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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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A comparison is indeed apt, because just like we have many well-researched contemporary estimates of the Jewish population of Central and Eastern Europe before 1939 and after 1945, we have many well-researched contemporary estimates of the Arab population of Gaza in 2023 and will almost certainly have good estimates after the end of the current war given how international the Palestinian diaspora (much like the Jewish diaspora) now is, how many relatives people have abroad, how many people are aware of extended family members and so on.

We will therefore be able to find, to a likely high degree of accuracy, what percentage of the civilian population of the Gaza strip (2.3 million pre-war) under Israeli military authority has died in the war that is currently unfolding.

If the percentage is close to the figures for the proportion of Central and Eastern European Jewish civilians who vanished between 1941 and 1945 (over 80%) or even the proportion for European Jewry as a whole, including in countries never occupied by Axis forces like the UK and most of Russia (~65%), I will accept that the events are comparable in precisely the way you insist they are.

I think, however, that it is very unlikely that even 10% of the civilian population of the Gaza strip will die in this conflict. It is unlikely even 5% will (the current figure, doubling the official number and taking all casualties as civilian, is perhaps 2%). This is well within the bounds of modern conflict (for example, 15% of the Korean civilian population died in the Korean War; as a comment below reminds us, 10% of Afghans died in the Soviet war there). 80% is not, which is why revisionists must argue that most Holocaust victims never even existed, not that they just didn't die.