Ralph Nader's Bloody and Groundless "Numbers Game"

For some fifty years, Ralph Nader has been an angry fringe figure in American politics and a new essay by the ninety-year-old, four-time presidential candidate once again shows US why. In it, Nader turns his self-righteous wrath toward Israel’s war of self-defense against the murderous terrorists of Hamas, and insists that the actual casualty count of Palestinians has been outrageously under-estimated by the Israel Defense Forces, the Hamas Ministry of Health, the UN and the rest of the world.

Citing the common calculation claiming that “more than 30,000 people in Gaza have been killed since the ongoing war began,” Nader dismisses that figure as a deliberate lie. “Just like the entire mass media, many governments, even the independent media and critics of the war would have us accept that between 98 percent and 99 percent of Gaza’s entire population has survived,” he writes. “A more likely estimate, in my appraisal, is that at least 200,000 Palestinians must have perished by now and the toll is accelerating by the hour.”

The most obvious flaw in his incendiary claim is that it offers no explanation of any kind for why the Palestinian Authority or Hamas itself would want to go along with a deliberate understatement of their own suffering. None of the terrorist leaders or their more moderate cohorts has ever come close to claims like Nader’s incendiary “likely estimate” that is advanced with no supporting evidence whatever. What possible motivation for minimalizing their own death and suffering could he possibly provide? No one who has paid any attention to the course of the fighting since October 7^th of last year could have missed the consistent Hamas efforts to win worldwide sympathy and support by demonizing Israel’s military and exaggerating, not minimizing the human costs of this war. In fact, the placement of terror tunnels and deadly supplies underneath hospitals, schools, private apartments and mosques indicates a desire to increase the casualties among impoverished civilians, not to avoid them.

But against all logic, Nader baldly declares: “Netanyahu and Hamas, which he helped over the years, have a common interest in low-balling the death/injury toll.” But the writer and activist makes no effort—none!—to explain what the possible “common interest” could be for implacable terrorists, hypnotized by the ideal of martyrdom (Shahida in Arabic), to “low-ball” the costs of the deadly combat in which they continue to engage. Far from repentance for the massacre of Israelis they perpetrated on October 7, or any pledge to avoid more mass killings in the future, the public statements by Palestinian leaders have all expressed pride in the mass murder and kidnapping they achieved, and have solemnly pledged repeat-performances in the future.

In this context, Ralph Nader’s contention that the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip have suffered nearly ten times the number of dead victims they themselves claim, emerges as not only irresponsible but mad. That irresponsibility takes on an additional dimension in relation to the one argument about casualties that should make a difference in assessments of the Gaza War and the way it has been fought. Israeli sources have noted that all of the “official numbers” from the Hamas Ministry of Health ignore the essential distinction between dead civilians and fallen terrorist fighters, with IDF arguments that close to half the dead—and maybe more—have been active combatants engaged in the ongoing struggle.

Of course, the death of any civilians is regrettable and should be avoided wherever possible on all sides. But for the Israeli forces engaged in this gruesome war, the killing of terrorist combatants is not collateral damage, or the product of grim battlefield accidents. It is the very purpose of the war to eliminate the deadly potential of Hamas, to destroy its weapons and its leaders while assuring both the Jewish and Palestinian people that they will be spared future chapters of barbaric and pointless killing. Attempts by radical activists like Ralph Nader to groundlessly exaggerate the horrors of this war, while suggesting no steps whatever in a path toward peace, will only make positive progress more difficult and less likely.