Are Arabs worth less?

A report suggesting that Israel ‘understated’ the number of Palestinians killed during its last invasion of Gaza is hardly a surprise. More surprising is that if accurate, it changed the value of Palestinian life.

In February 2009 Israel’s Prime Minister said the country would respond with “disproportionate” force to renewed rocket attacks by Hamas militants.

This breaks one of the conventions - or unwritten rules if you like - of the international community. This is the principle of “proportionality”, which serves to limit the risk of escalation when disputes occur.

There is, however, a second reason why “proportionality” is important. Without it, the value of human life becomes uneven. Some humans become more equal than others to misquote Orwell. It is down to maths. Let me explain.

Israel stated that the Gaza invasion in the New Year was a response to rockets falling on its territory. In the tit-for-tat of Middle-East politics, Palestinians claim that these rockets were themselves responding to Israeli oppression. And this in turn, says Israel, was prompted by earlier Palestinian outrages. And so on.

But in this case let us go with Israel and imagine that the rocket attacks were entirely illegitimate and unprovoked.

What damage did the rockets falling on Israel from Gaza since 2001 actually do? Highly inaccurate, they are indiscriminate weapons of terror, forcing civilians to scramble for shelters near the border on a regular basis. Thousands of mortar rounds and rockets have caused more than 400 injuries. A total of 15 Israeli civilians have been killed (source: Wikipedia).

According to the Israeli army, the latest major incursion into Gaza cost 1,166 Gazans their lives. Of these 709 were Palestinian militants or police and 295 were civilians.

The report by Israeli human rights group B'Tselem puts the figure at 1,387 Palestinians killed by the Israeli military. These include 773 civilians, 330 combatants and 248 police. Of the civilians, B'Tselem estimated that 109 women and 252 children under the age of 16 were killed.

Now the math. Let us assume, as the Israeli army does, that all Palestinian police might be considered enemy combatants. The outcome of this particular “disproportionate” response was to equate 15 Israeli civilian lives with those of 295 Palestinians.

So according to the Israel’s own figures, the outcome of its policy has been to imply that an Israeli life is worth 19.7 times as much as that of a Palestinian.

If you believe B'Tselem, the news is worse still for the relative value of Arab life. Run the maths – 15 deaths equated with 733 deaths - and an Israeli life is worth 51.5 times as much as a Palestinian.

It can’t be nice knowing that your life – in practical terms – is valued at between 2% and 5% that of your fellow human across the wire. Where’s the proportion in that?

Photo: © Stefania Zamparelli

History in the future

On 9th November 2009 it will be 20 years since the Berlin wall fell and the communist experiment in Europe came to an abrupt end. It also marks the last major shift in world history before the internet took hold.

No blogs. No tweets. No millions of digital photos. Our vision of the event will be to stare back into an analogue world; a vision shaped by a professional, established media.

A good time then to reflect on what the internet means for the history of the future.

As any historian studying the deep past will tell you, the problem is the lack of sources. And as any historian will tell you about modern history, the problem is how to cope with the surfeit of sources.

The internet means the availability of information has expanded exponentially. It may be an advantage to get eyewitness accounts, but there is a danger that historians buckle under the sheer volume of source material.

Historians of the future will develop apps that crawl the web, searching out information, aggregating it and elaborately filtering it.

Behind all of this the fundamentals of history remain the same. Having spent a few years studying and then practicing the subject, I can say two things:

1. Raw history doesn’t make sense. Source information is a random mass and a random mess. Meaning does not exist within it until a historian comes along to impose structure on it. Don’t think that the themes neatly presented in school history text-books are inevitable conclusions lurking within sources, which just needed to be liberated. In an internet age it will even trickier to make sense of the mess.

2. History is not about the past. Odd, I know, but it’s true. History is the way we work out how we arrived at the present. In future, history will still be about the present.