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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

The main difference with Syria is that those who are doing the killing are not funded by the US. Israel on the other hand is funded by the US government, especially its military. On the other hand, it is estimated that 90% of the deaths are by the Syrian government, which is not funded at all by the US Government:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Syrian_civil...

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> Israel on the other hand is funded by the US government, especially its military.

US funding of Israel is at most a few percent of their GDP. Some years it drops to below 1 percent. If the US stopped funding Israel nothing would happen in Israel. Israel is more than capable of looking after themselves. And they have nukes.

The only political repercussions of cutting funding for Israel would be in the US itself. It buys votes. They’re not actually doing it for Israels benefit.

Israel is an incubator for weapons systems, and generic contributions buy access. The US manufactures the ammunition for Iron Dome, and the DoD is generally keen on adding something like Iron Beam to the abilities of every branch of the service.

This is just a side effect of the Israel lobby pushing for strong alignment between the US and Israel. The lobby pushes for alignment and dollars and military cooperation follows. You can mixing up cause and effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_lobby_in_the_United_Sta...

For example AIPAC is pledging $100m to target in primaries progressive democrats who have not supported Israel recently. That is a hell of a lot of money: https://www.bostonherald.com/2023/11/17/powerful-pro-israel-...

the bombs being dropped on Gaza are american bombs. It is not 1% of bombs being american, so I don't know what GDP relativism has to do with it.

Are you replying to someone else? I didn’t mention gdp or even imply it.

Why would you compare (mostly) military aid to the GDP? Aid from the US has comprised around 15% of Israel's defense budget in recent years and the current bill under deliberation would almost quintuple that sum.

It is the largest recipient of American foreign aid since WW2

And it buys itself invaluable feedback by way of Israeli military being the beta users of many weapon systems. And of course intelligence sharing

It's not just the money, it's the fact that Israel has backing from the US at the UNSC, and from a military point of view.

Remove that and Israelis will be making peace with Palestinians very quickly.

> Israel on the other hand is funded by the US government, especially its military

Generally speaking, Israel is part of the West and we expect them to have a higher standard than some dictatorship.

That being said, how many deaths can be attributed to the US in Iraq or Afghanistan? I assume order of magnitude higher than what we're witnessing in Gaza. It seems Israel doesn't get the same free pass for some reason.

Can you provide a citation on your claim of "an order of magnitude" or retract it please?

At present it's not clear Israel is being held to any standard. What is the lower standard you would like them to be held to?

It would also be worth explaining why you think any country is due "a free pass" when it comes to killing. And what that "free pass" entitles you to.

> Population-based studies produce estimates of the number of Iraq War casualties ranging from 151,000 violent deaths as of June 2006 to 1,033,000 excess deaths

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

I'm surprised you're asking for numbers that are so easily accessible. Perhaps you're only thinking of people directly killed by US soldiers while the parent comment was considering all violent deaths caused by the war the US started?

I protested the Iraq War when it happened too. It was started on false premises and cost a ton. The outcome was good, the us did withdraw and these is a democracy now, but the costs were high.

The Israelis have killed more children in two months in Gaza than the US killed in 20 years of war in Afghanistan.

That's also not true. It seems every single thing you write isn't true.

Afghanistan child deaths: 26,000 vs 5,500 in Gaza (according to Hamas).

There's a reason it's Afghanistan people cite here, and not Iraq. Even counts of dead children aren't neutral. There's no way around taking time to learn about things; you can't sum things up with a grisly picture or a grim scorecard. Or you can, I don't know, maybe it works great. It's what we've been trying to do up 'til now. How's it going?

The Israelis have also killed more kids in Gaza than the U.S. did in Iraq from 2008 to 2022 (according to UNICEF).

https://www.unicef.org/iraq/press-releases/more-9000-childre...

I'm really not interested in lining up and correcting the scorecards, so much as I am in the broader point that what people suppose to be simple, clarifying jolts of information --- body counts, horrible photos, whatever --- don't so much clarify as nudge people towards a preferred narrative.

That doesn't make them wrong. There is truth and there is falsity and for every important, complicated truth, there are people who "prefer" the narrative that conveys it. But it's not the body count that establishes the truth, it's the underlying work that went into revealing it.

The truth of the situation you're intent on nudging us about is intensely complicated.

I am sorry but stating the truth is beyond criticism. If someone is wrong you can state a different fact that illuminates their facts, or wait until they lie, which they must do if they are sticking with the wrong ideas.

You can't criticize someone for saying something that's true, and people only do so when they are losing the argument. If you're so beaten back that you're resorting to that, I will help you: Hamas killed more Israeli children than Saddam killed American children.

In addition to the problem that the parent commenter seems to be comprehensively wrong, just as a matter of fact, they're also obviously not just stating simple facts to contribute to the body of knowledge we draw from to make our own conclusions; there is a clear subtext to the "facts" they're providing (again, scare-quoting because that's not what they are --- though, give it another month, and check again).

But, more generally, you're just not responding to anything I actually wrote.

I mean, to me it seems that they are in fact just stating “facts”. What, in your eyes, is the “correct” way to state those purported facts that would “contribute to the body of knowledge we draw on the make our own conclusions“?

"Your facts are biased," is only a legitimate rejoinder if you offer the rest of the facts. Otherwise it is a tool that could be used against anything the speaker doesn't want to acknowledge.

"Reality is too complex to understand, therefore the understanding you are offering must be wrong," is also a way to argue against anything, unless it's accompanied by some part of that reality that the other person cannot explain with their theory.

I don't know who you're quoting here, but it isn't me.

"The truth of the situation you're intent on nudging us about is intensely complicated."

The act of stating facts is criticized as being "intent on nudging us," and rather than challenging those factual claims or contextualizing them, the line suggests epistemic disengagement in the face of a reality that is "intensely complicated."

In summarizing the thread to this point you might want to start by acknowledging that the things you're referring to as facts weren't, and that my critique was that the assumed facts weren't contextualized. I don't think "epistemic disengagement" is a rap you're going to be able to pin on me, sorry.

Except he was NOT stating the truth, not even remotely close to the truth, and I replied to his post.

I think your post is a good next post for the conversation, I am only complaining about vague methods of shifting the discussion away from facts and towards suspicions.

An Israeli father (and media in general) thought his own daughter died and turned out to be wrong when she was released (she was kept as a hostage which I don't think is right but she was not killed). https://twitter.com/moghilemear13/status/1728629391373029792

The same media that's wrong about this is giving other information based on similar assumptions (granted that they were corrected).

I would be overjoyed if a significant number of the assumed casualties turn out to be mistaken but I am not hopeful.

That's not even true. 5,500 children (according to Hamas) is less than 9,000 in Iraq (according to UNICEF).

And around 33% of that total is from failed rockets in Gaza (based on figures collected in previous wars).

Sadly the troops are only in the early stages of controlling the area and that number is going to rise a lot if the war is brought to a military completion the way politicians sound like they intend to.

If you check the figures most of the deaths were early in the war before people actually believed the IDF that they should move South. Once they did that civilian deaths dropped dramatically.

So I don't think it's in the early stages, although this ceasefire is going to restart some elements, which is unfortunate.

Hamas needs to surrender - everything they do makes life worse for Palestinians.

I don't think Hamas is structured in a way that is able surrender, especially now that its "political" wing has totally lost whatever diplomatic or local credibility it had. It only took one month for the coalition to destroy Saddam's regime but it took eight years in all to overcome the random violence and isolated terrorist resistance. Some really bad things happened during the latter part and that's what did the most damage to America.

Sir, you are posting fake news.

You may be right. I can't find exact statistics, but I saw a few sites giving numbers of 20,000 - 30,000 (for Afghanistan). The rate of children being killed in Gaza however is far more.

Both of your numbers, Iraq and Afghanistan are simply not true.

Also, as a percentage of civilian population Gaza deaths are very close to Iraq deaths, except way less dead children in Gaza vs Iraq.

All of these numbers come from Hamas, is that a source you trust?

They've been roughly reliable in the past. Past performance isn't guarantee of future results, of course. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/26/can-we-trust-c...

Good discussion at https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/82572/why-are-s... about the issue.

A quick Googling doesn't find me a counter-estimate from Israel. Given the very clear evidence of large scale bombardment of the Gaza Strip (Israel claims 6,000 bombs dropped, and Hamas is known for favoring populated areas; https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-hamas-war-gaza-strip...), counts in the thousands seem very plausible.

They've already botched major events, like the death toll from PIJ's accidental strike on Al-Ahli Hospital. There's also an ongoing concern about "Gaza Health's" practice of including Hamas fighters in civilian death tolls. They're the best numbers we have or are going to get, so they can't be ignore, but their reliability is probably not a good hill to die on.

Israel's had its own counting issues. It's a challenging enough task with a functioning government and control over the area, let alone an area with more than an a million evacuees going in various directions. https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-hamas-war-gaza-strip...

I don't doubt they include Hamas fighters, but I do doubt that Israel's targeting has been so effective and precise the deaths are mostly Hamas. US intelligence estimates 20-25k Hamas members (https://www.dni.gov/nctc/ftos/hamas_fto.html); I don't think half of them are likely to have been already taken out.

I don't think you'll see me saying anything about the accuracy of Israel's numbers in this thread.

> Israel on the other hand is funded by the US government, especially its military.

Israel spent $23.4b on it's military vs $3.3b from the US. And the Israeli economy is $522B making the US "funding of Israel" 0.6% of their economy.

That's hardly "funded by the US government". And on top of that the US is "funding" Israel in return for technology, so it's more a purchase by the US than anything else.

https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-israel-2/

>The U.S.-Israel economic and commercial relationship is strong, anchored by an annual bilateral trade of nearly $50 billion in goods and services. Several treaties and agreements, including the 1985 U.S.-Israel Free Trade Agreement (FTA), solidify bilateral economic relations. Since the FTA’s signing in 1985, the United States has become Israel’s largest trading partner.

I think it's fair to say that the US has strong connections to Israel. I don't know if it's fair to imply it's totally dependent on the US as they implied, but I think it's more complex than the aid being a small percentage of the GDP.

3.3 billion dollars is a substantial sum of money. If it's as insubstantial as you claim, can I then safely surmise that discontinuing that funding would be a political nothingburger? Would American zionist politicians shrug and say it doesn't matter if we don't give Israel that 3.3 billion, or would they cry and scream about it? Probably the latter. And Israeli politicians, would they shrug and say it doesn't matter, or would they echo their American counterparts? I think the latter.

They US gets a lot in return for their funding, it's not a one way deal at all.

So you need to take into account what the US would lose. It's far more complex than your shallow "cry and scream".

You mean like getting "the only democracy in the region" to be our ally in supporting America's wars in the region? This is the most often touted "benefit" but to say this actually has value to the average American is farcical. Most of America's support for Israel is rooted in religion and ideology, not any tangible benefits to America.

> not funded by the US

Hey just curious here, mind explaining why/how the US is currently occupying 1/3 of Syria and taking 90% of it’s pre-war oil production?

See, this is exactly what I mean.

Syrian government and Russia.

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