With a ceasefire in effect in Gaza, it seems like an apt time to go back to the beginning of the conflict. Israel efforts to limit civilian casualties in their prosecution of the war against Hamas has emerged as one of the most controversial questions not only of the conflict but of our present-day politics. Even if the ceasefire holds, the debate over Israel’s conduct in the war is not nearly over. If the rest of the region’s historical legacy is any indication, we’ll be debating accounts of this conflict for decades, if not longer.
The London-based watchdog group Airwars recently released an extremely detailed report on civilian deaths in Gaza during the first twenty-five days of the Israel Defense Forces’ bombing campaign following Hamas’s October 7 attacks. The report provides an analysis documenting civilian casualties in each individual bombing during the first month of the war, finding that “by all major metrics used to measure rates of civilian harm, the pace at which civilians were killed in this 25-day period in Gaza outpaces any recent military campaign.”
Sobering, damning, regrettable-but-necessary: how you view this conclusion will likely depend on how you view the conflict as a whole. As regular viewers will know, I’ve been critical of Israel’s conduct; John McWhorter has been less so. We both believe too many people have died; we disagree about how much of the death was necessary. Yet neither of us is an expert. So we brought two on with us to debate the report. In John’s corner, we have Eli Lake of the Free Press, who has covered foreign policy and national security for decades. And in my corner, we have Matthew Cockerill, a graduate student at the London School of Economics who peer-reviewed the Airwars report.
With the exception of a handful of interjections and questions, John and I mostly leave the debating to Eli and Matthew. We didn’t expect them to change each others’ minds, and they did not. But both John and I thought it important to represent both of sides of the debate. There’s nothing conclusive about it, but then it’s not clear that the war (at least this iteration of it) is over for good. The debate is certainly not over. That will be with us for some time.
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1:08 Intros
4:24 Matthew: The IDF recklessly disregarded civilian life in its October 2023 bombing campaign
9:01 Eli: Israel made efforts to warn civilians ahead of bombings
15:31 Ground News ad
17:35 Are Gazan civilian deaths part of Hamas’s strategy or merely an effect of its strategy?
23:39 Counting casualties in the fog of war
30:04 If Hamas is still partially intact, can a ceasefire hold?
33:28 ACTA ad
38:53 Why Matthew thinks Israel was intentionally killing civilians early in the war
48:41 Is Matthew holding Israel to a different standard than he would hold the US?
52:39 Alternative strategies for prosecuting the war
56:16 Do civilian warnings negate the question of murderous intent?
1:01:46 Eli: I don’t think Jewish critics of the war are speaking for the larger diaspora
1:10:05 Is further normalization between Israel and the rest of Middle East coming despite the war?
1:15:10 Matthew: Israel clandestinely continued its initial starvation strategy in Gaza for months
Recorded January 17, 2025
Links and Readings
Trailer for Eli’s forthcoming Free Press podcast, Breaking History
Matthew’s YouTube show, History Speaks
Airwars’ Gaza Patterns of Harm report
Yuval Abraham’s +972 piece, “‘Lavender’: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s Bombing Spree in Gaza”
Bethan McKernan and Harry Davies’s Guardian piece, “‘The Machine Did It Coldly’: Israel Used AI to Identify 37,000 Hamas Targets”
Glenn’s conversation with Omer Bartov
Motty Perry and Ariel Rubinstein’s Haaretz piece, “It’s Impossible Not to Know What’s Going on in Gaza”
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