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Introduction
Throughout July and August of 2014, as numerous media outlets in the UK, US, and elsewhere publicised mortality statistics on a daily basis, it was difficult not to be bombarded with the numbers of those killed and injured in the conflict in Gaza. In conjunction with its televised reports, the BBC ran online features exploring the 'toll of operations in Gaza'.1Israel's oldest daily newspaper, Haaretz, released 'live updates' of fatalities for each numbered day of the crisis,2while The New York Times published both 'The Toll in Gaza and Israel Day by Day' and a daily running total of the dead (both Israeli and Gazan).3Alongside the body counts, however, something else was happening. Sometimes clandestinely, sometimes openly, scribbled on walls or listed in advertisements, occasionally the source of legal wrangling, or the prompt for charitable fund-raising, concerted efforts were under way, particularly on social media, to name the dead of Gaza publically.
It is this contestation over the representation of Gaza's dead that I investigate in this article.4I am interested, in particular, in why naming is regarded as preferable to statistical accounting as a way to record death. I take as my focal point the idea of the 'human'. I have two reasons for this. First, ways of representing the dead (as named individuals or as statistical abstractions) are symptomatic of the workings of what Judith Butler has called grievability, described, by her, as 'a condition of life's emergence and sustenance'.5Grievability links etymologically with grief and, by inference, with death; thus what is often stressed in research on grievability is how the dead are represented, for example, in obituaries, newspaper reports, and the like. But grievability is not a synonym for grief or for death; it is a way to think about liveability. An order of grievability, I argue (and I explicate this concept more fully below) certainly determines how different deaths are hierarchically ranked and how those deaths figure, if at all, in public discourse. But crucially it also governs which lives matter, thus regulating who is deemed fully - that is meaningfully - human, in the specific sense of having a life judged worthy of value, support, and protection. It...