Okay, does anyone remember what we do when we see rage bait?
In information literacy instruction, we use the acronym SIFT. It stands for :
Stop (Or Slow the fuck down)
Trace back to the original source
Here, all we're told about the source is that it's an article in The Atlantic. I already know that The Atlantic is a mainstream, somewhat left-of-center (by US standards) general-interest magazine. Based on that, I would expect its coverage to be pro-Israel, but still acknowledge that Palestinians are human beings and killing children is bad. (And, spoiler, that's pretty much what happens in the article.)
Finding other coverage is difficult because it's not really clear from the excerpt what this article is covering: it's definitely something to do with Palestine, and civilian casualties, and the technical definitions of war crimes, but that is a big topic. So I'm going to put that to one side for the moment.
Tracing back to the original source is easy: I just picked a distinctive phrase from the excerpt--not the inflammatory one--and put it into Google. Here's the article. (The Atlantic wants you to create an account to view X number of free articles a month, but the 12-foot ladder works.)
Here's the title, subtitle, and author:
The UN’s Gaza Statistics Make No Sense
The actual death toll matters—first, because of the dignity of those killed or still living. By Graeme Wood
So that tells us some important context already, about what the article is about and why it's important. The author is saying that we don't know how many people have been killed in Gaza, and we should.
The first paragraph of the article gives us the more immediate context for why he's talking about this topic right now: the UN just revised its official figure for the death toll in Gaza, downward, by a lot. That seems fishy.
It turns out that what happened is that the UN changed which department of Hamas it gets its numbers from. The higher number comes from their media office, the lower one from the Ministry of Health.
The lower number, it turns out, is the number of confirmed dead: identified deceased people, or unidentified remains in a morgue/some kind of official setting. The higher number includes things like,
If, for example, first responders bring in a body, and they say 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 article emphasizes that this is an example, and Hamas isn't providing details on how this number is calculated. The author then goes on to talk about how the UN is being cagey about the source of its numbers, and then the second half of the article--which is where the inflammatory statement comes in--is about how Israel, by limiting journalists and other outside observers' access to Gaza, is not helping itself beat those war crimes allegations.
The gist is kind of that he, the author, would really like to believe them that they aren't doing war crimes, but they're making it very difficult.
Which, again, is kind of what you'd expect from a mainstream, left-of-center publication in the US at this point: extreme reluctance to criticize Israel, but describing things that they could be criticized for.
The inflammatory line is true: a child being killed in a war zone isn't automatically a war crime. This is something that isn't usually acknowledged, for obvious reasons. But, for instance, a factory that manufactures weapons would generally be considered a legitimate target, and if a child happened to be, say, visiting their parent at work when that factory is bombed, that's not a war crime*.
So that's the context for that line. When I first started writing this, I was going to say that it's still badly phrased, but now that I've thought about it more, I think it's phrased that way on purpose.
Israel is killing kids in Gaza. That is definitely happening, and getting bogged down in the minutia of whether that is or isn't technically a war crime, that gives us psychological distance from the sheer fact that it is definitely happening.
Israel can't make themselves look better by being more transparent, because--even if they are, actually, technically adhering to the laws of war--what they're doing is still shocking to the conscience. The nature of this war--that it's taking place in a small, densely populated area, where the whole thing is effectively a combat zone but noncombatants cannot leave--makes atrocities inevitable.
The conclusion here--which, I want to be clear, the author of this article stops well short of actually saying--is that, even if you accept that Israel has legitimate security interests in Gaza, you have to acknowledge that it has created a situation where it cannot defend those interests without killing kids.
And once you acknowledge that, you either have to decide that killing kids is somehow OK in this instance, or you have to admit that Israel's entire doctrine vis-a-vis Gaza is fundamentally flawed. Those are the choices, and if you can't stomach the first one, you have to accept the second--even if you, like the author of the article and like most moderate liberals in the US, you are extremely reluctant to criticize Israel.
(*Also, and this is even more saying the quiet part out loud, but you get that saying "it's possible to kill a child legally" is a savage indictment of the very concept of war crimes, right? If we can't find a way to draw the line that doesn't allow at least some child murder--an act that every human society considers morally abhorrent--then maybe the entire idea of a morally acceptable way to conduct war is bullshit.)
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