How Many White Flag Waving Innocents Have Died?

The horrible story of the Israeli military killing three hostages that were waving a white flag has received attention from our Islamophobic media only because they were Israelis. If they were Muslim, no one would care outside of Gaza. But it does make one ask a pretty important question–how many people waving white flags, trying to surrender, clearly innocent people, have the Israeli military killed? The answer is probably very high. A “kill em all” mentality does mean that you aren’t too worried about who gets caught up in your genocidal campaign. Israel says it was a violation of its “rules of engagement.” If you believe that, I have some sweet oceanfront property in the West Bank I’d love to sell you.

I ask again, how many lives are 1,200 Israelis worth? Present estimates are about 19,000 Palestinians have been killed. We know that the gigantic majority of them had nothing to do with the Hamas attacks. We also know that you can destroy the infrastructure of a movement dedicated for change (if you want to define Hamas as entirely evil, that’s fine, I basically agree with you, but the point stands) but you can’t destroy the conditions that lead to movements like this rising. So you can kill all the people in Gaza you want, but this is not going to make Israel safer, nor will it stop a new generation of people seeing no alternative but violence from acting on it. So I really wonder what the end game is here. And again, how many people need to die here? 50,000? 100,000? 500,000? Because it’s pretty clear that the military is just targeting anyone they see, hostages or not. And there actually has to be an answer to the question here.

At the very least, everyone on every side of this debate needs to rewatch The Battle of Algiers. There’s a reason it has been shown in government circles and the military since at least the Reagan administration, if not before.