What’s Happening in Gaza Is Not a War. It’s a Massacre. by James A. Siebens, Benjamin S. Case, Inkstick, March 5, 2024 https://inkstickmedia.com/whats-happening-in-gaza-is-not-a-war-its-a-massacre . . . As scholars of conflict and political violence, it is our job to seek clear and consistent ways to understand concepts like war, terrorism, and coercion with sufficient empiricism to avoid being confused or disoriented by the passions of the moment. To that end, we will discuss three objective elements of the violence in Israel and Gaza in service of appropriately defining the conflict: the types of political actors involved in the fighting, the numbers of fatalities, and the dynamics between combatants and civilians.
Based on these three elements, it is difficult to characterize the Israeli military campaign as war. In fact, applying objective criteria used by the Correlates of War project (COW), a widely used resource on historical armed conflicts, it’s debatable whether any of the violence between Israel and Palestinian groups in the past two decades could be classified as war. Technically speaking, the more appropriate classification is colonial massacre. . . . *When War Isn’t War* The point of this type of clinical analysis is to be able to help discuss complex and emotionally-wrenching violence across contexts with consistency. There are few conflicts in the world that are more historically, culturally, and politically fraught than Israel and Palestine. And with much confusion and misinformation in the air, many of the numbers, including those we use, are not fully verifiable. However, in the ongoing violence in Gaza, there are certain things that are empirically clear. One side is a sovereign state while the other is a kind of dependency, a formerly occupied and currently encircled non-state territory under the control of a state to which it does not belong. One side is militarily incapable of effectively resisting the other, and both combatant and civilian fatalities are vastly disproportionate. The ICJ will spend the next several years determining whether Israel is guilty of genocide. In the meantime, whatever our personal attachments and opinions on the conflict, we should strive for intellectual honesty and precision in the terms we use to discuss the horrific violence in Israel and Gaza. As the fighting drags on and Palestinian casualties continue to mount, it is increasingly clear that social scientists and historians will not regard what’s happening in Gaza as a war, but as a massacre. # # # -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#29342): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/29342 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/104819062/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
