Ryan has posted a long discussion on what genocide really is. And the usual suspects are flinging the charge of genocide at Jews and Israelis again (for example, Ilan Pappe in Electronic Intifada but I’m not linking).
So lets do some maths (stay with me, it’s so simple even a BDS supporter can follow this).
From the CIA World Factbook for Gaza:
- Population: 1,816,379 (July 2014 est.)
- Birth rate: 32.2 births/1,000 population (2014 est.)
- Death rate: 3.09 deaths/1,000 population (2014 est.)
Let’s take this nice and slow.
A birth rate of 32.2 births / 1000 means there are 1,816 x 32.2 births per year = 58,487 births per year.
A death rate of 3.09 deaths / 1000 means there are 1,816 x 3.09 deaths per year (all causes) = 5,612 deaths per year.
So we have an extra 52,874 new Palestinians in Gaza alone, every single year. That’s 4,406 per month, 1,017 per week or
145 new Palestinians in Gaza every single day.
Do you see where we’re going with this yet?
Even if Israel were slaughtering them at the prodigious rate Arabs are managing in Syria (which has a population roughly 10 times bigger than Gaza) we’d still only be just about preventing growth. Reports are, in case you were wondering, that 229 people died yesterday in Syria of whom 45 were civilians and whose deaths nobody can directly attribute to Jews.
So the next time someone tells you that around 200 Palestinian dead in 9 days (most of whom will certainly turn out to have been terrorist fighters or commanders) constitutes an act of genocide, ask them why 9 days of regular births and deaths give us new 1,307 Gazans.
