You are reading a State of Dystopia post. These entries deal with current events that put us on the cyberpunk dystopia timeline. Read them now to see the future we’re going towards. Or read them in the future to figure out where things went wrong.
We had been leading up to this moment for a while.
Facebook posts in Myanmar calling for violence against Rohingya Muslims. ISIS using social media to showcase executions. Mexican drug cartels mimicking that and tweeting videos of kidnapped men being forced to kill each other. The Combat Footage subreddit being inundated with content from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“I don’t know if you noticed, the war in the Middle East is just…on the internet,” comedian Shane Gillis jokingly observes in a recent Netflix special. “The whole fucking thing.”
Given all of the above, it was likely inevitable that the world would get to see its most explicit, and online, look at a genocide. The whole thing: bloodthirsty rhetoric by national leaders, soldiers gleefully trashing ruined homes, hospitals being attacked. War crime footage has been around forever? Sure, but countless hours of it being dumped online for weeks straight seems new to me.
All of us are tragically inured to seeing snuff. And after this, we will be even more so. But the assault on Gaza is a new development that leaves behind deeply troubling implications — not least for Gazans.
Yes, it’s a genocide
As a leftist, I often cringe at the terms used by my political peers, who have a tendency to describe everything as a ‘genocide.’ Crying wolf about extreme words is worthy of criticism, but in this case the term is absolutely warranted.
The numbers are undeniable. I’m not going to bombard you with gruesome images, just give an overview of the facts — because they speak for themselves.
First, body counts do not need to hit the million-person threshold to count as a genocide. For example, Germany’s violence towards the Herero and Nama people in Southwest Africa resulted in about 75,000 deaths, and it has been described as the 20th century’s first genocide.
Nor must the majority of a group be killed for an atrocity to meet the ‘genocide’ classification. Even the most archetypal genocidal regime had more in mind than death camps; the Nazi plan for Eastern Europe charmingly envisioned both mass death and mass expulsion.
To give another, more recent example, the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar was widely understood to be a genocide. 6,000 people were killed in the first month of the military crackdown in 2017, and a million people — most of Myanmar’s Rohingya — fled the country.
Compare that to Gaza: the first month of the conflict alone killed at minimum 10,000 people, most of them civilians, and displaced about 1.5 million internally.
But the pace of the violence cannot be understated, even using only the accepted minimum estimates.
Per Axios, in late November:
In less than two months’ time, the Gaza death toll has already outstripped the more than 12,000 civilians killed in Iraq in 2003, according to figures from the Iraq Body Count.
Israel has drawn comparisons between its campaign in Gaza to the effort to root out ISIS from Mosul from 2016 to 2017. […] Yet the civilian death toll during the nine-month battle for Mosul numbered between 9,000 and 11,000, AP reported.
From Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:
The pace of killing of civilians has been much greater than in most other recent conflicts; the only one that I know of that compares is perhaps the Rwanda genocide in 1994.
Also from the New York Times, back in November:
Israel’s liberal use of very large weapons in dense urban areas, including U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs that can flatten an apartment tower, is surprising, some experts say.
“It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career,” said Marc Garlasco, a military adviser for the Dutch organization PAX and a former senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon. To find a historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area, he said, we may “have to go back to Vietnam, or the Second World War.”
And the number of women and children reported killed in Gaza since the Israeli campaign began last month has already started to approach the roughly 12,400 civilians documented to have been killed by the United States and its allies in Afghanistan during nearly 20 years of war, according to [Neta C. Crawford, co-director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project].
As of mid-December, about 70% of Gaza’s homes were destroyed, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Journal also reports that 80% of buildings in Northern Gaza are destroyed, a more severe percentage than Dresden saw in WW2, and that two-thirds of the strip’s schools are damaged.
As military historian Robert Pape told the AP:
“Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history,” said Pape. “It now sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.”
The official number of dead kids in Gaza, after just 2 months of conflict, was roughly 8,700. (It’s around 10,000 now.) Compare that to the total number of children killed in all conflicts around the world in the entire year of 2022: 2,985. Or the global total for 2021: 2,515.
Researchers from Save the Children estimate that over 30,000 Gazan children have been killed or maimed in the 12 weeks since Israel’s onslaught began. This is what charity official James Denslow told The Independent:
“This is the highest number of children killed and maimed in one conflict since 2006 when United Nations records began,” Mr Denslow told The Independent.
The UN has verified that 131,311 children have been killed or maimed across conflict situations since 2006. These numbers – which go up to 2022 – are woefully low estimates, particularly in countries such as Syria, where rights groups say accessing the death toll is near impossible.
“But even if we go by the caveated numbers in Gaza, in just over two months they are already a quarter of a way through that total number of children killed and maimed in 17 years,” said Mr Denslow.
As we approach the third month of hostilities, the total number of dead has passed 22,000. These figures, which are provided by the Gazan Health Ministry but accepted by basically everyone, are widely believed to be undercounts, because they do not count people lost under the rubble or those whose bodies did not reach hospitals. As of early 2024, another 7,000 Gazans are missing, likely buried under rubble.
And given that health infrastructure has been extensively degraded, the ability of Gaza’s bureaucracy to actually count its dead has likely been degraded as well.
In October, back when the official death toll was about 10,000, Israeli outlet Ynet News cited a military official that put the death toll at 20,000. Given that the entire population of Gaza is about 2.2 million, that would amount to about 1% of the population killed in a month.
Maybe that’s an overestimate from an unreliable source. But our conservative estimate is about 1% of the population killed in two months. If you thought the 3,000 deaths of 9/11 were tragic, imagine two months of nonstop hijackings killing 80,000 New Yorkers. The conservative estimate is already unprecedented in a modern conflict — and we know for a fact that it’s an undercount.
Israel claims it has killed about 7,000 militants, out of an estimated 30,000-40,000 Hamas members. Taking those numbers at face value, it would mean roughly two-thirds of Gaza’s dead are civilians. The ratio is likely far higher, given that the militant death toll is a high estimate and the overall death toll is an undercount.
Even with the very conservative estimate that about 61% of Gaza’s deaths are civilians, that would make this war an outlier, according to research published by Haaretz:
The ratio [of 61%] is significantly higher than the average civilian toll in all the conflicts around the world from the second world war to the 1990s, in which civilians accounted for about half the dead, according to [sociologist Yagil Levy].
What would a higher, and probably more realistic ratio look like? The Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor expects that civilians account for 90% of the deaths.
How much worse can things get? From the University of Edinburgh’s chair of global public health:
The WHO spokesperson Dr Margaret Harris has said that diarrhoea rates among children in refugee-like camps (sheltered housing) in Gaza were, in early November, already more than 100 times normal levels, and with no treatments available, children can become dehydrated and die quickly. Diarrhoeal diseases are the second leading cause of death in children under five worldwide.
Experts analysing previous refugee displacements estimate in the Lancet that crude mortality rates (that is deaths per 1,000 people) were more than 60 times higher than when each conflict began, on average.
Meanwhile, about half the population of Gaza is starving. Videos show masses of desperate Gazans swarming the very few aid trucks allowed in.
One of the leading international bodies for monitoring global hunger, closely affiliated with the UN, had this to say about how the situation in Gaza could shape up in the coming weeks if nothing changes:
Between 24 November and 7 December, over 90% of the population in the Gaza Strip (about 2.08 million people) was estimated to face high levels of acute food insecurity, classified in IPC Phase 3 or above (Crisis or worse). Among these, over 40% of the population (939,000 people) was in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) and over 15% (378,000 people) was in Catastrophe (IPC Phase 5).
Between 8 December and 7 February, the entire population in the Gaza Strip (about 2.2 million people) is classified in IPC Phase 3 or above (Crisis or worse). This is the highest share of people facing high levels of acute food insecurity that the IPC initiative has ever classified for any given area or country.
It is particularly damning that the destruction includes not just people, but their culture. At least 100 historical landmarks have been damaged since the campaign started, including eight museums and dozens of religious sites. Gaza’s oldest and largest mosque has now been all but destroyed.
This campaign could potentially end one of the world’s oldest Christian communities.
- Gaza had roughly 1,000 Christians prior to October 7. Most of them have been reportedly sheltering in Gaza’s two churches, believing them to be safe.
- One October airstrike killed 18 Christians in the world’s third-oldest church, meaning that single airstrike killed 2% of Gaza’s Christians. And those are just the deaths we know of.
- Hint: You might be the bad guy if the Pope accuses your soldiers of killing women sheltering inside a church.
If all of this was done coldly, aligned primarily with long-term geopolitical goals — like the US carpet bombing of Vietnam — one might be able to describe it as just another of history’s many excessive military campaigns.
But it should be obvious to any observer that the tenor in Israel is beyond unhinged; that the entire population of Gaza, and perhaps all of Palestine, is seen as a viable target. (The occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, areas Hamas does not rule, have seen a record number of Palestinian deaths in 2023 as well as a record number of Israeli settler attacks.)
Numerous high-profile Israeli officials have made statements that arguably express genocidal intent. See page 59 of South Africa’s invocation of the UN genocide convention for more of these delightful quotes:
This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.
— Prime Minister Netanyahu on Twitter, and to parliament on October 16
You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.
— Netanyahu on October 28
Netanyahu was referencing a biblical passage that describes the destruction of Amalek by the Israelites. The passage reads: “Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings.”
Netanyahu is hardly an outlier:
It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware not involved. It’s absolutely not true. … and we will fight until we break their backbone.
— President Isaac Herzog on October 12
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s declaration that Israel is fighting “human animals” is already quite infamous. Some may argue he referred only to Hamas. I disagree, but let’s focus on his other quote, which seems harder to misinterpret:
Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything. If it doesn’t take one day, it will take a week. It will take weeks or even months, we will reach all places.
This also seems rather unambiguous:
All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.
— Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Israel Katz, on October 13
These comments were not simply made in the heat of the moment, nor do they represent the views of a tiny fringe of the Israeli government, because the vows are being made good on weeks later. Indeed, the US State Department welcomed 2024 by issuing a public rebuke of this statement:
What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration. If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million Arabs, the entire discussion on the day after will be totally different.
— Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich
Or listen to Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, tell a British broadcaster why her country has to destroy all of Gaza:
Hotovely told [interviewer Iain Dale] that the Israel Defense Forces have found that “every school, every mosque, every second house, has an access to tunnel,” referring to the tunnels used by Hamas.
“That’s an argument for destroying the whole of Gaza, every single building,” Dale said, prompting Hotovely to ask, “Do you have another solution, how to destroy the underground tunnel city?”
Her comments were not made on October 8, but this week.
Maybe you don’t want to use the G-word. Fine. Why bother with the semantics, right? Let’s just describe this conflict by the following characteristics instead:
- 1% of the population was killed in just 2 months, at minimum
- 2% of the population has been wounded in just 2 months
- 40% of the dead are children
- 60 to 90% of the dead are civilians
- 70% of the homes and two-thirds of the schools have been destroyed
- Dozens of cultural sites have been damaged or destroyed
- 85 to 90% of the population is displaced
- An unprecedented number of journalists have been killed
- An unprecedented number of UN aid workers have been killed
- Half the population is at risk of starvation
- Preventable diseases are running rampant
- The leaders of the government doing the killing openly call for the mass deportation of the ethnic group they are killing (either explicitly or under a thin guise of refugee resettlement)
Whatever term is most appropriate for that type of conflict, I’m pretty sure it’s the first time the entire world has witnessed one in real time.
Worse than televised, actually
If Twitter existed from 1941 to 1945, what would ranking Nazi officials, like Heinrich Himmler or Joseph Goebbels, post on it? I suspect they would not actually post images from the concentration camps.
But they would probably post triumphalist pictures of the war front. They might honor a national holiday by showcasing some expanse of eastern Europe that had been destroyed for Lebensraum, living space.
If the German soldiers invading the Soviet Union had social media, what would they post? Perhaps as they massacred and starved Slavs, they would film themselves destroying food stores.
If German foot soldiers had smartphones, and were lucky enough to get a visit from a national leader, what kind of PR stunts would they get to record? What cool pictures would they be able to send to their group chats?
Speaking of group chats, one wonders how the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda would have used such an exciting medium. It might have resembled the Telegram channel run by the IDF’s psychological warfare department, which offers participants “exclusive content from the Gaza Strip.”
Suppose TikTok existed in 1939, when Germany invaded Poland and established its first ghettos. What viral challenges would take hold amongst the German public? Influencers might have found the new state of Polish Jews to be particularly amusing.
A more optimistic line of thinking associated with a younger internet might have once supposed that states are less likely to commit atrocities if they know their crimes will be exposed to the world. Cynical as we all may have become since then, how many of us really expected a genocide to play out on camera? Certainly the Israeli government has produced sanitized explanations and excuses, but the effort is so cursory that it is effectively meaningless.
And to be fair, the whole world is rightly outraged — just not the one country whose position actually matters. It turns out the United States is perfectly capable of supporting a genocide even when its public watches. Unlike when the US enabled the slaughter of a million people in Indonesia in the 1960s, or the systemic murders of 200,000 Guatemalans from the 1960s to the 1990s, events that few Americans were aware of at the time.
So much of the intellectual agonizing that followed the Holocaust concerned questions of how many people knew what was happening, how many looked away, what type of government could carry it out. If the public of the Axis powers had truly been aware of it, unable to feign ignorance or uncertainty, and had the Axis states not been totalitarian, would the Holocaust have still happened?
If we didn’t have answers before, we have them now. It seems genocidal campaigns can still happen when the information is literally available at everybody’s fingertips, and even when the two main offending countries are democracies.
If anything, academics of the future may have been given a new set of soul-searching questions to grapple with; perhaps psychologists and sociologists will look back years from now and shiver at the world’s biggest simulation of the bystander effect.
Maybe political scientists will start re-evaluating the likelihood of democracies committing genocide, or whether genocides are more or less likely in a multipolar world. There may be even some popular lamentation in Israel and in the United States after a decade or two, some indulgent self-reflection on past sins.
Maybe some people will reconsider the debate on content moderation. For all that American liberals cried about the proliferation of hate speech and domestic extremism, or Russian propaganda, few are calling for the Israeli officials I listed above to get account bans for incitement to genocide.
But in the meantime, there’s a more pressing question: if this genocide can be witnessed by billions and continue unabated, with active support from the world’s biggest military power, what does that imply about how it will end?
And if one genocide can be exhibited in front of the entire world without repercussion, what does that mean for the next?
While all of us watch this unfold, perhaps the most unsavory characters are taking special notes. Present or future strongmen, military planners, politicians, and everyday patriots — all realizing that they face fewer constraints than they thought. Perhaps Myanmar’s junta will try to finish the job with the remaining Rohingya, or Azerbaijan will intensify its conflict with Armenia, or Modi’s India will flex its new geopolitical muscle by emptying Kashmir.
Whoever starts the world’s next genocide may not bother hiding it. Noting Israel’s success, they may even welcome our attention.