🇮🇱🇵🇸 73,000 dead in Gaza, and Israeli advocate Joseph Cohen thinks that number isn’t as bad as it looks
This is where my debate between Sami Hamdi and Joseph went completely off the rails.
Joseph insists Israel isn’t pursuing territorial expansion. He says Israelis are fighting for their survival, and that the two-state solution is dead.
But Sami raised a question that goes to the heart of the entire conflict:
What gives one people the right to take another people’s homes, restrict their movement, and then offer them whatever rights they’re prepared to grant?
And then came the moment that changed the entire temperature of the debate.
Joseph cited 73,000 deaths in Gaza, then began subtracting estimated militants and deaths from natural causes to argue that Israel’s civilian casualty figures compared favourably with other wars.
Sami couldn’t believe what he was hearing: “Listen to him. 73,000 is just 73,000.”
Joseph argued that civilian deaths were tragic but unavoidable in a war against Hamas.
Sami’s response was devastatingly simple: “Joseph, don’t do it to the kids.”
He reminded Joseph of the Holocaust, of the persecution Jewish people endured, and of the moral responsibility not to inflict suffering on another population.
And that leaves us with the question at the centre of this entire confrontation:
When does defending your people’s right to survive become an argument for the suffering of another people?
And who gets to draw that line?
@SALHACHIMI, @israel_advocacy
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