What the Hell Does 'Too Many Palestinians Have Been Killed' Mean?

And, if too many Palestinians are dying, why don't we stop giving Israel the bombs it is using to kill them?

Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

On Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris traveled down to Selma to mark the 59 years that have passed since Alabama state troopers perpetrated the atrocities of Bloody Sunday against civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bride. There, she spoke about another set of atrocities being carried out by racist state forces—this time, by the Israeli military in Gaza.

“What we are seeing every day in Gaza is devastating,” she said. “We have seen reports of families eating leaves or animal feed, women giving birth to malnourished babies with little or no medical care, and children dying from malnutrition and dehydration.
As I have said many times, too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.”

Harris was right—she has said many times that “too many” Palestinians have been killed. She said it on November 29 ( “There have been many conversations both in public and private about the fact that far too many Palestinians have been killed”). She said it on December 2 (“The United States is unequivocal; international humanitarian law must be respected. Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed”). And she said it on December 19 (“As I have said many times, I think we know that far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed”). And on February 17 (“Far too many Palestinians, innocent Palestinian civilians, have been killed”).

Harris isn’t alone. Everyone in the Biden administration, from Joe Biden himself to Secretary of State Antony Blinken to their spokespeople, has been saying for months that “too many” Palestinians “have been killed.” (They never quite get around to saying who killed too many Palestinians, but we know why that is.)

All of this has me wondering a couple things. First, what the hell does “too many” mean? And second, how long can “too many” people die before the U.S. does anything at all about it—for instance, I’m just spitballing here, by no longer giving Israel the weapons it is using to kill “too many people.”

Let’s deal with the “too many” bit first.

“Too many” is an inherently strange way to describe the number of Palestinians Israel has killed in Gaza since October 7 (over 30,000 at the last count, though that is almost certainly an undercount). “Too many,” with its echoes of Goldilocks examining porridge, implies that there is a “just right” number of dead Palestinians, or even a “not enough” figure. What is the benchmark that the U.S. government has for when “acceptable” becomes “too many”?

Matthew Miller, the top spokesghoul at the State Department, was asked about this on Thursday:

QUESTION: Well, when you say too many Palestinians died today, does that mean that there’s some kind of acceptable number of Palestinian deaths?

MR MILLER: The acceptable number is zero. The acceptable number is zero of innocent Palestinians – I’m differentiating that from Hamas fighters, obviously. But the acceptable number of innocent Palestinians dying is zero.

Oh, so the “too many” count starts at one? Then I bet Matthew Miller is going to be incredibly appalled that the death toll in Gaza is tens of thousands of times bigger than his “too many” metric. (Update: I am hearing that he’s not actually that appalled.)

OK, let’s be generous to the Biden administration. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that “far too many Palestinians have died” is a sincere expression of empathy for the massive civilian casualties in Gaza, and not a purposefully vague catch-all phrase the U.S. trots out to make it seem like it cares about Palestinians.

If you are the U.S. government, and you think that too many people are dying in Gaza—if you have been saying this in public for nearly four months straight—and the number of “too many people” keeps going up and up and up, day after day after miserable, horrifying day, and a big part of the reason that the number keeps going up is that you keep giving Israel bombs to drop on Gaza, have you ever considered, oh, I don’t know, NOT DOING THAT?

It’s not complicated. I know I have said this before, but if you gave a guy on the street a machine gun, and he immediately shot up everyone on the block, and you said “far too many people just died in this attack,” the way to prevent even more people from dying would not be to hand the guy more bullets. This is because when you have bullets, you can kill people quite easily, and when you don’t have bullets, it’s much harder to kill people. This is why the idea that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is widely rejected by politicians like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris—because people are much less able to kill other people if you remove their weapons.

Instead, Biden is handing the guy more bullets—even though he apparently knows the guy has plenty of bullets already.

Instead, the U.S. is airdropping aid into Gaza to (very meagerly) ameliorate a humanitarian nightmare caused in large part by the bombs the U.S. is supplying Israel. Instead, the U.S. is lamenting that “too many” people are dying in Palestine, while making sure that Israel’s capacity to kill “too many” people never, ever runs out.

It’s almost as though anyone who says the U.S. is trying to end the slaughter in Gaza is lying to you.