The ruling class in the West is celebrating this genocide. They are now freed of any legal or moral limits. This only the beginning.
Gideon Levy is a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper’s editorial board. Levy joined Haaretz in 1982, and spent four years as the newspaper’s deputy editor. He was the recipient of the Euro-Med Journalist Prize for 2008; the Leipzig Freedom Prize in 2001; the Israeli Journalists’ Union Prize in 1997; and The Association of Human Rights in Israel Award for 1996. His new book, The Punishment of Gaza, has just been published by Verso.
Originally posted in Haaretz
Palestinians react as they ask for food from a charity kitchen, amid a hunger crisis, in Gaza City, July.
Israel’s plan for the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip is proceeding apace, maybe even better than expected. In addition to significant achievements in systematic killing and destruction already chalked up, the last few days have seen one more critical achievement: the deliberate starvation has started to yield results.
The effects of this policy are spreading rapidly, felling victims in numbers that do not lag behind the number of deaths caused by shelling. People who don’t die while waiting for food have a good chance of succumbing to hunger.
The weapon of deliberate starvation is working. The Gaza “Humanitarian” Foundation, in turn, has become a tragic success. Not only have hundreds of Gazans been shot to death while waiting in line for packages distributed by the GHF, but there are others who don’t manage to reach the distribution points, dying of hunger. Most of these are children and babies.
On Wednesday alone, 15 people died of hunger, including three children and a six-week-old baby. One hundred and two have died since the war began, including 80 children, with the graph on the upswing in recent days.
The pictures hidden from the public by Israel’s criminal local media, whose lack of coverage of Gaza will never be forgotten or forgiven, are seen by the rest of the world. These are pictures reminiscent of concentration camp survivors, pictures from the Holocaust. Concealing them is akin to denial of the phenomenon.
The skeletons of babies and infants, living and dead, whose bones stick out through wasted fat tissue or muscles that have withered, their eyes and mouths opened wide, their expressions dead.
They lie on hospital floors, on bare beds, or carried on donkey carts. These are pictures from hell. In Israel, many people reject these photos, doubting their veracity. Others express their joy and pride on seeing starving babies. Yes, this too is what has become of us.
Turning deliberate starvation into a legitimate and acceptable weapon among Israelis, whether through open support or through chilling indifference, is the most demonic stage so far in the war Israel has launched on the Gaza Strip.
It is also the only one for which one cannot invent any justification, excuses or explanations. Even Israel’s boundless propaganda apparatus can’t manage to find any. Starvation has become a legitimate weapon since it is another means for attaining the objective: ethnic cleansing.
One has to internalize this fact and view the continuation of the war in this light. Just as Israel benefits from the deaths caused by gunfire, it also gains from the hunger that kills hundreds. Only thus will it be possible to turn Gaza into a place that is unlivable, and only thus will its residents leave “willingly,” first to the “humanitarian” city, and from there to Libya, or God knows where.
Palestinians make their way with belongings as they flee their homes after the Israeli military issued orders for evacuation from eastern Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, in May.
Starvation is now visible on everyone. Palestinian journalists in Gaza who have not yet been shot to death by the IDF report that they have not eaten a thing for two or three days.
Even physicians from overseas spoke on Wednesday about what they had eaten, mainly what they hadn’t eaten. A Canadian doctor at the Nasser Hospital said that in the preceding two days she had only eaten one tiny bowl of lentils. She will not be able to continue caring for the sick and wounded this way. That too is good for Israel.
A team from Al-Jazeera accompanied a young man who went in search of food for his children. He searched and searched, until he found two bags of Israeli flour and a bottle of oil at a market stall. The price was hundreds of shekels a bag, and he returned home empty-handed, to his starving children. The TV studio then gave details of the three stages leading to death by starvation. This man’s children were at the second stage.
A Palestinian boy carries a sack of food from a World Food Program convoy that was unloaded en route to Gaza City in June.
This deliberate starvation has turned this war into the most horrific of Israel’s wars, certainly the most criminal of them. We have never starved two million people this way.
However, there is only one thing that is worse than deliberate starvation: the indifference with which it is received in Israel. An hour and a half away by car from the location in which another baby, Yussef al-Safadi, died on Wednesday. His family couldn’t find any milk substitute for him.
While he died, Channel 12 was broadcasting a cooking show, and the ratings were excellent.
Thank you so much for publishing this! The Holocaust IS happening again right now, and Europe and the U.S. are aiders and abettors in Israel’s insane “revenge” genocide for it’s own past— Doesn’t Psychology teach us that those who don’t heal their past torments often later inflict that same precise torment on others? Why is the western world acting like this isn’t happening? … Still? What do we think we are holding onto ? God Help Us ALL if we do not stand up NOW and insist our governments and leaders and corporate profiteers stop this NOW. The rest of the world, the Global South, the majority of the world will NEVER forgive us… And one can only ask: why on earth should they? “Fortress Europe” and the New (nakedly) White Nationalist America is fast on it’s way to going the way of the Roman Empire. Only faster with Climate Change now baking European cities, and just Third World ones. How long before enough people in the “First World” see the connection between corporatocracy’s destruction of the planet and corporatocracy’s promotion of right-wing NeoNazi mass murderers LIKE Nettanyahu all too happy to blatantly dehumanize THEN kill both symbolic targeted “criminal groups” AND anyone who would oppose their fascist rule? OPEN YOUR EYES Europe, America: Muslims, Immigrants, Non-white people, poor people are NOT the enemy. Even if somehow (horrifically) you & your leaders kill “them”, or enslave them all in work/concentration camps all off who do you think the real enemies (to your prosperity and peace) are coming for next? If obscene levels of morality does not move you to action, then for heaven sakes think about your own self-interest. Alliance with OR leadership by politicians who advocate and act on kill them all or let them all die, globally or domestically, —(and notice the same crowd always at best ignores climatic devastation) is going to eventually (turning into very soon) end VERY BADLY for you and your children.