ARE JEWISH LIVES MORE VALUABLE?

OF COURSE NOT. BUT — WHILE THE WORLD FOCUSES ON QUANTITATIVE NUMBERS, THERE ARE QUALITATIVE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN DEAD PALESTINIANS AND DEAD ISRAELIS. (PREPARE TO CLUTCH YOUR PEARLS.)

And whose fault is this? (Guess again.)

Do Jewish lives matter more than Palestinian lives? This is a question anti-Israel activists pose. In fact, this is a highly sanitized version. The accusations are usually far more savage. It is a trope of this war specifically and attitudes toward Jews generally that “they only care about their own.”

Consider one of the more famous recent instances of this accusation. A British news interviewer, noting that Israel was willing to make a three-for-one exchange of Palestinian criminals for Israeli hostages, asked Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy if this reflected an assumption that Israeli lives are more valuable than Palestinian lives. (Stop reading now and watch the interaction.)

Palestinian terrorists have operationalized the Jewish/Israeli commitment to the sanctity of life by making kidnapping a core tactic of their “resistance.” They know that for every Israeli hostage, they will be able to free two, three or 1,027 terrorists and criminals from Israeli prisons.

The Israeli commitment to the sanctity of life extends even to the reverence for the bodies of the dead. This is why Hamas terrorists dragged corpses over the border into Gaza, holding cadavers hostage. They knew these bodies were bargaining chips because Israeli society has a fundamentally different approach to human life and even the sacrosanctity of the dead than Palestinian society does. (Oh yes, I went there. It is self-evident by the very fact that they hold dead bodies hostage.)

Earlier this year, Israel traded 600 live Palestinian criminals for the bodies of four dead Israelis held hostage. My mind cannot even fathom what such an exchange looks like in practice. Sorry to evoke these images on your Saturday morning, but what do bodies that have been held in desert conditions for days, weeks, months or even decades look like?

It is a core characteristic of both anti-Zionism and antisemitism to find the thing that Israelis or Jews most cherish and then accuse them of defiling it. Recognizing the sanctity of life that Jews and Israelis revere, enemies accuse them of disregard for human life.

Knowing that the Israeli military attempts to minimize civilian casualties in the most unimaginable conditions, enemies accuse them of “shooting fish in a barrel” and “indiscriminate killing.”

There is no end of examples of this recently and throughout history. As I noted a couple of weeks back, the blood libel — the idea that Jews ritually cannibalize non-Jewish blood — is one of the oldest and most deadly antisemitic tropes. And it is a direct inversion of the Jewish proscription against the consumption of blood. The koshering process removes all blood from meat to be consumed and, FFS, we’re talking about beef and chicken, not human beings. But leave it to the antisemitic imagination to take this core ethical prohibition, invert it, and then take it to its most erstwhile undreamed-of extreme: cannibalism.

The same sort of extreme inversion is happening now against Israel.

Israel goes to extreme lengths to minimize the deaths of Palestinian civilians. Meanwhile, Hamas, the ostensible government of Gaza, does their best to maximize civilian deaths so that overseas useful idiots count the numbers and blame Israel.

But this is not just a numbers game, though anti-Israel voices and protestors worldwide would like to make it so. (And I use the term “game” advisedly, because, for many or most of these activists, that’s exactly what this is. It is a “game” in which the side with the most dead wins.)

But we need to be frank. There is a difference. Not all deaths are the same. Counting Palestinian deaths and Israeli deaths are not apples and oranges.

While the Gen Z jihadis are hyperventilating and the hashtag humanitarians are rushing for the smelling salts, let me explain to those still with me.

It may seem inhumane to talk about qualitative differences when discussing human lives.

In fact, it is inhumane to ignore these differences.

Here is the fundamental difference: Every innocent civilian Palestinian death is a tragedy — but every single one is a consequence of war. Every innocent civilian Israeli death is deliberate, premeditated murder.

We need to understand that innocent people inevitably die in war, which may seem like a heartless thing to say. But it’s a basic truth.

It must further be said this war was begun by Hamas, and could have ended at any point in the past 18 months had Hamas released the hostages and surrendered. Therefore, every death — Palestinian and Israeli — must be blamed on the Palestinian side.

But the world has refused to acknowledge this fact. The world, almost unanimously, has made an immoral, tragic, horrific choice: to blame Israel for the destruction of life and infrastructure we see on the news.

Misplacing blame is morally wrong. But it is also strategically wrong — because if we do not place blame where it belongs, the consequent, justified outrage will never be positively channeled into constructive outcomes. That is, if we do not recognize and accept how and why a situation evolved, we will be highly unlikely to resolve it.

So these are key moral differentiators, indicators that the world has gotten tragically wrong. As a result, rather than advancing peace, coexistence and an end to war and death, the world collectively encourages these tragedies.

All of this, though, overlooks the one most glaring moral difference.

It is facile to say that one innocent Palestinian life is as valuable as one innocent Israeli life — of course that is undeniable. But as aggregate numbers, these are qualitatively different.

Anti-Israel activists have a vested interest in insisting that the number of dead is a strictly quantitative matter. In their perverted wordlview, Palestinians are victims, not perpetrators, by sheer dint of the dead. Therefore, any suggestion that there are qualitative differences is denounced as atrocious heartlessness, as proof (again!) that what our grandparents said about Jews remains true about Israelis — “they only care about their own.”

Put side-by-side, in a brutal accounting of dead Israelis and Palestinians, the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians seems quantifiably straightforward. (Of course, we really have no idea of the numbers, since Hamas is both responsible for reporting the statistics and has, as a core PR strategy, maximizing those numbers. Neither do we know how many are civilians and how many combatants, because terrorists don’t always wear uniforms. But no one doubts that there are exponentially more dead Palestinians than Israelis.)

Here, though, is the difference: Every dead Palestinian is an unintended consequence of the war their side started. Every raped, tortured, immolated, beheaded, kidnapped and killed Israeli is the victim of a deliberate, premeditated, sadistic — and, it needs to be said, entirely characteristic — tactic of the Palestinian movement.

None of this diminishes from the sanctity of any single life.

But there is a fundamental difference in how and why these people died.

Inevitably, by making this case, I will be accused of politicizing death. This, again, is a projection. Politicizing these deaths is the deliberate strategy of Western “pro-Palestinian” activists. The breathless, apoplectic outrage about the number of Palestinian dead is a symptom of a strategy that rewards the strategy that leads to these deaths. Which makes the performative indignation that much more atrocious, because it is the very people who shriek lamentations about dead Palestinians who are partly to blame for their deaths.

It is not an act of inhumanity to acknowledge the qualitative difference between the deaths of innocent Israelis and innocent Palestinians. It is a moral imperative.

Every death of an innocent Palestinian is an unintended consequence of war. Every death of an innocent Israeli is deliberate, premeditated murder.

That might be an inconvenient truth. It might undercut the power of the abacus of annihilation so-called “pro-Palestinians” love to toy with. But if we are going to be honest, moral and get, ultimately, to the root of why people are dying, we need to face this fact.

There are qualitative differences between dead Palestinians and dead Israelis.