One of the most common and misleading tactics deployed against Israel by its critics is to compare the number of dead Israelis and dead Palestinians, and use the figures to portray Palestinians as victims of Israeli aggression.

Vox’s Max Fisher, who is on a campaign to convince people that Israel bears primary responsibility for the absence of peace in the region, pushed the argument this week to show that the conflict was “lopsided.” The Legal Insurrection blog has rounded up other examples of liberals and critics of Israel making similar arguments emphasizing comparative death totals.

In a sense, it’s understandable why opponents of Israel seek to make such arguments, because it allows them to flash a simple statistic that could be persuasive those who are uninformed about the actual details of the conflict. But no objective observer should take moral arguments rooted in raw casualty statistics seriously, and below, I’ve given five reasons why.