There is con­sid­er­able dis­pute  over who coined the phrase: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and sta­tis­tics.” What is indis­putable, is that any­one who ignores or manip­u­lates sta­tis­tics to dimin­ish vio­lence and human suf­fer­ing, is a liar of unfor­give­able proportion.

The woe­ful­ly inept and under-prepped State Depart­ment spokesper­son Tam­my Bruce, who didn’t seem to know that the Israeli army had blocked food and oth­er aid from enter­ing Gaza for three months, insist­ed that: “The real sto­ry here is that aid, and food, is mov­ing into Gaza at a mas­sive scale…”
Her mea­sure of that was a chaot­ic “hub” secured by Israeli troops and U.S. pri­vate “secu­ri­ty con­trac­tors”, who retreat­ed from des­per­ate, unarmed civil­ians after hand­ing out the grand total of 8,000  “food boxes”.
Appar­ent­ly that sta­tis­tic is jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for sidelin­ing human­i­tar­i­an aid agen­cies with years of expe­ri­ence and sys­tems geared to calm­ly dis­trib­ute mas­sive amounts of vital, life-sav­ing aid through­out the strip, every day.
Accord­ing to a report issued by the World Health Organ­i­sa­tion in mid-May: “The entire 2.1 mil­lion pop­u­la­tion of Gaza is fac­ing pro­longed food short­ages, with near­ly half a mil­lion peo­ple in a cat­a­stroph­ic sit­u­a­tion of hunger, acute mal­nu­tri­tion, star­va­tion, ill­ness and death.”
Israeli spokes­men blame Hamas, insis­tent­ly claim there is no famine or near star­va­tion, and accuse aid agen­cies and their staff of exag­ger­at­ing because they are either pro-Hamas or Hamas-controlled.
I think the rep­u­ta­tions of MSF, Save the Chil­dren, Nor­we­gian Relief, to name but a few oper­at­ing in Gaza, are well above deserv­ing that lev­el of rote condemnation.
The Israeli argu­ment rings all the more hol­low because they have barred inde­pen­dent for­eign jour­nal­ists from enter­ing Gaza to report the war, while accus­ing every Pales­tin­ian media work­er there of being either a Hamas mem­ber or cowed by the gunmen.
Mid­dle East Mon­i­tor report­ed this week that 220 of them have been killed so far, many delib­er­ate­ly.

                                THE BETTER JOB

The busi­ness of aid agen­cies and human­i­tar­i­an work­ers is to make things bet­ter for those in need, irre­spec­tive of ideology.
The busi­ness of politi­cians and gov­ern­ment spokes­men, on the oth­er hand, is repeat­ing their cho­sen nar­ra­tive, whether true or not, until it becomes fact in people’s minds.
Psy­chol­o­gists refer to the tac­tic as  the “illu­sion of truth” effect, per­fect­ed and summed up by no less a pro­pa­gan­da mas­ter than the Nazi Josef Goebbels:“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.”
Sta­tis­tics are the  mainstay.
With­out fail, any Israeli offi­cial or sup­port­er inter­viewed right­ly notes how many peo­ple Hamas mas­sa­cred and abduct­ed on Octo­ber 7, 2023.
I have yet to hear one of them men­tion the num­ber of Pales­tini­ans – main­ly women and chil­dren – killed by Israeli actions in Gaza since then. (55,000+ and counting).
Prime Min­is­ter Binyamin Netanyahu said of sev­er­al West­ern gov­ern­ments who crit­i­cised Israel’s con­duct of the war: “You’re on the wrong side of human­i­ty and you’re on the wrong side of history.”
How many “sides” there are to his­to­ry is debat­able, but some of its lessons are crys­tal clear for those will­ing to look beyond knee-jerk level.
Every Israeli Jew, in fact every Jew­ish per­son I ever met, knows in their heart that every dig­it in the Holo­caust defin­ing num­ber “six mil­lion” was not a sta­tis­tic, but a per­son. Some­one who mat­tered, a human being who did not deserve their fate.
And yet, Finance Min­is­ter Beza­lel Smotrich proud­ly told a “Set­tle­ment Con­fer­ence” in the Occu­pied West Bank: “With­in a few months, we will be able to declare that we have won. Gaza will be total­ly destroyed..” He went on to proud­ly vow that the remain­ing Gaza civil­ians would be con­fined to a small area of the south and “… total­ly despair­ing, under­stand­ing that there is no hope and noth­ing to look for in Gaza, and will be look­ing for relo­ca­tion to begin a new life in oth­er places.”
One won­ders if the words “pogrom” and  “ghet­to” strike any chord with the min­is­ter or his faith­ful. Or per­haps they’ve been inspired by the late Sovi­et dic­ta­tor and mass mur­der­er Joseph Stal­in: “When there’s a per­son, there’s a prob­lem. When there’s no per­son, there’s no problem.”
In sim­ple, bru­tal terms, that’s arguably true if your aim is short-term.
Despite the sta­tis­tics of the Israeli’s abil­i­ty to blast Gaza to rub­ble if they choose, those who think that defines win­ning might note that nei­ther by sta­tis­tics nor any oth­er mea­sure has fire­pow­er ever defeat­ed an ideology.
A senior U.N. human­i­tar­i­an offi­cial decried the chaot­ic effort to deliv­er a rel­a­tive smidgeon of aid under the con­trol of Israeli forces and U.S. hired guns as “an assault on their (Gazans) human dignity.”
The extent of that isn’t sta­tis­ti­cal­ly quan­tifi­able, but it’s a per­fect mea­sure for what is being ignored.

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