Foucault's Pudendum🌻

A shepherd in abandoned Sacred Grove, Herbert List, Italy, 1952

John Spencer, Richard Kemp, and Andrew Fox are experts in the field of urban warfare, and I detail their findings in my new book, Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law. In urban warfare, the average militant-to-civilian casualty ratio is about 1 to 9, meaning one militant killed for every nine civilians killed. That's not because every war that's ever been fought is a genocide. It's because war is horrible and urban warfare in particular is horrible. That's why Israel would much prefer to fight Hamas out in the open. It's Hamas who chooses to fight in Gaza underneath its civilian population precisely to increase—not decrease—the number of civilian casualties. In the American war in Iraq and Afghanistan, we and our allies set the gold standard. We had a militant-to-civilian kill ratio of about one to four-and-a-half, maybe one to five, and many experts believed no army would ever be able to meet that standard again. In much more difficult and complicated circumstances, Israel, even if you believe Hamas's bogus numbers—which you should not believe for all the reasons I lay out in the book—but even if you took Hamas at completely face value and you believed all of their numbers, Israel has a militant to civilian kill ratio of about one to one-and-a-half in Gaza. If Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, then the Americans committed genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan, then the Americans and the allies committed genocide in Germany and Japan, and literally every war that has ever been fought in human history has been a genocide. That's not what genocide means. We should reserve the label for the crime of all crimes, because otherwise the consequences will be dire.