Unfathomable Numbers, and the Truth they Tell

I read two chilling statistics this week that stopped me in my tracks. The first came from a study in The Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal. The study found that since 1970 the U.S. and Western European governments killed 38 million people through economic sanctions. Over 50% of the victims were women and children. The study puts the lie to the prevalent view that sanctions are a “non-lethal” policy option. In fact, the human toll is staggering. Several times more people are killed by sanctions each year than by war. Countries that aspire to economic independence from the dollar and Western capitalism, or don’t fall in line with western powers, are punished. This was the explicit aim of the U.S. blockade of Cuba from the beginning. A State Department memo from 1960 states that “every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba by denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.” Sixty-five years later, the current State Department is ramping up this savage policy toward Cuba, causing a massive humanitarian catastrophe on the island. We.ve witnessed the same things with Israel’s 18-year blockade of Gaza, the barbaric stoppage of all food shipments in March 2025, which induced famine, and the continuing severe restrictions on humanitarian aid by Israel. In the words of Prof. Jason Hickel, who studies global inequality and political economy: “We cannot accept a world where half a million people are killed each year to prop up Western hegemony. An international order that relies on this kind of violence must be dismantled and replaced.” (https://jasonhickel.substack.com/p/the-staggering-death-toll-of-western). The words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from his “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” echo loudly: “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world is my country, and I cannot keep silent.”

The second statistic was that Israel’s military campaigns in Gaza, and now in Lebanon and Iran, have led to over 6 million forcibly displaced persons. In Gaza, over 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes. In the West Bank, over 50,000. In Iran, 3.2 million have fled their homes in Tehran and other urban centers. This includes thousands of Afghan refugees who found shelter in Iran from American bombs only to have to escape them again. Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon has caused the displacement of over 1 million people. None of the devastation Israel inflicts on its neighbors happens without American support. In the case of Iran, Israel and the United States are waging war together.

Violence spreads in all directions. Military action on the part of Hamas and Hezbollah since 2023, and now Iran, have caused Israeli Jews to be forcibly displaced from their homes in southern and northern Israel. Estimates are between 200,000 and 240,000 evacuees. It’s important to point out, however, that not all displacements are created equal. It’s my understanding that Israeli Jews who have been displaced from their homes have generally been put up in hotels at government expense, with the full range of their needs supplied to them. Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza who’ve been forcibly displaced (multiple times) during the genocide, huddle in tents, starving, bombed and shot at, chronically ill, and deprived of medical care. Moreover, once the violence in northern Israel subsides and it is considered safe to return, most Israeli Jews will have a home to return to. Not so for the Palestinians of Gaza. Over 90% of all homes in Gaza have been reduced to rubble.

The situation is similar for Lebanese who have fled the Israeli invasion in southern Lebanon. Israel has announced that they plan to occupy a large swath of southern Lebanon. Over a million Lebanese will not be permitted to return to their homes for the foreseeable future. Israel plans to do to South Lebanon what it did to Gaza. Turn it into a wasteland. For all intents and purposes, they have been ethnically cleansed, and Israel now occupies their land. It has long been a dream of Zionist planners to take and hold all the land of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River. This is an egregious crime of aggression against a sovereign nation, a grave violation of international law. Yet, nothing is stopping it from happening. It is unfolding before our eyes.

38 million. 6 million. On a human level, it’s impossible to take in the human reality of such unfathomable numbers. Imagine the complexity, the fullness, the arc of a single life: a person with an eternal destiny, a family, friends, hopes and fears. Multiply that millions and millions of times. All the suffering, the lives lost, the futures ended. Daunting as that is, it’s far more daunting to try to make sense of it, much less know how to respond. One thing seems clear to me: the first step in bringing light out of darkness, hope out of despair, starting a new world, is not fooling ourselves. Being absolutely clear-eyed and honest about what we are facing. Knowing the truth and accurately naming the situation. That is plenty in itself, but we can start there.