If you read a lot of the mainstream media, they will tell you that the biggest obstacle to peace in the Middle East is the lack of a Palestinian State. They will conveniently forget to remind you that kindergarten children in the Gaza Strip are being trained as martyrs (see kindergarten graduation photo below):

Would America sponsor a terrorist state on its border?

When you look at the statistics on the various conflicts in the Middle East, you see a very different picture of Israel and its Arab neighbors.

In October 2007, Front Page Magazine reported the following:

This grisly inventory finds the total number of deaths in conflicts since 1950 numbering about 85,000,000. Of that sum, the deaths in the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1950 include 32,000 deaths due to Arab state attacks and 19,000 due to Palestinian attacks, or 51,000 in all. Arabs make up roughly 35,000 of these dead and Jewish Israelis make up 16,000.

These figures mean that deaths Arab-Israeli fighting since 1950 amount to just 0.06 percent of the total number of deaths in all conflicts in that period. More graphically, only 1 out of about 1,700 persons killed in conflicts since 1950 has died due to Arab-Israeli fighting.

(Adding the 11,000 killed in the Israeli war of independence, 1947-49, made up of 5,000 Arabs and 6,000 Israeli Jews, does not significantly alter these figures.)

In a different perspective, some 11,000,000 Muslims have been violently killed since 1948, of which 35,000, or 0.3 percent, died during the sixty years of fighting Israel, or just 1 out of every 315 Muslim fatalities. In contrast, over 90 percent of the 11 million who perished were killed by fellow Muslims.

Comments: (1) 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. (2) Still, it helps to point out the 1-in-1,700 statistic as a corrective, in the hope that one day, this reality will register, permitting the Arab-Israeli conflict to subside to its rightful, lesser place in world politics.

Admittedly, this is not up-to-date information, but considering ISIS, the civil war in Syria, and the mischief being done by Iran, I suspect the percentage of Muslim deaths at the hands of Muslims has increased–not decreased. Unfortunately, there is now added to that number a large number of Christians being killed by Muslims in the Middle East. In recent years it has become very obvious that Israel is NOT the problem.