Innocents in Gaza
Pretty much since the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas that began on October 7, 2023 with Hamas's vicious attack, my Facebook feed has been filled with various posts attempting to minimize the number of innocent human beings living in Gaza. These posts range from saying that nobody in Gaza is innocent to acknowledging that some innocents do exist but the vast majority are Hamas supporters and thus, minimally, guilty by association.
As usual, reality is a lot more complex. For starters, the demographics of the population in Gaza skews very young. About half of Gazans are under the age of 18. That’s over a million right there. Now, reasonable people can argue about the age at which children are still objectively innocent, but even if we take it down to 10 years of age that’s still over a half a million innocent kids, a quarter of the entire population. And yet even on this point I’ve seen posts of videos purportedly of kindergarten children in fatigues acting out “terror attacks” with the clear intent to claim that even these 5 year olds are not innocent. Of course that’s an untenable position which doesn’t really warrant a response, but suffice it say that, at worst, it’s child abuse and proof of complicity.
Moving on to the adult population, a common refrain is, “they voted for Hamas”. The most obvious problem with that line of thinking is that there hasn’t been an election in Gaza since 2006, thus, the vast majority Gazans were either not yet born or too young to vote in that election. But even for those who did vote for Hamas in 2006 assuming guilt for that electoral decision is tenuous at best.
In 2006, a year after Israel disengaged from the strip, Gazans had a choice between a highly corrupt and ineffective Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas which, at the time, was efficiently providing needed services to the population. A vote for Hamas was not necessarily in support of their religiously fanatic, anti-Semitic, genocidal charter… it was a vote for what most people around the world choose in their elections, the hope of a better life.
More currently, there are those who point to recent polls showing a high level of support for Hamas. Obviously polling citizens in a viscously authoritarian regime is fraught. People aren’t really free to speak their minds, especially when speaking negatively about the government could be accompanied by imprisonment or worse. Still, one could argue that there’s a significant level of support for Hamas. A recent poll taken during the war showed that level around 60%. (As well as support for the attack on October 7.) Of course the flip side of that is that around 40% explicitly do not support Hamas and slightly fewer did not support the October 7th attacks.
Still others point to anecdotes such as the reports that non-Hamas members participated in the October 7 terror attack, others celebrated as Hamas members dragged hostages through the streets, the case of Roni Kriboy, an escaped hostage who was returned to Hamas by Gazan citizens, and more. Anecdotes are a great tool to use when illustrating a well-reasoned data supported argument, but not so much, as here, when used to support a belief born of a cognitive bias.
Certainly the estimated 30,000 to 50,000 Hamas militants are not innocent. There’s also probably a not insignificant number of citizens in Gaza who fully support Hamas in everything they believe and do. But, very conservatively, well over half the population of Gaza can be reasonably considered to be innocent civilians with another huge chunk in some sort of grey area.
So, what gives? Why are so many people trying so hard to minimize the number of innocents in Gaza? I actually think it comes from a good place; an attempt to resolve cognitive dissonance. Most decent people, and most are decent, really do care about the death of innocent human beings. The war that Hamas has forced on Israel and the way in which Hamas fights it is creating a real human tragedy. Even taking into the account the unreliability of Hamas’s government in reporting causality statistics, thousands of children and other innocents have been killed so far. The fewer of those of the deaths that can be considered innocent the easier it is for the mind to accept those deaths.