The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance

by Rashid I. Khalidi

The casualty figures tell only part of the story, although they are revealing. In these three major attacks, 3,804 Palestinians were killed, of them almost one thousand minors. A total of 87 Israelis were killed, the majority of them military personnel engaged in these offensive operations. The lopsided 43:1 scale of these casualties is telling, as is the fact that the bulk of the Israelis killed were soldiers while most of the Palestinians were civilians.27 Shuja’iyya, Gaza City, July 2014. A retired American general described the Israeli bombardment as “absolutely disproportionate.” One might not have known this, however, from much of the mainstream US media coverage, which focused heavily on Hamas and Islamic Jihad rocket fire at Israeli civilian targets. Certainly, the use of these weapons obliged the Israeli population in the south of the country to spend long periods of time in bomb shelters. However, thanks to Israel’s excellent early warning system, its state-of-the-art American-supplied anti-missile capabilities, and its network of shelters, the rockets were very rarely lethal. In 2014, the 4,000 rockets that Israel claimed were fired from the Gaza Strip killed five Israeli civilians, one of them a Bedouin in the Naqab (Negev) region, and a Thai agricultural worker, for a total of six civilian deaths.28 This does not mitigate Hamas’s violation of the rules of war by using these imprecise weapons for indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas. But the casualty toll t...