When Is It Genocide?

In the days after October 7, President Joe Biden tried to help Americans touch the size of Israel's horror and its grief by trying to translate it into the terms of our own tragedies. Since this terrorist attack took place, we've seen it described as Israel's nine eleven. But for a nation the size of Israel, it was like fifteen nine elevens. Imagine what that level of trauma would do to us. Imagine what that level of loss would do to us. We are almost two years on. The death toll in Gaza is now estimated to be over sixty one thousand people. There are a little over two million cousins. The leaders in the US government are not spending time trying to help Americans grapple with the scale of their grief, of their loss. But that would be for our population, like 2,509 elevens. I know there are many who want to cast doubt on that death toll. We're told that it's from the Hamas run Ministry of Health. And that's true. But look, when The Lancet, the medical journal, tried to fill in the gaps in the data by adding in new sources, they concluded that the true number, the real death toll, was far higher. Gaza is a strip of territory about the size of Detroit, Michigan. Since October 7, Israel has dropped more than a 100,000 tons of explosives on this tiny sliver of land that is more tonnage of explosives than was dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during World War two. Aerial photography shows just absolute devastation. It's estimated that 70% of all structures in Gaza, every home, every hospital, every mosque, every school are severely damaged or completely destroyed. You cannot drop that many bombs on such a densely populated strip of land without mass casualties. You just cannot. But it is not just the casualties. Israel has also been restricting the flow of food into Gaza. Aid organizations have been warning all along of growing hunger, of the possibility of famine. Then in March, Israel blockaded aid into Gaza for eleven weeks. Then it largely ended the existing aid infrastructure the UN had built and replaced the hundreds of operating sites of aid distribution with four sites, four, run by inexperienced American contractors. Famine is now spreading across Gaza. People are dying of hunger. The images and the videos and the stories here, not just of the starving, but of the people, of the children, their bowls out begging for help, lining up to get food, hundreds having been killed at these aid distribution sites. It is beyond what I have the capacity to imagine. What would it be like to not be able to find food for my children, to not be able to feed them, to have them lose their mother or their uncle or me because we went to get food for them? The idea that this is made up, that it is a concoction of Hamas or …