Comment by pron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pron | Hacker News Reader

The mutual bloodshed is terrible, and, as a resident of Tel Aviv I'm personally affected, but there is one thing that has always perplexed me a bit, which is the perception of the actual ferocity of the conflict. Obviously, every death is a terrible loss, but this forum is fond of numbers, so while we're on the subject, here are some numbers:

The total number of deaths in the entire Israeli-Arab conflict over the past 70 years or so, is - according to Wikipedia - under 100,000. Out of which, about 25,000 are Israeli, a similar number are Palestinians, and the rest, I guess are casualties of all the other fighting arab countries combined, although the total seems to me a bit high. That's the total for the past 70 years.

By comparison, in the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, Wikipedia puts the number of deaths at about 30,000 in each country in the last year alone. And the Mexican drug war has claimed the lives of about 56,000 since 2006; some estimates go as high as 100,000.

So, not to compare suffering, but the entire Israeli-Arab conflict has claimed, over the last 70 years, more or less the same number of lives as the drug war in Mexico in the past 6.

I'm not even sure what I wanted to say by that.

I'm not sure what you wanted to say either but two things are notable about your comment: 1. you broaden the context to include the entire history of the Israeli-Arab conflict, 2. you make no distinction between military and civilian casualties.

Between 1860 and 2010 there were a reported (by Israel) 3,971 Israeli civilian casualties of terrorist attacks.[1]

Between 2000 and 2012 there were a reported (by Israel) 3,034-3,726 Palestinian non-combatant civilian casualties of IDF operations.[2]

Obviously, tank battles in Sinai are not going to produce the same casualty rates as wars of attrition fought at street level in densely populated cities. Air strikes on Gaza (10,000 people / km2) are precisely on the same order of devastation though. The broader you make the context, the more you mask that fact.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_casualties_of_war

[2] http://old.btselem.org/statistics/english/Casualties.asp

Well, I don't know how many non-combatants die in the cartel wars, but I guess I'm saying that the Israeli-Arab conflict is lesser in magnitude compared to past and present violent conflicts around the world, perhaps contrary to perception. So it's not Vietnam-big (where millions lost their lives); it's Mexican drug war-big.

Of course, while not a big conflict in terms of actual warfare, it carries a lot of political influence worldwide.

Maybe I need to be a little more blunt.

Because of the gross disparity in casualties between the two sides, attempting to minimise perceptions of the conflict as a whole (with a frame of reference chosen for statistical convenience) amounts proportionally to discounting the importance of the (overwhelmingly Palestinian) deaths.

This attitude of "it's bad but we can live with it" is directly reflected in the policies of the current Israeli government with respect to peace.

This is true but a useless statistic. Israelis do kill many more Palestinians than vice versa, but Hamas could end the violence at any time, and Israel can't. If Hamas would simply hold all fire, and publicly announce it, Israel would be forced to stop, both by internal and external pressure. If you mistakenly believe otherwise, you really don't know much about Israelis. [Edit: This is only true of the violence, not about the political dispute. But you don't really need to kill people to have a political dispute.]

Hamas can only end 'the violence' [against Israel] by (a) violently suppressing competing militias[1] in Gaza (one wonders how many different ways that could play out), or (b) pointing to progress in peace talks to convince Gazans to hold the truce. Only Israel can end the occupation though.

So, far from being a 'useless statistic', the relative hardships and pressures faced by each side have a direct bearing on the longevity of the conflict.

BTW, it's not necessary to speculate about how little I know. Let's stick to the facts.

[1] http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Backchannels/2012/1114/Is-Ham... [as-responsible-for-Gaza-rocket-fire-Not-exactly]

I don't think much of your comment makes sense, unless you think that it's worth the violence to end the Israeli occupation. I think it's clear that the violence is hurting that goal anyway plus killing Palestinians, so the only reasonable thing to do is to try to end the violence first, then worry about everything else. If the price is (a), well, policemen get shot everywhere. That's one (heavy) price Hamas has to pay to be a government.

It is Israel that breaks the ceasefires and starts the violence. Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-kanwisher/reigniting-vio...

Maybe, maybe not: http://www.pnas.org/content/108/15/E53.full

>by (a) violently suppressing competing militias[1] in Gaza

In other words, behaving like a government, which they supposedly are?

Oh, no, that's not was I was trying to say at all. We most certainly cannot live with it. I also wasn't trying to discount the importance of the Palestinian deaths. I was just trying to give a sense of how violent this conflict really is.

I do think, though, that you really must take into account, when measuring the intensity of the conflict, its entire history. After all, the violence didn't start when the occupation began, and, sadly, it's not likely to end when the Palestinians finally get an independent state (as I hope they would). But let's not turn this into an endless political argument. This isn't the Daily Beast.

OK, I take your point. And really, I didn't intend to have a political argument, just to identify the political dimensions of statistics.

(Of course, the Israeli-Arab conflict doesn't encapsulate the 'entire history' of the Jewish/Palestinian-Arab conflict either, some of whose bloodiest events happened before 1948. But that doesn't alter its magnitude.)

There is actually some merit to the notion that this is one of the <least> violent times in Human History. But I wouldn't trust that intuition very far. The world is becoming a much more dangerous place as we speak. But for comparison, The US has been at war for 12 years, with under 5K combat deaths including the invasion of IRAQ and what-ever-u-want-to-call mess in Afghanistan. Thats comparable in order of magnitude the civillian deaths of the single day 9/11 in the US.[2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualti...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks

The Iraq war alone has resulted in at least 100 thousand total deaths (including civilians) according to the most conservative estimates. How is the 5k figure relevant? That's like AlQaeda claiming 9/11 wasn't very violent, since they lost only a dozen combatants.

Historically, however, these conflicts pale in comparison to the 'normal' wars of the 20th century. Read some history if you doubt this. [1]

_________

Iran-Iraq War [2]

Casualties and losses

320,000–720,000 soldiers and militia killed (Iran)

150,000–375,000 soldiers and militia killed (Iraq)

Economic loss of more than $500 billion (per side)

100,000+ civilians killed on both sides

______________

World War II was the deadliest military conflict in history. Over 60 million people were killed, which was over 2.5% of the world population. [3]

_________________

[1] This is also clearly visible in the citation of the GP comment, but i provide more examples.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

Like pron, you for some reason insist on taking the casualties of one side as representative of the scale of the conflict overall. He says, 25,000 Israelis killed puts the Israeli-Arab conflict on the same scale as the Mexican Drug War (30,000) when in fact the overall death toll puts it more on the scale of the Wars in Yugoslavia (115,000).

You say that the 'cost' of the Iraq war is a mere 5,000 deaths, coldly ignoring the deaths of many tens of thousands of people just because they're on 'the other side'.

I hesitate to ask exactly which historians you recommend that would justify this selectivity.

I hesitate to ask exactly which historians you recommend that would justify this selectivity.

The post-9/11 wars are not in (or near) the top 10 conflicts for the US. And, en-toto casualties are an order of magnitude lower than Iran-Iraq war, etc if you want to look at it that way.

Either way, you lose.

I've certainly lost the thread of your argument since you've replaced the comment I replied to, about 'the cost of doing business', with statistics from the Iran-Iraq war.

I'm not really interested in whether certain wars are bigger than other wars. I am interested in how the trivialisation of ongoing conflicts tends to dovetail neatly with pro-war agendas ('cost of doing business').

[Unexplained downvotes, how novel.]

The comment thread you are interjecting to is not of your interest, then. This sub-thread is explicitly about the quantification of violence, and comparing data accross conflicts. It seems clear you have not read either the earlier comments or much history very carefully.

Your repeated attempts to politicise (a/k/a dumb down) the conversation are also trivial and out of place.

Excuse me but it's not for you to dictate who is interjecting and who is merely participating.

What I have pointed out, and what your own comments clearly demonstrate(d), is that this exercise in 'comparing data across conflicts' as you so euphemistically put it, has a distinctly political edge which could be missed by the unwary reader.

Interjecting is what you call it when you disregard the topic being discussed, qualifications made to observations, you don't read the data in the footnotes...etc.

Steven Pinker: The surprising decline in violence

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1455883115

Filmed Mar 2007 • Posted Sep 2007 • TED2007

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...

to which the counter=argument is somthing like this:

The biggest problem with [Pinker], though, is [his] overreliance on history, which, like the light on a caboose, shows us only where we are not going. We live in a time when all the rules are being rewritten blindingly fast—when, for example, an increasingly smaller number of people can do increasingly greater damage. (Scientific American)[1]

I don't fully dis-agree with this latter qualication. If you go back and read my initial comments, you will see this.

[1] from: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bookreview-...; See also: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-decline...

I don't accept that this minor qualification is the main critique of Pinker's thesis, which in the end has very little to do with the fact that violence has declined. (And, BTW, this qualification also serves a political agenda which regards terrorism as a discreet phenomenon that can only be dealt with by military means.)

But failing to acknowledge the circumstances surrounding outbreaks of violence as being intrinsic to the nature of that violence is, generally, a matter of choice.

[Again, the fact that you don't like what I'm saying doesn't give you the right to set the terms of the discussion, and condescending comments about my ability to read don't really help either.]

[Edit: Your reply below, which doesn't yet have a reply button, is not coherent so I can't respond to it anyway. (A? B? Bozos? What?) I don't think there's much more that can be usefully said at this point. Speaking of non-falsifiability though, ain't evolutionary psychology a hoot?]

If A->B there are a million (infinite) things C that may or <may not> follow from B. In terms of style you have a lot of "I don't accept..." and "XYZ...serves a political agenda" which are not counter-arguments, but rather non-falsifiable statements about your own beliefs. In particular, your beliefs about C=Politics. Its generally not helpful or interesting to jump the gun to C=politics, without working your way through the discussion of A,B first.[1]

____________________

[1] http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/waldo/2012/07/27/the-bozo-event...

I upvoted you for admitting upthread you mis-understood the premise of the conversation. Its probably best to leave it at that.

That's a shameful distortion of what I admitted.

Pron explained why the association with your comment was unfair and I admitted that it was. Your comment, however, remains.

Oh, you've misread me. I wasn't comparing the number of Israeli deaths to the drug war, but the total number: 100,000 in 70 years, vs. 100,000 (highest estimate) in mere 6.

My apologies, then. It was my mistake.

2 million murdered in Darfur and South Sudan - nobody cares.

1 Hamas terrorist killed - CNN breaking news.

Make your own conclusions.

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