The First Casualty

Simplifying this conflict is genocide against the truth

“Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.” – Samuel Johnson.

Truth, it is said, is the first casualty of war. That’s been attributed incorrectly to Aeschylus, the misattribution go-to if you can’t blame it on Mark Twain. Wikiquote tells us the first use of it was by a Brit politician who said, “Truth, it has been said, is the first casualty of war.” If that’s true, then the first person who said it didn’t know who said it, but maybe he was referring to the Johnson quote. Like a barfight or a war, the person who started it doesn’t admit it and attributes it to someone else.

The quote, ephemeral in origin, and the fact, universally accepted, are central to discussions around the latest flare-up of the conflict in the Middle East, which dates to the second book of the Bible or the first time a sophomore heard about it, whichever comes later.

The current flare-up is the latest simple manifestation of a conflict that goes to the dawn of human writing. Hamas slaughtered Israeli civilians, and Israel is bombing Palestinian civilians. These are bad things, and they become worse when you only mention one of them, and become casualties of war when you simplify them to the extent I just did.

If you want to simplify them even further, call it genocide, without stopping to look the word up in a dictionary or a history book. Hamas supports genocide of Jews in Israel as a matter of policy. Israel isn’t practicing genocide. Israel is accused of genocide.

The Turks massacring Armenian males was genocide, and marching the rest of the Armenians into the Syrian desert without water was genocide. The Nazi gas chambers were genocide. Shooting Romani people on sight was genocide. The slaughter in Rwanda was genocide. The Israeli actions against Palestinians don’t compare to any of those actions. But the word, like “apartheid,” has seen its definition stretched to the breaking point to simplify the politics or feelings of those who support one side in the Middle East conflict.

The word is useful on social media if you’re trying to convince people who follow you but know less about the topic, or if it’s important to you that people know your feelings on the topic. To me, and to others I’m fairly certain, the word is the clue to quit reading a political piece or to follow a social media contact less closely. This piece might have suffered a similar dismissal if I’d begun it with, for instance, those who accuse the Israelis of genocide don’t have sufficient understanding of history.

I didn’t do that, but I did manage to work in a reference to a Brit. That’s what my oldest uncle on my dad’s side called them when he bragged about his dad, Joe Fitzgerald, selling bad horses to them at the outset of World War I. Selling inferior war materiel to an ally? That’s treasonous. But Grandpa Joe lived in a corner of the Midwest more Irish than Iowan, and his grandfather had come there to escape the potato famine, an historic period some describe as genocide.

It's not that simple, but it’s simple enough that the Irish were still bombing Brits thirty years after my grandfather died. And it’s fair to ask what I mean by the Irish. Irish descendants worldwide, like me and my fifth-generation siblings, or the Irish Oireachtas, or the Sinn Fein, or the IRA? By the British, do we mean the English people, the black and tans, or the governments of Margaret Thatcher or Benjamin Disraeli?

Truth is a casualty of trying to simplify any war. Do we refer to the Israelis and, if so, who do we mean? The government, the army, the people? That gets more complex if we include Jews worldwide facing a backlash from the current flare-up. Who’s the other side? Hamas, Gaza residents, Palestinians, Arabs? Attempts to simplify the conflict are as fruitless as attempts to solve it.

Yitzhak Rabin tried to solve it and was assassinated for his trouble. How that led to the rise of Netanyahu, Israel’s Trump, can explain the current conflict. Menachem Begin tried to solve it, thirty years after his terrorist group blew up the King David Hotel, aiming at Brits and killing mostly Arabs. Anwar Sadat tried to solve it and it’s hard to remember if he or Rabin was assassinated first. Same reason anyway.

Those simplifications get us back to the 1940s, but the conflict goes back to before the parting of the Red Sea. If that really happened. Truth was a casualty even back then.