For America and Israel, How Many Innocent People Killed Is Too Many?

War is hell, some people are fond of saying. Those still in constant struggle over the obvious facts in front of their noses downplay every Israeli attack, every atrocity, every mass murder as just another brutal fact of war, which they seem to forget still has rules (theoretically), of which the President of the United Staes has said they likely violated, which means the Biden administration likely violated both international and U.S. law too. We see this dynamic again and again and again from Western commentators still shamelessly dedicated to the imperial cause of the 20th century, as every carpet bombing of a neighborhood by Israel can be portrayed as a “win” if there is a bad guy in the rubble amongst the children.

Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and others in his leadership over the weekend in a massive strike in Lebanon. Western commentators and papers like The Washington Post celebrated the killing of one man, even as Al Jazeera notes, “Israel dropped what local media said were ‘bunker-busting’ bombs and flattened about six buildings.” How many other people were killed in the strike is still to be determined as rescue teams continue to sift through the rubble, but with six buildings in a dense city being “flattened,” the death toll is likely to be high.

The Washington Post reported that these were likely U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs, as yet again our signature is found next to Israel’s bloody fingerprint. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board called it a “justified defensive act” because of Hezbollah’s thousands of rocket and missile attacks into Israel’s north, one of which killed 12 civilians, including children. But as Roqayah Chamseddine noted for Splinter in her report at the funeral Israel attacked in Beirut, Nasrallah said afterwards about Hezbollah’s continuing rocket attacks that “we tell Netanyahu and Gallant: the Lebanese front will not stop until the war on Gaza ends.”

Nasrallah echoed the WSJ Editorial Board’s stance that his attacks on civilians were defensive too, just in the name of Gaza. Who is and is not afforded the luxury of “defensive” attacks with civilian death tolls is determined entirely by one’s place in the international order, not the legality or legitimacy of what actually happened. This is proven by the Jordanian Foreign Minister repeating over the weekend what many Arab countries have offered through diplomatic channels: end the war in Gaza and Israel’s security will be guaranteed by its neighbors. Yet this basic fact has been ignored and obscured over and over again to justify mounting Israeli aggression in Gaza (a quick search of both their sites and Google does not seem to indicate that either The New York Times nor The Washington Post wrote about these comments from Jordan’s FM, but Haaretz did).

If you are part of the Western hegemony that created this system for its own ends, self-defense can be applied to almost any action, especially once the conflict gets going and the number of justifications for a counter-attack mount. Even when the President of the United States admits that an ally is likely in violation of international law, that ally still receives billions in weapons shipments that it can use to continue flattening city blocks with impunity and even celebration at times like this one, so where exactly is the deterrent for escalation in this decaying situation?

More than 1,000 people have been killed in two weeks in Lebanon, and while Elijah Magnier, a military analyst based in Brussels, told Al Jazeera that “there are thousands of Hezbollah operatives who’ve lost their hands or eyesight” and that Israel has achieved some operational success against Hezbollah, the cost of these military victories to Lebanon’s people has been high, and flattening six buildings to kill a few men proves that the mounting death toll in Lebanon is not limited to Hezbollah operatives.

The United Nations’ refugee agency said “at least” 100,000 people have crossed from Lebanon into war-torn Syria while hundreds of thousands of others have been displaced. The World Health Organization warned that Lebanon’s health care system was overstretched and displaced people were at increased risk of diseases. At least 136 people have been confirmed to be killed in Lebanon in the last 24 hours alone. Biden’s inaction in Gaza has already shown us where this path takes us.

Oxfam noted that the “daily death rate in Gaza [is] higher than any other major 21st Century conflict,” while Haaretz interviewed Professor Michael Spagat of the University of London, who said “If we factor in the amount of time it took to kill one percent of this population [in Gaza], then it could be unprecedented.” The Lancet, the medical journal whose approximations of the Iraqi War death toll being far higher than initially reported were generally correct, used the same techniques to produce a “conservative estimate” that 186,000 Gazans had died as of July, a total over four times higher than what Professor Spagat is working off of in his “unprecedented” math of Israel’s mass killing machine.

We are being inured to a truly horrific amount of violence all while people in Washington D.C. and Tel Aviv, metro areas housing a combined ten million people, claim that Hezbollah and Hamas are entirely to blame for any civilian casualties by hiding among their population who Israel is killing en masse with American bombs. Over three-quarters of all journalists killed in 2023 died in Gaza, and more journalists died in the first three months of Israel’s assault on Gaza than died in all of World War II or the Vietnam War. This is what it looks like.

How many innocent lives in Beirut is Hassan Nasrallah worth? What about a mid-level Hezbollah operative holding an exploding pager in a supermarket? Would this strike over the weekend still be justified if Israel flattened ten buildings? A hundred? The entire city of Beirut? Where’s the line?

For Western commentators justifying Israel’s determination to start a regional war, they have proven that so far there is no line. Like Joe Biden’s sham of a “red line,” it is wherever Benjamin Netanyahu says it is. The Biden administration has yet to see anything out of Israel’s actions that would necessitate a policy shift away from one that has produced a genocide that imperial forces are trying to hide in plain sight, demonstrating the bankrupt value system that animates the American and Israeli states.