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Headage Counting Corpses On December 4, George Will wrote, "Coming from the territory for which Yasser Arafat is responsible, terrorists last weekend killed 26 Israelis, a portion of Israel's population that is equal to 1,240 Americans." The same week, Rush Limbaugh wrote, "In the past 14 months, more than 230 Israelis have been killed—the proportional equivalent to the U.S. losing some 11,000 people." Both of these statistics are meant to appeal to our sense of outrage in the wake of September 11, and to make sure we know that Israel's Situation Is Just Like Ours. This in turn is intended to justify “unleashing” the Israelis upon the Palestinians (Mr. Limbaugh’s idea) and expelling Arafat from Israel (Mr. Will’s idea). Although these ideas may or may not have merit, what I’d like to discuss here is the same fatuous assumption that underlies the arguments in support of each idea. Namely: that the immorality of an act of terror can be measured mathematically, and that said computations can then be used to morally justify reprisals based upon the relative worth of individual human lives. Implicit within in Mr. Will’s and Mr. Limbaugh’s calculations is the conviction that Palestinian lives—of any sort, terrorist or no—are worth little or nothing. First, let’s do the numbers for the Palestinians, shall we? Between September 28 of 2000 and December 5 of 2001, 851 Palestinians were killed by Israeli Security forces in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. There are about 1.2 million Palestinians living in Israel, with another 3.3 million in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Based on the latest U.S. Census, the US population is 281,421,906. That means that in the past 14 months, the proportional equivalent of 53,220 Americans have been killed by Israeli Security Forces. Or, if you prefer, the proportional equivalent of about 916 Israelis (based on a Jewish population of 4,847,000). Give or take—it really depends on how many decimal places you use. I used seven. At any rate, it does seem strange that while it’s important for us to know that the Palestinians have killed the Israeli equivalent of 11,000 Americans, it isn’t quite as important to know that the Israelis have killed the Palestinian equivalent of over 53,000. I find it a peculiar sort of math, this counting of corpse equivalents that Mr. Will and Mr. Limbaugh do. It’s a peculiar sort of math because they are using a methodology of numbers to lend moral weight to an argument that they are making. The intent of the mathematical equivalents is to suggest that—perhaps because the Israelis are fewer in number—their worth as individuals is proportionately greater, for some reason. When broken down further, the Israeli-American life equation that they’ve built works out to about 58 American lives for every single Israeli of Jewish extraction. And, we should note, about 97 Americans for every Palestinian. Thus, instead of individuals, we have now a Portion of a People. This Portion—signaled by the Mr. Will’s word “portion” and Mr. Limbaugh’s words “proportional equivalent”—is then compared with an amalgamation of American lives, 1,240 in Mr. Will’s case and “some 11,000” in Mr. Limbaugh’s. Without knowing the exact numbers Mr. Will and Mr. Limbaugh are using in that math offhand—the exact Israeli population, the population of the U.S., etc.—the natural emphasis for the reader quite intentionally falls on the American corpses, in their significantly larger numbers. Those large numbers are intended to arouse within the reader the thoughts and feelings that would be stirred up if 11,000 Americans really had been killed over the past 14 months. All of this is in turn intended to persuade the reader that his or her response to “1,240” or “some 11,000” lost American lives ought to be equivalent to the deaths of 26 and 230 Israelis, respectively. The Chinese, you know, really ought to be outraged: the Palestinians have killed around 60,000 of them over the past 14 months. In this time, in this place, the image of “1,240” or “some 11,000” American dead cannot be separated from an emotional response, and part of that emotional response has to do with desires for justice and for revenge. In using the numbers in the way that they have, Mr. Will and Mr. Limbaugh are clearly seeking to draw an equivalency between those desires resultant from September 11 and the situation in Israel. It is because this argument seeks to secure the intellectual and emotional support of the reader that it begins, to me, to feel like a try for moral argument. In playing upon our desires for justice and for revenge—both inherently moral concepts—the mathematical equivalencies become moral equivalencies. We are expected to apply the moral principles that underlie the seeking of justice and revenge for our dead to the Israeli dead. Since Mr. Will and Mr. Limbaugh use this equation in the course of a moral argument intended to demonstrate the rightness of their respective positions on Israeli responses, it is only fair to examine the idea of worth, which I brought up previously. Worth is a judgment we make about something or someone: that car is worth the money, that person is worthy of my trust, and so forth. It generally indicates—even in cases where it is a materialistic judgment—quality or value. The suggestion here is that, as we value 1,240 American lives, so ought we to value 26 Israeli lives. As we value 11,000, so ought we to value 230. And, finally, as we value one Israeli life, so ought we to value 58 American lives. The proper math, if I may be so callous, seems to me to be this: one Israeli life equals one American life. The notion that a single Israeli—or a single person of any other nationality—is worth 58 Americans is appalling and morally indefensible. I will take the 14-month Israeli total of 230 for our single day’s 3,000 with few regrets. Following the logic further, Mr. Will and Mr. Limbaugh's abstract mathematical comparison of the values of individual human lives in the service a moral argument implies that greater moral weight ought to be given to, essentially, higher proportional body counts. This being so, their omission of the fact that by their own methodology the Palestinians have suffered losses of far greater moral equivalency reveals something about them, namely, their deep-seated contempt for the Palestinian people as a whole. Implicit within their math is the idea that, somehow, creating proportional equivalencies between the number of corpses in Israel and America lends moral justification and weight to their calls for diplomatic ejection or unlimited reprisals. By that same math, a Palestinian ought to be worth 97 Americans. Based upon Mr. Will's and Mr. Limbaugh’s implied value system of proportional corpse equivalency, how much more of a right, then, do the Palestinians have to resist? But Mr. Will and Mr. Limbaugh do not do that particular bit of math, suggesting that, for them, such moral equivalency does not apply to the Palestinians. By this omission, Mr. Will and Mr. Limbaugh imply that individual Palestinians are equivalent to, at best, a fraction of an American life. Mr. Will’s application of a simplistic baseball-statistic mentality to this human tragedy of death, destruction and injustice is cruelly ignorant at worst and amoral at best. Mr. Limbaugh’s invocation of Truman’s ghost in his call for the obliteration of Israel’s enemies ignores the fact that Israel has repeatedly shown that it is not capable of distinguishing between its true enemies—those who are responsible for or carry out acts of violence—and ordinary Palestinians. The method recently chosen by Israel for execution of its enemies involves no trial, no judge, no jury, and no appeal—just artillery that occasionally wipes out innocent bystanders. Of course, given the mathematics involved, this wouldn’t seem to matter to Mr. Will or to Mr. Limbaugh. The pile of Palestinian corpses has to be very high, it seems, before it reaches the equivalent of one American life.
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