Statistics have become the measure of genocide, the means through which we have evaluated its scale — and for our enemies to question its reality. In a particularly egregious op-ed, The New York Times’s Bret Stephens opines, “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza,” asking why the death toll isn’t in the hundreds of thousands. Sixty thousand, he implies, is just the fate of being Arab, and the only way the Palestinian can live is if he dies prematurely.
… More disturbingly, their projection began to function as a prophecy that forces a new distinction on the Palestinian: the killed and the not-yet-killed. The imprecision of the martyr toll puts us in a morbid double bind: if we undercount our martyrs, we condemn them to a realm of non-existence. If we overcount, we condemn them to a predetermined death.
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