking and warning calls.

on one of its most deprived and overcrowded territories.

Milne ends his opening sentence with another whopper.  Gaza is not an "Israeli territory" at all.  Israel pulled every last soldier and settler out of Gaza - unilaterally! - in 2005.  The blockade of Gaza was not imposed until 2007, after Hamas took over the Gaza Strip, and its legality confirmed by a United Nations investigative committee. The Palestinians have had full control over Gaza's administration since the 2005 withdrawal.

As a reminder, it's worth pointing out that Milne managed to load this much factual error (and calling it "error" is kind) into the very first sentence of his article.  It, quite predictably, sets the tone for the rest.

Since Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip began, just over a week ago, more than 200 Palestinians have been killed. Nearly 80% of the dead are civilians, over 20% of them children. 

Around 1,400 have been wounded and 1,255 Palestinian homes destroyed. So far, Palestinian fire has killed one Israeli on the other side of the barrier that makes blockaded Gaza the world’s largest open-air prison.

Milne then proceeds to the professional victimologist's favorite argument: "look how many Palestinians were harmed!  So many more than Israelis!"

But he is right about one thing - the world absolutely needs to look at the number of Palestinian casualties.

But they need to do it in proper context.

more than 200 Palestinians have been killed ... Around 1,400 have been wounded

Milne reports this number as though it were an indictment of Israel.  It isn't.  To the contrary, it's the ultimate proof of Israel's virtue.

As many critics of Israel note, Gaza is "densely populated."  As outlets such as Vox and the Washington Post point out, this makes it incredibly hard to avoid casualties in airstrikes on Gaza. And the IDF reports that it has attacked "over 1872 terror targets." (Number as of 7/17/2014 at 1:00 p.m.)

So the real question is this: given more than 1850 attacks in a "densely populated" urban area, how many casualties would you expect?  More than the reported 200 dead and 1,400 wounded? Or fewer?

The answer is obvious: More.  200 dead is roughly 1 Palestinian death per 9 Israeli bombs.  Combined, the number of Palestinian dead and wounded is less than 1 per Israeli attack.  This, in a densely populated area in which airstrikes, to use the Washington Post's words, make civilian casualties inevitable.

What are we to make of this?

There are only three possible explanations:

1) Something the Palestinians are doing is holding down the number of casualties;
2) Something the Israelis are doing is holding down the number of casualties; or
3) It's dumb luck

The first option is self-evidently false.  As this ArabNews.com article points out, though Gaza's Hamas rulers have spent significant resources on tunnels and bunkers to shelter Hamas leaders, Gaza's citizens have no bomb shelters to seek safety in.  Hamas openly encourages Gazans to serve as human shields, and in a rare moment of candor, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri confirmed Hamas is leading Gazans to death - before catching himself and changing it to "confrontation."  Hamas and other Palestinian terror organizations store weapons in civilian buildings, such as UN schools and homes (watch the video and pay attention to the secondary explosion at 1:57, six seconds after the Israeli bomb hits the targeted house, which confirms the presence of a weapons cache), rendering them military targets.  Hamas and other Palestinian terror organizations fire from civilian areas, drawing return fire from the Israelis.  All of this increases the likelihood of Palestinian casualties; no Palestinian activity decreases that likelihood.

Option 3 is also out.  Getting lucky and having fewer casualties than expected in a single bomb strike is certainly possible.  Even ten, or twenty.  But luck swings both ways - you can as easily get "unlucky" and have a single strike kill more than you'd expect - and with a sample size of over 1,800 Israeli attacks, the idea that luck could account for the fact that far fewer Gazans are being harmed than expected is absurd.

Milne doesn't want to hear this - and neither do the folks screaming "genocide" and "war crimes" on twitter, or Racip Tayyep Erdogan - but that leaves option 2: Something the Israelis are doing is holding down the casualties.

Which, of course, is what Israel has been saying all along: they do their best to minimize civilian casualties, including taking steps no other army would, such as warning Gazans when the weapons caches or command and control centers near them are targeted.  Reflexive Israel haters may look at the casualty numbers in Gaza and see an indictment of Israel - but anyone looking at the numbers analytically sees confirmation of Israel's extraordinary efforts to avoid civilian death.

But wait - what about the proportion of civilians being killed?

Nearly 80% of the dead are civilians, over 20% of them children.

Let's start with the obvious: Any dead civilian is a tragedy.  Palestinian or Israeli, white or black or purple and polka-dotted, it doesn't matter.  As the Fraenkel family put it when speaking about the horrific murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, from the depths of their own grief over the murder of their 16 year old, Naftali, "blood is blood", and there is no distinction to be made between the value of Israeli innocents and the value of Palestinian innocents.  For example, as a parent and a human being it is impossible to read about (let alone see pictures of) the deaths of the Bakr boys, killed on a Gaza beach, without crying.

War is war, however, and in war, civilians die.  In the Bakr boys case, for example, it appears that the target was "a shipping container used in the past by Hamas security forces."  It is horrible, awful, painful.  But it is also - until someone much smarter than me invents a "kill only combatants" weapon - inevitable.  Which is but one reason that war should always be an absolute last resort, engaged in out of pure necessity.

And even the most necessary wars involve civilian casualties.  In World War II, for example, over 1,000,000 German civilians were killed, and few would argue the necessity of that fight (again, the ones who would can be found on twitter).  So the simple fact that there are civilian casualties doesn't tell you much of anything about whether Israel's actions are just or unjust.

More, it is once again important to examine the statistics.  In World War II, somewhere between 60 and 67% of the casualties were civilians.  In the Korean war, roughly 67% of the casualties were civilians.  In Russia's wars in Chechnya, civilians comprised up to 90% of the casualties.  In the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, 4 civilians died for every Serbian soldier killed - an 80% civilian casualty rate.  In asymmetric warfare generally, the UN has estimated a 75% civilian casualty rate.

So assuming that "nearly 80%" number is accurate, Israel's strikes are not causing an unusually high rate of civilian casualties.

And, it turns out, that 80% number isn't accurate at all.  It comes from a UN report, which in turn relies entirely on statistics provided by the Gazan (i.e. Hamas) health ministry.  Funnily enough, Hamas has no compunction lying about things like casualties.  [Update: Hamas has actively instructed Palestinians and their supporters on social media to call all casualties "civilians" even if they are fighters.]  Palestinian claims about the civilian status of particular individuals can be checked, and when they are checked, they are often false.  For example, as blogger Elder of Ziyon points out in the linked article, Palestinian sources identified Youssef and Anas Qandil as civilians, killed for no reason while sheltering under a tree.  But Elder of Ziyon notes that Islamic Jihad identifies Youssef Qandil as a top commander, and Anas as a mujahid.  According to the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, background research on the first 193 Palestinians killed by the IDF identifies 80 as civilians, 72 as combatants, and 41 as unknown.  That's close to a 50% civilian casualty ratio.  Even if all the unknowns are civilians (which is unlikely), that's a 63% civilian casualty ratio.

Again - even a single dead civilian would be one too many, and a tragedy.  But a 50% or 63% civilian casualty ratio is incredibly low, especially for this type of asymmetric warfare, and given both the population density and Hamas' efforts to put its citizens in harm's way, that is extraordinary.

So far, Palestinian fire has killed one Israeli 

And here we come to the most shameful of Milne's arguments.  Yes, the Palestinians have killed only one Israeli.  But that's certainly not for lack of trying; they've launched well over 1,000 rockets at Israeli population centers, with no intention of hitting anything other than civilians.  Each rocket launch sends Israeli civilians running for cover.  Israeli children learn the "Tzeva Adom [code red] song" to help them both learn how to stay safe when a rocket is launched and to deal with the trauma that comes with life under fire.

Thanks to Israel's ingenious Iron Dome missile defense system and extensive efforts to protect its civilians, only one Israeli has died in this round of rocket fire.  But the suggestion that the rockets are a mere nuisance that Israelis ought to just live with - or that Israel's defensive actions would be more acceptable if only the Palestinians could just kill a few more Israelis - is nauseating.

And yes, that is what Milne is suggesting.  Given that we're only 2 paragraphs into the article and the response is this long already, I'm going to cut this post here and continue with Part II later - and we may not get to the end of the article until Part III.  But go read the article yourself - all the way to the end - and the reason I say that will become immediately clear.