ISRAELI-PALI CONFLICT NOT SO BLOODY AFTER ALL

How Bloody the Conflict? (BackSpin)
See FrontPage Magazine, where Gunnar Heinsohn and Daniel Pipes seriously crunch numbers, finding that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn't deadly compared to other world conflicts.

Stats were compiled to rank conflicts since 1950 by the number of human deaths incurred. There were 67 conflicts with at least 10,000 deaths. Deadliest was China, where 40 million people were killed outright, in gulags, or man-made famines. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict ranked 49 on the list with 51,000 deaths. Deadlier conflicts receiving far less media scrutiny included Nicaragua, Eritrea, El Salvador, Chechnya, Kurdistan, and Brazil (who knew about that one?)

Heinsohn and Pipes conclude:

Despite the relative non-lethality of the Arab-Israeli conflict, its renown, notoriety, complexity, and diplomatic centrality will probably give it continued out-sized importance in the global imagination. And Israel’s reputation will continue to pay the price.