It Has Been Four Hiroshimas

It's been over a month since I suggested that I had an idea about what was causing the disconnect between perceptions of the economy and the actual economy. I really thought I had it - I had an explanation, which might not account for all of it, I thought might have accounted for a significant chunk. And then on firther reflection, I determined that I was probably wrong. And now I've been struggling to fill in my understanding of what happened and what is happening. So I'm still trying to parse the November disatser - but in the meantime, here are some thoughts about the scale of destruction in Gaza. 

It's fucking nuts. Like, we don't really comprehend how fucking nuts it is. I keep trying to find ways to contextualize it so we can understand how absolutely fucking ludicrous the campaign of genocide has been, but it's just beyond comprehension.

One example I tried earlier was to note that US military aid to Israel over the span of a year was on the order of $18 billion. There's another half dozen billion dollars spent on shit like keeping a carrier group deployed to the region and such.  By comparison, the GDP of the West Bank and the Gaza strip combined hit a peak of 19 billion in 2022. Now Gaza was under siege in 2022, and while economic activity in the West Bank was forcibly depressed by Israel, Gaza definitely had it worse.  Meaning that the value of US military aid to perpetrate this war is multiple times higher than the peak total economic activity of the region being bombed. Even if every man, woman, and child in Gaza decided to dedicate their entire productive output to "destroying Israel" or whatever racist bullshit the genocidal maniacs believe - this would still be far less than what the US has provided to destroy them. Multiple times less.

Here's another way of thinking about it. Between 1965 and 1975, the US dropped 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos - roughly 100 times more than the amount of bombs dropped on Gaza in roughly one year. Here's an interesting article from ESRI's StoryMaps Team about the Vietnam bombing campaign. They are GIS people so they've plotted out the areas hit by bombs - and since it's ESRI, you can scroll the map around as you please. You can even drag it all the way over to the Middle East and compare the size of the bombing area with the size of Gaza.  It looks something like this:

What's my point here? It's the intensity of the bombing. We're talking about less than 1% of the area being hit by about 1% of the bombs dropped in the Vietnam War - but only in one tenth the amount of time. IOW - Israel is conducting a bombing campaign thats an order of magnitude more intense than the air power used during the Vietnam War.

The StoryMaps article ends with the following:

But there's no doubt that the aerial bombardment of Vietnam will forever remain one of the most staggering sustained attacks in human history.

That was written in 2017. It's already wrong. Incomprehensibly, it has been knocked down to a lower tier of destruction - because what Israel is doing to Gaza is just on a completely different scale.

The people at Airwars have done a study about Israel's bombing campaign for the month of October 2023. They have a bunch of ways of trying to contextualize just how much harm Israel is inflicting on Gaza. That one month was about as deadly for children in Gaza than the deadliest year in the Syrian civil war. And let's not forget that Syria is much larger than Gaza - with almost ten times the population.

85,000 tons of bombs. Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, had a yield of 21 kilotons. It has been four Hiroshimas.