Any killing is an atrocity, but our analytically culturally-conditioned brains sometimes need comparative perspectives to help us feel this at distance and act.
Something like 10,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israeli attacks in the last month [1], the majority of them women and children [6]. Gaza's population is about 2 million. 1 in 200 Gazans have been killed in the last month.
In the years of the USA's war in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, Western forces killed about 1 in 1000 Afghan civilians and about 1 in 200 Iraqi civilians [4]. In the first 6 months of the invasion of Iraq, about 1 in 10,000 Iraqi civilians were killed (4,000) [5].
COVID killed 1 in 1000 people in the USA in the year 2020 [3].
The USA gives about $4 billion in military grants to Israel every year [7]. The USA spent an average of $100 billion per year on its war in Afghanistan.
Understand. Feel. Act.
[1] https://truthout.org/articles/bidens-own-officials-cite-the-palestinian-death-counts-he-cast-doubt-on/
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/17/gaza-size-population-comparison/
[3] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/podcasts/2022/20220107/20220107.htm
[4] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/WarDeathToll
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/oct/29/iraq.suzannegoldenberg
[6] https://www.who.int/news/item/03-11-2023-women-and-newborns-bearing-the-brunt-of-the-conflict-in-gaza-un-agencies-warn
[7] https://sgp.fas.org/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf
[8] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/human-and-budgetary-costs-date-us-war-afghanistan-2001-2022
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