Spunch

tamarrud:

I’m going to be scratching at the surface of this, but when I use the term “calculated” when describing Israel’s genocidal tactics, I’m not using it arbitrarily. Military violence is in fact based on a lot of calculations, and here I don’t mean figurative estimations but rather actual mathematical formulas.

The first example that comes to mind is from the Iraq war, where “the number of anticipated civilian deaths was carefully appraised beforehand in a calculation known as the collateral damage estimate”.

A mathematical calculation was needed in order to determine the extent of casualties following US attacks. “The magic number was 30”, meaning if the number of expected civilians killed in a US attack was ≥30, Rumsfeld or Bush had to sign off on the attack. Whereas if the number was less than 30, it was an automatic go-ahead.

This degree of dehumanisation is basically seen as setting a threshold so that military lawyers and humanitarian law can be able to determine what’s “lawful” and what’s “collateral civilian death”.

Now of course this is something applied by Israel as well, where, for instance, formulas are created to predict the number of people necessary to be killed by Israel in order for a Palestinian organisation to be eliminated. One equation was created by Itzhaq Ben Israel, then chairman of Israel’s space agency, in 2002. It goes: Q=1–(q ln q + 1/q ln 1/q), where Q stands for the probability of the collapse of the Palestinian organisation and q is the percentage of killings necessarily done by Israel. You can find the breakdown of it here.

Israel doesn’t stop there. With its siege on Gaza since 2007, it relied heavily on daily calculations to enforce its blockade. You’ve likely heard about the Red Lines documents, in which Israel calculates the amounts of food allowed into Gaza through rationing calories using the following formulas:

ALT

These calculations usually use a “humanitarian minimum” threshold determined by lawyers, scientists, engineers, humanitarian experts, etc. Based on these thresholds, the formulas and equations also seep into things like the amount of electricity Gaza would receive. For example, in 2008 Israel would reduce the current supplied by each powerline by 5% every week for months to test how low the minimum threshold can be.

When Gaza’s power plant required 3.5 million litres of diesel to work at full capacity, Israel’s high court decided that the “humanitarian minimum” was 2.2 million litres, reducing the plant’s operation to 68%, forcing Gaza to undergo routine blackouts (details here). Israel then reduced it to 1.5 million litres which affected fresh water supply, crops, and decreased sewage pumping, resulting in the sewage treatment plant to overflow and for millions of litres of raw sewage to pour into the Mediterranean for days, after which of course Israel decided to increase the amount of diesel allowed in as that started to affect Israeli beaches.

So yea, they may call it “calculating the economy of the violence” or “proportionality principles”. But it’s murder. It’s genocide. It’s incremental and it’s grotesque.

(via stridingsquids)