On The Atlantic’s “The UN’s Gaza Statistics Make No Sense” (06/05/24)
Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Abby Cartus and Phil Rocco discuss a recent article by The Atlantic staff writer Graeme Wood that went viral for its assertion that, in the context of the genocide in Palestine, “it is possible to kill children legally.” We take a close look at the piece and how the rest of the surrounding argument uses a veneer of data “objectivity” to mask its underlying idea: that Palestinian death statistics cannot be trusted simply because they are collected by Palestinians themselves.
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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)
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Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:32
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So I'm Beatrice Adler-Bolton, and I'm here today with two of my amazing co-hosts, Phil Rocco.
Phil Rocco 1:35
Hi.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:36
And Abby Cartus.
Abby Cartus 1:37
Hi.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:38
And today, the three of us are going to be breaking down an article in The Atlantic that went pretty viral for arguing that in the context of the settler colonial genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, that quote, "It is possible to kill children legally." That article was written by a guy named Graeme Wood, and it is called, "The UN's Gaza statistics make no sense." And in this article, Graeme Wood, a staff writer at The Atlantic, questionss the death toll in the US-backed settler colonial genocide in Gaza because the source of the data is Palestinians themselves. The whole thing is pretty heinous. And as we promised in the episode that we did in last week's patron feed, that was a rapid response to the massacre of Rafah, this whole article deserves a very critical close read. So that's exactly what we're going to do today.
Ultimately, this piece, which is awful, is not being highlighted because it's unique, but its argument, specifically around data and genocide, is a really great example of something that we've touched on often on the show, especially when we've done episodes about Palestine, which is the social and political construction of data, the lens of statistics, and its power to offer a veneer of objectivity and certainty. There was immediately a lot of outrage about this piece, so you may have heard of it. There was a lot of disgust at the blatant dehumanization of Palestinians that goes on in this essay, which is definitely going to be echoed in this conversation.
But today, we're also going to be able to offer a deep dive into the very shallow, strange, and at times a little confusing argument that Graeme Wood is making in here about the death data, that as we were sort of talking about before we started recording, you know, this is at its core, just a really good example of a mistake that we see people making all of the time. So with that said, let's get right into the close read. Again, the piece is called "The UN's Gaza statistics make no sense." It's by Graeme Wood. It was published in The Atlantic on May 17th, 2024. The subhead for the piece is "The actual death toll matters—first, because of the dignity of those killed or still living," which --
Phil Rocco 3:47
Oookay.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 3:47
You know, yeah, it's a little confusing. And uh, maybe we'll get into that a little later when we get into interpretation, but we're gonna read through most of this, but there's also a lot to discuss. So I've slightly edited it down, but not by much at all. So first, Wood sets up the problem that he thinks he's stumbled on here, which, in fact, is not really a problem, but is rather a ruse that he is using to buttress the argument that he wants to make about how Palestinians are not to be trusted or listened to about their own experiences, treating Palestinian voices and data as worthless, but also as a threat.
So again, he starts this by setting up what he's portraying as a sort of shocking problem, a conspiracy, and momentarily, we'll get a second to break down what's actually going on. So the piece starts, "Between May 6 and May 8, the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) revised its estimates of how many women and children had died in Gaza. The numbers appear to drop drastically: first, it reported at least 24,000 dead women and children, and two days later, it reported exactly 12,756 identified dead women and children. One could be forgiven for wondering whether the UN had raised about 6,700 Gazan children and 4,500 Gazan women from the dead one."
Phil Rocco 5:07
One could be forgiven, I guess, if one just didn't bother to, I guess, look in a bit more to how statistics are produced, but do go on.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 5:16
Nah, he's just going to vibes here, you know what I mean?
Abby Cartus 5:18
[groan]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 5:19
So Wood continues, "OCHA has provided a running body count since the beginning of the Gaza war, and it currently stands at 34,844. This figure was generated by Hamas and is apparently accepted, give or take a few thousand. The apparent downward revision was made without any accompanying statement to explain the change or sudden precision... Many noticed anyway." Wood continues, "Haq said that the UN had 'difficulty' verifying Hamas's numbers but was adamant that the number of total dead remained the same. There was, he said, a 'reduction in the number of identified bodies.' To clarify, to the extent possible, Haq seems to be arguing that there are just as many dead Palestinians as before, but many have now lost their identity?"
Abby Cartus 6:05
What the fuck?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 6:06
I know.
Phil Rocco 6:07
Did he -- sorry -- that sentence ends with a question mark?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 6:09
Yes, it does.
Phil Rocco 6:10
I don't have the text in front of me.
Abby Cartus 6:11
Yes.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 6:11
Yes, it's --
Phil Rocco 6:12
You know, I think this is one of these pieces that you learn about halfway in is sort of an op-ed or like, I don't know, a very lazy think piece. And you learn it, because it's obvious the person hasn't done, I don't know --
Abby Cartus 6:23
A lick of --
Phil Rocco 6:24
Any reporting, like any reporting. So like a first thing that you might want to do in writing a piece like this, I guess, is think about -- is think about how does a person become encoded as a statistic?
Speaker 1 6:40
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've talked about this so much in the context of COVID, right, where there's provisional death data released, and then it's updated. Like, this is a long process. And this is really kind of just pulling conspiracy out of procedure, almost.
Phil Rocco 6:55
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I feel like this happens all the time, right? The -- there's an innocent version of it, too, which is, if you don't understand how a process for like generating statistics about the world works and something immediately appears fishy to you, but you genuinely don't understand how it was produced, like a first intuition is to just go to conspiracy, right. But often, the reasons for discrepancies or inconsistencies in data are far more mundane.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 7:26
Right. Absolutely. And I think what's important about this is that it's a very good way of sort of getting at what the point of this piece is, because this point about data that he's making, which appears to be the driving force and reason and intent and concern behind his argument, is actually just this armature that's being used to make a bigger argument that really kind of fits into a framing, a preferred framing of how Palestinian data, how Palestinian sources and sort of self reporting should be treated by the media, and what kind of like truth and deference it should have, and whether it should be allowed to sort of stand uncontested. As we'll get into, when we get further in the piece, it becomes a very weird like advice column to the settler state at one point almost. And really kind of the bottom line of the piece is that this argument about data is not only kind of making a lot out of confusion, ignorance, lack of research, whatever, but it also is sort of using data for the power and the perceived power that statistics has and is sort of tied to the idea of objective truth that's like unassailable.
Abby Cartus 8:45
Yeah, well, and like, I've just been thinking the whole time you're talking that it's also tied to this idea that I really think is kind of non-ideological. I think that people from all over the ideological spectrum do this, which is that they think that there is some kind of like numerical proof of questions of political and moral import, and like the vibe that I get from reading this piece is that you know, Graeme -- is that how you say his name, Graeme?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 9:12
It doesn't matter. Who cares.
Abby Cartus 9:13
Yeah, it doesn't -- who gives a shit? But it seems to be like the vibe is that he's saying like, well, you know, we can only take these allegations of genocide seriously if we have accurate numbers to reflect what's really going on, and it's like, that is absolutely asinine. Like, you don't need numbers really to make that determination. Now, in some cases, like legally, I think that might matter but like, there's just such a bad faith undergirding of this whole argument. And it's based in this very common, I think, trust in the objectivity and unassailability of numbers.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 9:50
Yeah, I mean, it's -- what we're seeing here is him really standing up the strawman of the "Hamas" numbers, like the specter in the night, it's -- ugh, it's sickening. So Wood continues, "Haq makes the discrepancy sound like a minor correction. But the UN so drastically reduced the count of identified women and children that it amounts to an admission that it had been spreading deficient numbers for months."
Abby Cartus 10:18
Okay, just a stylistic point. I mean, this person is a fucking writer. Deficient is not the right word if you're trying to argue that the UN is over -- I'm not trying to help him do his like evil deed better. But again, I mean, this just speaks to what Phil was saying. Like, when you have absolutely no idea about any kind of process for how data are constructed, this is the type of shit that you can apparently argue with a straight face?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 10:45
Yeah, absolutely. Should we should we keep going?
Phil Rocco 10:48
Well, let's -- can we pause on this for a second --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 10:50
Oh yeah.
Phil Rocco 10:50
Because, like what he's saying here is, this is an admission of what, like the complicity in reporting false numbers. And the reality is like what does it take for a corpse to be identified, right? And under what conditions does a corpse get reclassified as un-identified? If any single piece of information -- I think the way that it works, based on some actual reporting, is that if there is a missing piece of information, if their name is missing, if the date of birth is missing, if full documentation, however it's defined, is not there, if any of those pieces of information is missing, there's a possibility that person is going to be listed as unidentified. And I mean, if you look at Serbia, in the 1990s, the death counts from Srebrenica didn't get stabilized or weren't stabilized until years and years and years after the event.
Abby Cartus 11:46
Yeah, and not to be so macabre about it, but the types of weapons that are being used, both in terms of like the direct sorts of injuries that they can cause, but also things like buildings collapsing, like it's very, very possible for people to die and for their physical bodies to not be identifiable, or even recoverable. And all of this kind of semantic, you know, jumping jacks about like identified bodies, it feels really, really grotesque to me, because it's like, we've all seen these images, you know what I mean? Like it is -- it's incredibly believable and I think highly likely that it's not possible to identify -- it's not possible to make an identification, at least not under the conditions that prevail currently.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 12:36
I mean, the idea that there is even equipment to move the rubble to excavate all of the buildings that have been collapsed, that are still being demolished, that are being bombed. There is a presupposition here that he's sort of making, right, that is so fucking disgusting, to say that the real thing, the real problem here, this discrepancy that requires an elaborate, coordinated correction, that he's demanding the kind of care and attention go into counting the Palestinian dead, like they're property? Like what the fuck are you talking about?
You know, the fact that this is all being weaponized towards the idea of like, oh, well, here's the real problem. This should be taken as a tacit admission that the UN, for months, right, has been "spreading deficient numbers." Like the priorities that are on display here, right, really kind of tell you something about the perspective that is being prioritized in The Atlantic.
And I mean, it's not really surprising considering who the editor in chief is and the kind of positioning of the rest of the body of work of Graeme Wood, you know. I don't know if listeners all know this, or if you both know this, but like the editor in chief of The Atlantic is a former IOF soldier.
He's a Zionist from the US, but he served in the IOF during the First Intifada. His name is Jeffrey Mark Goldberg. And he was a guard at one of the largest settler state detention facilities during the First Intifada, known in Arabic as Ansar III. And from April 1991, there's this Human Rights Watch report that talks about this facility specifically where the editor in chief of The Atlantic was stationed during the First Intifada, that really kind of gets at just the significance of him having been at this particular camp at this particular time when he was in the IOF. The report is called "Prison Conditions in Israel in the Occupied Territories." And this comes from April 1991, "IDF Detention Camps Visited. Ketsiot (Ansar III) may look like the other IDF detention camps, with its rows of fenced-in tents, but it stands apart as a phenomenon. Its remote desert location, the makeup of its inmate population and its unique conditions give the impression that it is conceived as something other than just a larger version of the IDF detention camps that exist elsewhere.
Ketsiot reflects the apparent determination of the Israeli authorities -- manifested generally in their response to the Intifada -- to leave no one in doubt as to who is in control. Its physical characteristics contribute to... the atmosphere of subjugation that pervades Ketsiot. Ketsiot's fences enclose approximately one out of every 50 West Bank and Gaza males older than 16. Ketsiot is more than four times the size of the next largest incarceration facility of any kind in [occupied Palestine or other areas occupied by the settler state.]" So like, this is the editor in chief of The Atlantic, right? This is someone who has let's say vested interest in deprioritizing the perspectives of Palestinians and delegitimizing attacks and critiques of the settler state, right?
And when you sort of couch the just blatant misuse and data errors that are going on, the kind of lapses in logic, the leaps to conspiracy, it just becomes so obvious too that Graeme Wood, who really has this axe to grind in his work of sort of being like, oh, well, you know, I don't know if you looked at the whole truth, but here I am coming from this standpoint where I have like a very superior objective analysis that I can offer you, that's going to cut through the bullshit and sort of tell you what's really going on. And his opinions always redound to these awful fucking conclusions, like, you know, it's legally okay to kill children sometimes in the context of genocide in Palestine, right. And what we're really seeing here is a piece of propaganda that is relying on the power of data to bolster its credibility.
Phil Rocco 16:57
Well, yeah. And I think like here's one -- one important takeaway from the piece is he begins with the supposition that the statistics make no sense. You would think that maybe by the end of that piece, you would get a concrete debunking and say, like, here's why this is wrong, or here's what like may be a better, more plausible estimate, or a set of parameters around that estimate, or maybe even like, here's some other independent source, but like something more -- you know, maybe even if not that far, something that feels more like a concrete refutation of the death toll as it stands. You don't get any of that in this piece.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 17:40
No.
Abby Cartus 17:40
No.
Phil Rocco 17:40
Like he ultimately has to admit that like there's no necessary alternative to these death tolls. And indeed, I sort of wonder if he read the Lancet study that looked at data reliability from the same source that he's sort of attacking, and kind of compared it with an -- what you would typically do if you were trying to audit a source of information, do an independent audit with a different source of data on a delimited population, and found that if anything, the Ministry of Health data is an undercount, at least when they were looking at it over the last year. And so it's just like, in the end, all you get is a series of just sort of like chin stroking kind of questions.
Abby Cartus 18:20
Well, yeah. I feel like this is intentional, that by the end of the piece, you have no more clarity about these death statistics, or how they come into being, or what they mean, or their reliability, or anything like that. But at the end, what you're left with is just a vague sense that there is some kind of conspiracy to exaggerate how bad the situation is, between the Hamas media office or whatever the fuck, and like the United Nations, which is so gross. I don't know, like, there's just -- it's -- yeah.
Phil Rocco 18:52
Or if you don't want to go that far, if your sensibilities won't let you go that far in the piece, there are some dodges in the piece, which then leads you to the conclusion, you know, oh dear, how will we ever know? Which is actually -- it does a lot -- that, that --
Abby Cartus 19:07
That does a lot more, I think, yeah.
Phil Rocco 19:08
That conclusion itself does a hell of a lot of work politically, because if what you're doing is just creating this complete epistemic cloud over the whole situation, it will then sort of redound to just a war of numbers.
Abby Cartus 19:08
Well, and it's interesting that it's happening now, right, that this like epistemic -- it's like, yeah, it's the epistemic version of like a squid shooting out ink, you know what I mean, to like confuse a predator. I don't know, are squids predators? I don't know, whatever, like --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 19:40
Yeah. Both. They're predator and prey.
Abby Cartus 19:42
Ugh. Aren't we all? But I think it's interesting the timing of this, you know, this is happening now, this attempt to create a sense that it really is unresolved, that there is some kind of big important question that remains unresolved out there at exactly the time when it feels like a lot of public opinion has kind of turned a corner, you know what I mean? It feels --honestly, for the first time in my life, it feels like there is kind of an opening in the discourse more broadly, and that Biden's basically unqualified support for whatever Netanyahu wants to do, like that's becoming very unpopular. And so yeah, I think the sense that like, well, well, well, it is a great deal more complicated than that. But what do you know, there's simply no way to figure it out. Like I'm just gonna dangle this out here, that you can't trust these numbers, and the idea that there's something suss going on. Yeah, I think that does a ton of political work, particularly at this -- at this moment in time. Yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 20:46
Mhm. I mean, I was talking to one of our listeners in Gaza about this, it was like back -- this came out mid May. And he was just like, you know, isn't it amazing how he manages to both disembody and then datify and then commodify and then disappear Palestinians and Palestinian knowledge and like our bodies and our souls in an article that starts by claiming that you know, this is about the dignity of those killed or still living.
Abby Cartus 21:19
Yeah, yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 21:20
[sighs] Alright, Wood continues "If you are finding this mystifying, you are not alone. As Adesnik explains, part of the confusion arises from the Ministry of Health's shifting accounting labels. Its system has evolved, and it now tallies named and identified corpses that have passed through its morgues--as well as, in a separate category, 'unidentified' dead, for whom it has neither a body nor a name, just a vaguely-defined 'report' from outside the hospital system. If, for example, first responders bring in a body, and they say [they have] seven other bodies are probably still under the rubble, the body in the morgue would count as identified and the seven others as unidentified. The additional source of confusion is seriously aberrant numbers from the Government Media Office. Neither Hamas source, Adesnik writes, has fully explained where it gets its estimate of the number of unaccounted-for dead: more than 10,000 people. During the war, hospitals have stopped functioning, and keeping people alive has taken higher priority than keeping defensible statistics."
Abby Cartus 21:22
Jesus fucking Christ.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 21:27
"But these numbers matter--first, because of the dignity of those killed or still living, and second, because total deaths and the ratio of combatant to noncombatant deaths will have implications for judgments about alleged war crimes and genocide." And I think here is where we kind of get to the nugget of where his real concerns are, which is, again, like aligned with, let's say, the editorial perspective of The Atlantic and the kind of, you know, in general, pro-settler genocide position that we see all over the United States right now, whether that's out of protecting the settler state itself and its hegemony and its power, you know, protecting that right to that land that they're trying to assert, you know, that they don't want to give back, that they want to lay claim to, protecting the right to take more land, of the right of US companies to keep sending weapons that the US government is going to pay for, right? Like there are so many different angles of sort of interests that you could enter this from, but it's all clear at the end of the day that this is about discrediting Palestinians and discrediting records of appalling tragedies. Like some of these bodies are unidentified because they killed like an entire black of people, right, and it's family after family after family. And like, who is left, right, to identify? Are there even enough people to clear the streets, let alone clear the rubble, let alone transport people? Are the streets clear enough to take people on them in ambulances? The settler government has removed bodies that have been buried in mass graves. They're not returning people's bodies. It is -- I mean, to -- to really kind of grapple with the entitlement of this piece, the real nudge-nudge, like you wouldn't dare treat a Palestinian as a human being, would you -- is just all over it.
Abby Cartus 24:27
Yeah. And the idea that this kind of like motivated bean counting is about the dignity of those killed or still living is just -- like, it's just astounding. I don't know. I have nothing even intelligent to say about it. Because I mean, entitlement is just the word. I'm like, how the fuck -- how the fuck do you say -- like ugh, I don't know.
Phil Rocco 24:48
Well, because, let's take that proposition to its logical conclusion. There's sort of a dodge here, like a really big one. Which is that, let's take that proposition, that getting the precise count is really about the dignity of people who have been killed and who are still living. Is it the precision of that count that's the thing that gives them dignity? Or is it about like applying some pretty basic rules of deduction when we're thinking about it, it's like, do we suppose that given the difficulty in recording deaths, that the deaths are being undercounted or over-counted, right? And so then you have to make some judgments about what is plausible, what is a plausible range? What is a plausible floor? And is that plausible floor, I don't know, evidence of war crimes, evidence of genocide, take your pick. But rather than having -- like, coming right out, and he does, there's the sort of -- the ur line of this piece, which is about the legality of killing a child. Rather than making that the focus of the piece, he smuggles it in, right, to a piece that could read like sort of a -- you know, again, like a sort of chin scratching Vox or NPR story about like, how do we really know. But it's like, we're not counting -- we're not counting a civilian population during a time of peace. We're not counting objects in a warehouse. We're counting a population that is under assault. And so what really matters, I don't know, to their dignity, is whether or not we're willing to apply a reasonable set of parameters about what's a plausible floor here. And rather than doing that, he flips the conversation to do a kind of discrediting that is either false or trivially true.
Abby Cartus 26:41
Yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 26:41
So well put, Phil. Are you ready for this next line? I'm going to try and get through the whole paragraph, and then we'll stop because it's the first line of this next one is -- phew. Alright.
Abby Cartus 26:52
It's a doozy.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 26:53
It's a doozy. Alright. Graeme Wood continues, "This is one of those moments when the fog of statistics could be dispersed with just a few sentences of straight talk, of the sort rarely uttered by spokespeople."
Phil Rocco 27:09
Yeah, that's how it works. That's how all of this works. The straight talk -- if we only got the Straight Talk Express in here.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 27:19
Problems would be solved, right?
Abby Cartus 27:20
I'm heading down to Eton Park to interview some dude in a camo hat, [laughter] I just need some straight talk about this.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 27:26
This is why I said, like it turns at one point into a bizarre advice column to the settler state on how they should be managing their hasbara, like propaganda PR strategy. And this is really where that pivot happens. Wood continues, "The UN numbers changed because the UN has little idea how many children have been killed in Gaza, beyond 'a lot.' It gets its statistics from Hamas. Where else would it get them? There are no independent epidemiologists in Gaza right now doing the survey work, house to bombed-out house, that would yield reliable numbers. So OCHA used unreliable ones it never concealed its sources, but it distributed even the most questionable numbers under the UN name."
Abby Cartus 28:15
I mean, what the fuck? Okay, what's the counterfactual scenario here? Where OCHA didn't report any numbers --
Phil Rocco 28:20
The counterfactual scenario is don't report any numbers -- exactly! I was just gonna say that. Yes.
Abby Cartus 28:24
And then Graeme Wood is like genocide, what genocide?
Phil Rocco 28:27
Yeah, no children dead, okay?
Abby Cartus 28:28
Like no one has died.
Phil Rocco 28:30
Or better yet, like 0*, right?
Abby Cartus 28:33
Yeah.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 28:33
Right.
Phil Rocco 28:36
It's worth saying like, death counts always implicitly have an asterisk, and they are estimates. They are always estimates. That's just -- I mean, if you don't like that --
Abby Cartus 28:47
That just is.
Phil Rocco 28:48
If you don't like that, that's like saying, like "I don't like air." That's like saying, like I can't accept the fact that there's statistical uncertainty in a process.
Abby Cartus 28:59
It is really weird. And I think it goes back, it goes back to the entitlement piece that Beatrice was talking about, right? Like, I think there's an entitlement in, honestly, holding the requirements for certainty and accuracy and like real time death numbers in this instance to an impossibly high standard.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 29:24
But Abby, if we just like sent epidemiologists on the ground in Gaza --
Abby Cartus 29:28
I know, that --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 29:29
Door to door, we would be able to have Call of Duty like body count, so that we can designate them --
Abby Cartus 29:38
So that Graeme can decide, yeah --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 29:40
Whether they count or not for the ICJ hearings, and at night, you know, the Zionist bros at The Atlantic can like cheers beers over that day's body count, like they're fucking looking at a video game leaderboard. It's -- it's, um, it's sickening.
Abby Cartus 29:58
Yeah, I mean, I had to laugh this like dark, sickening laughter at that line, because, yeah, I mean, what -- what is the implication here? That we should have independent epidemiologists going door to door? Like, how is this situation going to be improved by sending me, you know what I mean, [laughing], like to walk - it's just like, what the fuck?
Phil Rocco 30:20
But also like, here's the thing, okay, you know, if you're going to really dispute it, what's your back of the envelope, right? What, like what -- what -- it's, okay, let's say it's half as large as they're saying. That seems -- that's completely implausible, by the way, but let's just say it's half as large. Does that -- like how does that --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 30:40
Doesn't change a thing.
Abby Cartus 30:40
Doesn't change a goddamn thing.
Phil Rocco 30:42
How would that substantively change your conclusion about these things, you know what I mean? Like, that's really what -- what is missing here. And I think it's missing in so many -- like, this is a not at all uncommon thing, which is a sort of endless puzzling over like, wow, it's really hard to get like an accurate statistic. But it's like, at the end of the day, if it changed by half, would that really alter your -- because I actually don't think that even if it increased by half, my perception would more or less be the same.
Abby Cartus 31:15
Mhm, the same.
Phil Rocco 31:16
Because once you've established that like order of scale of slaughter, the precision will matter to some extent for like international courts prosecuting things, it'll matter for when we try to reconcile like what happened here. But it's not going to change the overall conclusion about what's happening. And that, to me, that's the ultimate failure of this kind of writing, because it really does direct people to a character of question or class of question that is really in the shadow of a much more important question, like what ultimately is going on here? And would a change in statistics by half really alter how you perceive it?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 31:59
Yeah. I mean, the idea of like the epidemiologists, independent epidemiologists in Gaza doing survey work, house to bombed-out house. Like your house gets bombed: please God, someone send me an epidemiologist, please.
Abby Cartus 32:12
Send me an epidemiologist, said no one ever in the history of human civilization.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 32:19
Let alone like, of course, what if that epidemiologist were a Palestinian epidemiologist? Because there are a lot of brilliant epidemiologists all over the Gaza Strip. And sure as hell, like if they went house to bombed-out house --
Abby Cartus 32:33
Well, they wouldn't be "independent."
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 32:36
Right. They wouldn't be independent, as per Graeme Wood. And this is a hobby horse of his, ultimately, this kind of idea that he comes from this perspective where as an outsider, he really has a superior view of it that can shed the bias and shed the fog, right? Maybe this is like a good moment to get into Graeme Wood's background, but he wrote this book that purports to answer the question, like what does ISIS really want? And this is like a --
Abby Cartus 33:02
[laughing]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 33:03
It was published in 2016. I'm not gonna name it. you can easily Google this. But the book is like a series of vignettes of his first person encounters with people. And he says that it's the definitive account of the strategy, psychology and fundamentalism, driving what he calls a new wave of even more deadly terrorism. And like Steven Pinker was a big fan of the book. And throughout the promotional tour of it, I checked out some of these appearances and stuff, that Bill Maher appearance I sent you both, of his, is associated with the book tour and stuff. He spends way more time essentially justifying the fact that he's even written about this at all, and that he has something worthwhile to say on the subject, by essentially saying, you know, Muslim reporters wouldn't be able to see the way that I see the situation and I just really need to push back on the assertion that ISIS is not inspired by Islamic theology or something. It's like, he's like, I have more objectivity, I have superior objectivity, really, because I'm coming from this position where I'm totally an outsider, and I know nothing about what I'm talking about. And he really kind of boasts this as his credentials. And there's these like just terribly cringe videos of him on like, you know, "Vice Speaks To," like eight years ago, where he's just sitting there like a guppy like, ha ha, I know nothing, and I'm so proud of it.
Abby Cartus 34:23
Yeah, you would think that it would be a major limitation to be a huge ignoramus in my line of work, but I'm here to tell you why it's actually my biggest strength.
Phil Rocco 34:31
I mean, yeah, like there is -- there is a kind of -- an archetype in reportage going a very long way back, which is like, I'm not part of this community that thinks about this thing all the time, and thus, I'm gonna like come in and you know, give a different look at it. I'm going to be evaluating not only what's happening, but the way that the sort of like discursive world of the people who are reporting on and talking about what's happening, I'm going to try to comment on those norms as well. And when it's done well, it's really good. But the challenge of it is you actually do have to understand how the things in the world that you're looking at are produced.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 35:12
I hate that we have to keep going, but in this next sentence that I'm about to say that he wrote, I can't believe it's coming out of my mouth, but here we go. Graeme Wood continues, "Operating a statistics laundromat for Hamas's media wing is embarrassing. But the.." --
Abby Cartus 35:28
Again, what the fuck.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 35:29
I know. "But the absence of alternatives is also concerning. Any indictment of OCHA's numbers should propose better sources for numbers--and in their absence, ask why there aren't any."
Abby Cartus 35:42
Okay Graeme, get on it, like -- I'm sorry, I'm interrupting you [laughing].
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 35:45
No, no, it's all good. "Some of the blame for this absence falls on Hamas..." blah, blah, blah, blah, he says some, you know, whatever shit, and then he says, "Collecting data that contradicted Hamas's official figures would be hard or fatal, even in relative peacetime. But Israel deserves reproach, too," he writes, "Unlike Hamas, Israel purports to abide by the principles of the laws of war, including proportionality and distinction between combatants and civilians. Hamas has fought with transparent disregard for these principles. Israel has conducted its war opaquely, in such a way that one must take its word that every bomb and every round is dropped or fired lawfully."
Abby Cartus 36:31
One must do no such fucking thing.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 36:33
"Its media operations in this war will be remembered as a historic failure that allowed Hamas's propaganda to be accepted and spread almost without rebuttal." Now, as I said, it was like disgusting and embarrassing to know I was about to have to read this section of the piece out, because it is just like full of stigmatizing, propagandistic frames. But I think this idea that he gets to at the end of these two paragraphs, we really have to talk about this kind of idea of the statistics laundromat and this being like a strategic problem, right, that is solved through conducting transparent genocide, you know?
Phil Rocco 37:14
Right, yeah.
Abby Cartus 37:14
Yeah. I thought that was very interesting, because where this is like -- I'm like leading, or I'm looking ahead a little bit into the next few paragraphs, but like, what this is all building up to is he's like, well, the IDF should allow journalists to embed with them, you know, and -- yeah. It's just --
Phil Rocco 37:31
Why not bring a statistician along too, you know, like is that the argument? I mean, okay. So I want to like go through kind of carefully the syllogism here. So, the syllogism is something like, there are some inconsistencies in the data that the UN is getting and inconsistencies that he's not looking into them very carefully, but he does have to provide some like bunting to say like, okay, there are some potential reasons why these inconsistencies might exist that are kind of mundane. So then fact three, the UN is laundering -- like the UN, in trying to produce a death count with the only available data it has, is then engaging in the laundering of propaganda. I don't see how those -- like the assorted facts lead to that conclusion, right, at all.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 38:24
I mean, this is really a kind of Monday morning quarterback situation, where he's like turning to the Zionist entity and saying, y'all need to get a handle on your media operations here, because you're letting this data coming from a Palestinian source stand unchallenged, right? And really this idea of propaganda to be accepted and spread almost without rebuttal, this whole framework that he is putting forward here is almost -- as I said, it's this kind of sickening like Zionist advice column, right, about how to run a propaganda war. And I think the thing that is just disgusting, right, as Abby said, this is about setting up a section where he talks about the need for transparency and how we need to be like embedding journalists with the IOF in order for them to report on this and sort of waxes poetic about embedding journalists in the US led war on Afghanistan and Iraq and how good journalists have objectivity, you know, any good journalist has objectivity.
Abby Cartus 39:27
And then when you've been in the bivouac or whatever, with the Marines for a while, they let down their guard and you can tell if they are really like indiscriminately killing civilians or not. It's just like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like [sigh]. Sorry, I keep interrupting you. I've gotten nothing.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 39:42
No. I mean, it's like to call this guy a bootlicking genocide-monger, like Zionist apologists fanboy is just an understatement. It is -- it is truly some of the most despicable rhetoric we've seen crafted but the thing is is that it's not unique too, right?
This is -- the questioning of this data, he's writing about it because he's not the only one who has been like, huh, I think I found a gold nugget here in this pile of just regular ass sawdust, right? There is like a whole group of people who have been building off this conspiracy theory in the kind of framework of really, you know, it's -- I think it reminds me a lot of like the Alex Jones thing, being like the Sandy Hook children were not real, right?
The idea that the number of victims and the accounting of the dead, that is the ultimate judge of accountability, and who is held responsible, and if you could only beat the numbers by juicing everything just the right way and just engineering your propaganda war or your number counting to be transparent and be open and let the journalists do their work, right, then all of this is okay, right? Like as if that's the biggest problem with what has been happening the last eight months, what has been happening the last 76 years, right, that the problem is journalistic access? Well, and I think this is a perfect moment to get to the next to last paragraph, which is the kind of ultimate paragraph that has been going around, the screenshotted one, the one about killing children legally.
We're gonna skip through his arguments about exactly how he would achieve journalistic transparency. So alright, let's get right into this. So Wood continues, "To rebut Hamas's allegations by letting journalists see the war up close would be a calculated risk. Even when conducted legally, war is ugly. It is possible to kill children legally, if for example one is being attacked by an enemy who hides behind them.
But the sight of a legally killed child is no less disturbing than the sight of a murdered one. An infanticide that no one can see is also going to attract suspicion. Unsympathetic observers will think Israel is conducting its war in the manner of other countries whose counter insurgent forces have preferred to work out a view of independent media. None of this excuses OCHA, which jeopardized its credibility by repeating dubious numbers, long after the reasons for doubting them had been explained. That credibility is a precious resource. The IDF claims --"
Phil Rocco 42:31
I'm curious -- yeah, I'm just --
Abby Cartus 42:32
I've got a lot, yeah.
Phil Rocco 42:33
Yeah, there's a lot going on there. But like just one basic one is like, what would credibility look like to Graeme Wood, right? Like, what would be a sufficient level -- like what, the numbers should never -- is credibility just stability? Like, is that -- is that we're talking about here? It doesn't make any sense to me in that regard.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 42:51
Yeah, I mean, I think he's saying that settler credibility matters more than Palestinian life. You know, I mean, the reasoning of "it is possible to legally kill children" is quite motivated, right, like to write that sentence on a page, to make that argument, to be the person to die on that hill.
Abby Cartus 43:10
I want to pick up on something that's at the very beginning of what you read, which is that he opens this -- he opens this paragraph, this notorious paragraph, by saying "to rebut allegations by letting journalists see the war up close would be a calculated risk." And I'm just thinking to myself, you know, I'm like, okay, there is this question of what does this credibility mean, but like what does it mean to call this an allegation, like to turn a death count into an allegation?
Like, that's very, very subtle to me, but in some ways, it's kind of the key to the framing of this whole -- of this whole thing, basically, that like, yeah, Palestinians can't be trusted. Their deaths are, in some ways, calculated political moves. And that as such, you know, that even -- that even Palestinians perishing under US-made bombs is like an act of ideological war, on this world stage, where the credibility of the IDF is of paramount concern.
And I can't think of many ways of looking at the situation that are more grotesque than that, but that seems to be kind of really where he's coming from, because I don't really understand how you describe death numbers as allegations.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 44:33
It's fucking heinous, right? Like it -- part of what I struggle with whenever I'm trying to figure out exactly what to communicate about this particular two line framing, of the deaths as allegations, and then the kind of -- like the moral certitude of being like, oh, and you know, we could legally kill children, there are these circumstances, but it still looks just as bad as murdering them.
You know, that -- that positionality, I think what we're looking at here is just a very clear example of using the social and political sort of power of statistical language interpretation and of that mode, right, to essentially reframe the lives that are being taken, the murder, the mass murder of Palestinians, the mass destruction of the Gaza Strip ecology and landscape and history and architecture and knowledge, right?
All the universities have been destroyed, the libraries have been bombed, the houses that haven't been bombed are being bulldozed, the hospitals are being dismantled, the water infrastructure is being bombed. To frame the counting and accounting of these horrors, among them tens of thousands of people murdered, as allegations, as rhetorical chits in a game of PR chess, right? That is the point of this piece. That is the real core of it, right, to take this idea of life and death and translate it through the lens of statistics, right?
Abby Cartus 46:25
It's right there in that sentence, "To rebut Hamas's allegations by letting journalists see the war up close would be a calculated risk."
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 46:34
Yes, yeah.
Abby Cartus 46:34
You know, and like that -- that is kind of an idea, you know, that's like the -- I feel like that's the technical substructure of this argument as it relates to statistics and counting and numbers, is that there actually is a way, there is a way to get some kind of accurate count, you know what I mean? And there is a way to conduct the full on campaign of, I'm sorry, like ethnic cleansing, ecocide that's being carried out in Gaza right now, that like there are -- there are rules and procedures that kind of make it acceptable, or make it okay. And by like precisely, by precisely calculating the risk to public opinion of letting some journalists in to see what's really going on, like, I don't know, that we can somehow establish, or somehow once and for all ratify, you know what I mean, that Israel's actions here are justified, at least legally, if not morally.
Phil Rocco 47:45
Let's run out that hypothetical. You let journalists, more journalists -- where the IOF can have journalists embedded with them and, you know, maybe let's throw in an epidemiologist too. Would having this sort of hypothetical, independent set of eyes actually alter Israel's argument that essentially every -- every last inch of Gaza is, you know -- I mean, again, I would defy you to say like, what does Israel currently not consider a legitimate military target? Is there anything?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 48:18
No, because it's a farce, right? Because it's a construction and a justification, right? This is -- the thing it reminds me of, right, actually is hospital billing or medical billing, when you're just sort of dealing with a doctor's office, and maybe they're like trying to get your care or something. And they start talking about exploiting billing codes to try and get you the care that you need, for example. I think that the kind of way that -- and this is definitely incentivized by the form of international law and of "war crimes law" and genocide as it's sort of determined through the Hague, for example.
And we talked about this in our episode with Maryam Jamshidi, and she has done a lot of great work on this, I'd highly recommend anyone that wants to dig deeper on some of this like international legal context to check that episode out if you haven't already heard it.
But you know, ultimately, like the form of how these things are interpreted through international law incentivizes essentially a kind of winning by technicality mindset towards how these things are talked about, right? Like the US law itself, right, criminalizes essentially treating Palestinians as a self-determined people, right?
There are international penalties when countries recognize Palestine, right? This is a -- this is a regime that has multiple arms of discipline and multiple ways that it projects this idea of who is in control and who has power in the situation and who is entitled to have that control and power. And so ultimately, every sort of justification, whether it's the frame of combatant or being able to designate something a military target, you know, there is really, I think, an importance to seeing these things as the hollow justifications that they are, right?
Because one of the real cores of this piece, right, is doing this kind of advice, Monday morning quarterbacking, right, the kind of commentary, thinkpiece, op-ed form, to basically suggest other ways to get out of genocide charges on a technicality, while testing out and reinforcing an argument that not only dehumanizes Palestinians, paints them as untrustworthy, paints their deaths as allegations, right, says it's legal to kill children, that all of that too then also manages to dematerialize Palestinian life, right, and turn it into this thing where the numbers are the priority. It is -- this is how the media and the way that the media sort of engages with this topic also is part of the violence of this genocide and of the settler colonial project, right, because it's not just the direct attacks, right. It's also these attacks in wars of sort of information and wars of positionality, in op-eds.
And ultimately, what is going on here is that this is also, I think, a really interesting sort of self statement about journalism, right, and what the point of journalism is. This insistence that journalists need to be embedded, that journalists need to narrate war in order to make sure that the public accepts the facts as they're most favorable to the state, right, is really kind of telling us a little bit about where the purpose of journalism might lie for the editorial perspective of The Atlantic and its staff writers, you know?
Abby Cartus 52:07
Yeah. And serving like this further purpose of, yeah, just like you said, further dematerializing Palestinian, you know what I mean? I mean, who can better narrate the experience of what's happening in Gaza right now than Palestinians? But you know, Graeme Wood would say some fucking journalist from Missouri, probably.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 52:25
Him. He can, you know? That's what he says. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to -- it's like a -- it's a hard piece to deal with. There's I guess like one more line after what we read, but it's not even like really worth engaging with them. He closes the piece by saying, you know, this thing about like there needs to be like a trusted third party to "verify this macabre estimate with greater precision."
Phil Rocco 52:52
Yeah, there needs to be this, I don't know, what do you call it, international law somehow? Like, what? Okay. Alright. We have that, you know, such institutions. Have they -- exactly what have they guaranteed in this particular moment?
Abby Cartus 53:08
I guess, I don't know, what I would say is like, I don't particularly -- I don't think that Graeme Wood is like a huge supporter of data collection best practices or anything, like I just don't think that he's really a crusader for that. I think that the purpose of this piece is to be demobilizing, because that is what technical dithering is always about. You know, it's supposed to make people who read it feel like there is some huge problem, we don't really know what it is because we haven't looked into how these statistics actually get produced under the conditions in which they are being produced.
But the point of this, and the point of all this technical dithering about numbers, again, is just to make people feel like there is some problem, but it's not really solvable. And to the extent that I have feelings about the use of numbers and statistics and counting here, it just reinforces my feeling that like these kinds of -- again, I mean, this is the Bruno Latour quote that I'm going to repurpose for a totally different thing, the Bruno Latour quote that I'm always paraphrasing on the podcast, like when controversy erupts, debates become technical. And this just seems like another example of that.
So, you know, like, there's no -- now, I'm not speaking in legal terms, in international legal terms. I'm speaking just in moral terms. There is not really -- at this scale, as Phil was saying, you know what I mean, the scale of the slaughter here has already been established. And at this scale, there is not really -- like even 50%, a margin of error of 50%, 60% wouldn't change what we're looking at here. And you simply don't have to be browbeat by this like dithering and bean counting over numbers, because they're is no numeric threshold of deaths of a genocide that is going to disprove it.
Like, that's not really, at the end of the day and at this point, like that's not really a numerical argument. So I guess it's not very inspiring or anything but my final thought is that you can just feel free to like wad this op-ed up and flush it down the toilet, because it's fucking useless.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 55:25
I don't know, I always find when someone says like, hey bro, don't get got by this bullshit, that is very inspiring, you know, and reassuring.
Abby Cartus 55:34
[laughing] Yeah. Just don't get got by this bullshit. This is just -- this -- like it's sloppy work by a piece of shit guy. Like fuck off. You don't have to listen to anything this guy says.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 55:43
Yeah. I think it's also evidence that the real kind of like idea of the possibility of building one on one relationships with people on the ground in Gaza, which is absolutely doable, because while internet is not great in the Strip right now, it does exist and there are people and you can talk to them and build relationships with them. And the capacity for you to do that is a way to challenge genocide.
Ultimately, this is part of, I think, what our guest, Rasha Abdulhadi, was getting at in their call for people to do whatever they could to throw into the gears of genocide. I think what this article really shows is, at the end of the day, is also just how fundamentally threatened the Zionist entity is by the power and strength of solidarity that's emerging internationally, resoundingly, in solidarity with Palestine.
Folks who are engaging in political education, who are learning about the real history of Palestine, that this entire apparatus that Wood is saying needs to do better, really exists to suppress, right? And this is, again, I think, a really great reminder that folks on the ground in Gaza also have direct material asks, and you can go to GazaFunds.com. It is a site that folks have put together that is aggregating featured fundraisers for folks in Gaza, especially ones that are stalling, that need support. You can adopt a fundraiser, help see it across the finish line of its goal, you know, build relationships, ask people, how are you doing? How was your day? You know, how can I help you? Checking in with them.
This is really the kind of thing that it gets down to the most basic level that the state apparatus attempting to suppress and repress all support for Palestinian self determination is really pervasive, and any and all actions that we do, from the big sort of visible protests, to the very small, intimate social connections are critically important. So I think with that, this is a good place to leave it. I have, you know, a million things I could say. But you know, number one on my mind is: fuck Graeme Wood and fuck The Atlantic.
Abby Cartus 57:59
Yeah. Fuck Graeme Wood and fuck The Atlantic forever.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 58:01
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