[According to the charity Save the Children, “More children
have been killed in the Gaza Strip over the last three weeks than in
every other armed conflict annually since 2019.”]
[[link removed]]

THE INVISIBLE SLAUGHTER OF PALESTINIAN CHILDREN  
[[link removed]]


 

Charles Hirschkind
November 3, 2023
Informed Comment
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ According to the charity Save the Children, “More children have
been killed in the Gaza Strip over the last three weeks than in every
other armed conflict annually since 2019.” _

,

 

Berkeley, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – According to
our most reliable news sources, the children
[[link removed]] of
Gaza are being slaughtered at a horrific rate. No, you will not find
the terms “slaughter” or “horrific” in Western media accounts
of Israel’s current assault on the Palestinians residents of Gaza
(these terms are reserved for Israeli deaths), but nonetheless, there
is little disagreement among media professionals that nearly half of
the deaths resulting from Israel’s current assault on Gaza are
children, as I write, close to 4000 of them. And the killing of 4000
children by aerial bombardment in the short span of 3 or 4 weeks is
nothing if not a horrific and terrible slaughter.

Statements made by politicians or military personnel to mitigate the
significance of this number—that Israel is making every possible
effort to spare civilian lives, that collateral damage is sadly
unavoidable in war, that Hamas is to blame for forcing Israel to
defend itself, or, most perversely, Biden’s baseless
[[link removed]] caution
about the numerical accuracy of the data—all of these qualifications
seem morally obscene when weighed against the fact that close to 4000
children have been blown to shreds in a few short weeks.

According to the charity, Save the Children
[[link removed]],
“More children have been killed in the Gaza Strip over the last
three weeks than in every other armed conflict annually since 2019.”
Whatever viewpoint one may hold in regard to Israel’s military
actions in Gaza, in one very real and empirical sense, this has been a
war carried out -— to a stunning and unprecedented degree -— on
the bodies of children. This, I would argue, is a salient moral fact
of the conflict, one that any attempt to come to terms with Israel’s
assault necessarily confronts.

Or perhaps not. For when our major news media update us on the results
of Israel’s relentless bombing campaign, we hear, not that 100
Palestinian children were crushed in the day’s rubble, a now daily
occurrence, but rather, that Israel successfully destroyed more of the
“terrorist infrastructure,” that “terror tunnels” were
eliminated, that 15 Hamas terrorists were killed by the Israeli Army
and Air Force, and so on.

We are presented, in other words, with a narrative that conceals the
very slaughter that we know from the available casualty statistics is
occurring. The massive carnage in children’s lives -— again, an
inescapable moral fact of the conflict, whatever one’s point of
view—is replaced by the so-called “war on Hamas,” and presented
in a language ever more obedient to Israeli military speak, where
protocol seems to demand that every third word in a sentence be
“terror” or one of its derivative terms.

_ABC News: “Gaza is now a ‘graveyard for thousands of children’:
UNICEF”_ [[link removed]]

From the standpoint of Western media, Palestinian lives are relevant
precisely in proportion to their ability to resist Israel’s crushing
grip upon them. Insomuch as Hamas is the primary institution of
organized resistance in Gaza, it is they -— not dead children -—
who are the only significant Palestinian casualties in this war. It is
this perceptual regime that lays behind comments such as the
following, made by a US government official, just a few days ago:
“We believe that a ceasefire right now benefits Hamas, and Hamas is
the only one that would gain from that right now.” The thought that
thousands of Palestinian children might also derive some benefit from
a ceasefire, namely by not being blown to pieces, is not even to be
entertained.

The erasure of enemy deaths is an established practice within war, and
the deaths of children are no exception. Thousands of children were
killed
[[link removed]] by
the US in the “War on Terror.” These deaths never achieved
significant visibility within American public discourse, never weighed
heavily on the American political conscience.

Our mainstream media present us today with two events that cannot be
squared, the war on Palestinian children and the war on Hamas, and
then proceed to coach us in how not to see one of them. This is the
task in perception management that today sets their agenda.

_Charles Hirschkind
[[link removed]] is a professor
of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His
publications include The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and
Islamic Counterpublics
[[link removed]] (Columbia
UP, 2006) and The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and
Andalusia
[[link removed]] (Chicago
UP, 2020)._

_Informed Comment [[link removed]] sheds light on how
war, climate change and globalization are shaping our world. Drawing
on the insights of expert journalists, activists, and academics, we
strive to publish deep geopolitical analysis that’s readable for a
general audience. And unlike most foreign policy-oriented
publications, our editorial line isn’t dictated by beltway think
tanks or corporate boards. _

* Gaza
[[link removed]]
* Israel
[[link removed]]
* Hamas
[[link removed]]
* children
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]