We're going to be living with this question as long as we live

I hate the fashion online that substitutes video clips for text. For a person accustomed to learn by reading, video is slower, less precise, and less memorable than text. But, alas, perhaps we are becoming a post-literate world.

 

In any case, instead of writing frequently, Substacker Peter Beinart offers short videos at The Beinart Notebook. 

 

His most recent post is longer than the clips I usually share here. But if you've got 10 minutes, I highly recommend listening to the whole thing. The anguish in the original needs to be experienced.

An abbreviated transcript:

More deaths than Kishinev, Sharpeville or Bloody Sunday. Every Day. The astonishing scale of the killing in Gaza

So, one of the most difficult and depressing things about this moment is that the slaughter in Gaza goes on and on and on. And yet, it’s been relegated, you know, to the back pages of the newspaper. Americans are now more consumed by our own catastrophes. And so, there’s this way in which we’ve normalized, you know, in Western media discussion in the U.S, there’s been a kind of normalization of just that is kind of routine, that every day Palestinians are dying more and more and more. And it doesn’t even really provoke that much conversation anymore. And I’ve been thinking about how you can respond to that. 

And obviously the people who have tried the most are the Palestinians in Gaza themselves, journalists and others who are desperately kind of recording what’s happening to them and trying to speak to the outside world. ... But I also think there perhaps is a value in just trying to step back and look at the scale of this, and think about how desensitized we’ve become compared to other moments and places in history

... there’s a British academic named Michael Spagat—I actually quote him in my book—at the University of London, and he basically counts death in wars. That’s his academic specialty. He did this very, very large study with the Palestinian political scientist Khalil Shakaki where they surveyed 2,000 households in Gaza in order to try to get a more accurate count of the death toll. ...

... obviously, in Gaza, where many of the hospitals have been destroyed, and there’s been many, many reports of widespread starvation that there would be considerable deaths from that as well. And so, of the overall death toll that Spagat comes to the number of about 100,000, which, as Haaretz reported in a piece about his research, is actually not very different from some other researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who’ve come to a roughly similar number.

... So, if one uses that figure of 100,000, that would mean that more than 150 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed per day since October 7^th. More than 150 per day.

... But 150 people killed per day over 650 days is really just an astonishing level of death and suffering that has been normalized. ... Even if we think about the horrors, the horrors, the war crimes committed on October 7th, where roughly 1,200 Israelis, mostly Israeli Jews, were killed, right? If you just think in terms of the numbers, there is basically a close to an October 7th in Gaza, in terms of the number of people killed, every week, right? Every week for now 21 months. And the band just kind of plays on, right?

... you can have 150 people killed per day, you know, over 650 days, and yet, you know, much of the world reacts with a shrug, and the world continues to give Israel the military and diplomatic support to make it possible. 

... I think that’s one of the things that people are going to be struggling to face and deal with, and contemplate, and understand about those of us who are alive in this moment. How—when there were other moments in history where far fewer people died, and it sparked the conscience of the world, and led to fundamental political change—how can it be that in this case that this can just be tolerated? I think all of us are going to be living with that question for a very, very long time.