Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Political Scientist and liberal Zionist Michael Walzer gave an interview early in the Israeli campaign against Gaza in which he said, “It’s not easy for me to say such a thing, but if there were almost 10,000 Hamas fighters among the 30,000 Palestinians killed, it’s not a bad ratio for such a war on urban terrain.”
But how about if the ratio was 8,900 to 41,100?
Walzer had supported the aggressive Israeli war on Egypt in 1967, during which the Israelis first occupied the Palestinian territories that had escaped their grasp in 1948. A proponent of the “just war,” he has always had his thumb on the till for Israeli militarism and expansionism — as indeed have most American political scientists, for reasons I don’t understand. Walzer’s math was incorrect regarding Gaza, as was his genocide denialism.
Israeli investigative journalists have gained access to Israeli military records that include best guests on the number of Hamas militants they have killed versus the number of civilians. It turns out that the civilian kill ratio is 83% to 17% combatants. The true ratio of civilians killed could be even higher, since many civilians are buried under rubble because the Israeli Air Force dropped hundreds of one-ton bombs on inhabited apartment buildings even though there was no clear military target in the vicinity.
That is bad, very bad.
According to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “Since the Russian Federation launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, HRMMU has documented the deaths of at least 13,883 civilians, including 726 children, and 35,548 injured, including 2,234 children.”
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), some 250,000 Russian troops have perished in the war. There are some lower estimates but they are based on passive information-gathering, which always produces underestimates. As for Ukrainian troops, the same report puts their deaths at between 60,000 and 100,000.
So let’s say 350,000 military deaths and 13,883 civilian deaths, while admitting up front that civilian casualties may be underestimated because of the fog of war. That would be a civilian ratio to military ratio of deaths of 3.9%.
Admittedly this civilian kill ratio is small for modern wars, but actually the Ukraine War and the Gaza campaign are fought with similar weapons — planes, drones, artillery and are contemporary with one another.
Vladimir Putin has been widely denounced by European and American politicians for the deaths he has caused in Ukraine.
In contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still feted in Washington and much of Europe, even though he is far more despicable when it comes to treatment of innocent noncombatants like women and children and men who are old or disabled or just not in service.
If Putin is a “monster,” as Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said, what is Netanyahu? Klobuchar doesn’t seem to have a strong opinion on the matter.
“Gaza 52,” Digital, Dream / Surrealism v3, 2025
In the Iraq War, 2003-2011, Iraq Body Count estimated, partly from Pentagon records released by Wikileaks, that US troops were directly responsible for 15,163 violent civilian deaths. They killed on the order of 23,000 Iraqi insurgents. So 65% of those killed by US and coalition troops were enemy combatants, and 35% were civilians.
Walzer compared Gaza to the 2004 Fallujah campaign, but that was just one battle. If we look at the whole war, there isn’t a comparison.
83% of the Iraqi dead in direct violence weren’t innocent civilians.
Of course, tens of thousands more Iraqis died prematurely because of the bad health effects of the war — some public health researchers thought hundreds of thousands. But public health specialists also think two or three hundred thousand Palestinians in Gaza have died or will die because of disease, bad food and water, lack of medical care and so forth, which are caused by Netanyahu. Even on that score, proportionally speaking, the Israeli prime minister is the bigger monster.
Whether it was George W. Bush, a war criminal who unilaterally invaded another country and left it a basket case till this day, or Vladimir Putin, who unilaterally invaded another country and has wreaked havoc on his victim, neither of them can hold a match to Benjamin Netanyahu. In the game of killing innocent children, women and noncombatant men, Netanyahu is the 21st century champion.
Moreover, neither Bush nor Putin tried to starve the civilian population into submission, creating famine conditions in the countries they invaded.
But the UN has certified that there is now a man-made (read: Israeli-made) famine in Gaza.
In the stakes for worst person in the world, Netanyahu wins, hands down.
And yes, it is a genocide.
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