{"id":14159,"date":"2025-08-13T08:00:52","date_gmt":"2025-08-13T12:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=14159"},"modified":"2025-08-23T22:38:30","modified_gmt":"2025-08-24T02:38:30","slug":"the-starvation-of-gaza-is-not-a-glitch-in-the-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2025\/08\/the-starvation-of-gaza-is-not-a-glitch-in-the-system\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe starvation of Gaza is not a glitch in the system\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Z<\/span>ainab Abu Halib was only six-months old when she died in her mother\u2019s arms on July 26, starved to death by Israel. At the time,\u00a0 she weighed less than she did at birth. Another child murdered, born and killed in a world that is completely defined by a ruthless genocidal war. In the brutal clarity of her grief, Zainab\u2019s mother Esraa spoke<\/a>:<\/p>\n

With my daughter\u2019s death, many will follow. Their names are on a list that no one looks at. They are just names and numbers. We are just numbers. Our children, whom we carried for nine months and then gave birth to, have become just numbers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another life taken, another entire world destroyed.<\/p>\n

The visible, ravaged humanity, and the deepening impact of the enforced starvation of Palestinians and the looming plans<\/a> for the Zionist military\u2019s full occupation in Gaza has provoked some criticism of Israel from some very unlikely corners. Individuals like Jeremy Ben-Ami, the head of the staunchly pro-Israel J Street this week admitted<\/a> that now he is \u201cconvinced that Israel is committing genocide.\u201d A number of prominent Israeli figures, including Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset and the head of an organization tasked with encouraging settlements, signed a letter<\/a> calling for \u201ccrippling sanctions on Israel\u201d because of Israel\u2019s use of starvation as a weapon of genocide. Others, from ex-attorney generals<\/a> to prominent authors<\/a>, have made similar public comments.<\/p>\n

Here in the U.S., in the gaseous bowels of the Republican party, various GOP congresspeople<\/a>\u2014who hold nothing but contempt for Palestinians\u2014have voiced support for more food aid.\u00a0 Trump himself, shockingly, has called<\/a> to \u201cget the children fed\u201d to alleviate the \u201creal starvation.\u201d Marjorie Taylor Greene\u2014one of the most hardline of the parties\u2019 far right, \u201cAmerica First,\u201d MAGA wing\u2014has come out to describe Israel\u2019s actions in Gaza as genocide, and remarkably proposed a recent, failed, amendment to cut military aid to Israel\u2019s missile \u201cdefense\u201d system. None of these should be confused as allies, but the changes in their language reflect the intensity of the situation.<\/p>\n

The changing imperial dynamics being hastened by Trump, along with the public outcry about the severely<\/a> worsening<\/a> conditions, has also led countries like France, the United Kingdom, and Canada to state that they would move to recognize a Palestinian state\u2014in a month’s time<\/a>. In lieu of swift action to achieve a ceasefire or attempts to resolve the humanitarian situation, these sage imperialist powers, many of whose colonial ambitions carved up the region of Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) to begin with, are making a symbolic move to recognize a two-state solution. China and the other BRIC countries have responded in similarly contradictory fashion, with some public condemenation<\/a> while seeking to maintain <\/a>their business and military ties to Israel. Of course, the path of a two-state solution has long been implausible, routinely rejected<\/a> by a majority of Palestinians, and has merely been kept on life-support by Western liberals and soft Zionists<\/a> who want to preserve an exclusionary Zionist ethnostate while giving lip service to Palestinian rights.<\/p>\n

The contradictions and fractures among supporters of Israel, in Israeli society, and in imperialist political parties have driven some to pretend they have a semblance of a conscience when they\u00a0 otherwise care nothing for the liberation of Palestine. Nonetheless, the starvation of Gaza is a dire situation demanding an expeditious resolution. Immediate aid is needed.<\/p>\n

At the same time, an end to Israel\u2019s barbaric starving of Palestinians is not enough to stop the genocide in Gaza. Starvation is but one component of the plan of genocide and ethnic cleansing that the Zionist entity has been carrying out on Palestinians since before 1948. Indeed, since Israel\u2019s 2006 blockade of Gaza, the settler-colonial state has grotesquely been calibrating and facilitating hunger within the concentration camp. The calculation of calories<\/a>, connected to shipments allowed in, had as its goal, as described<\/a> by an advisor to then-prime minister Ehud Olmert: \u201c to put the Palestinians on a diet.\u201d For years before<\/em> October 7, 2023 many international humanitarian groups routinely warned<\/a> of the impending \u201cuninhabitable\u201dconditions in Gaza. By December 2023, per the UN<\/a>, 80 percent of those people in the world experiencing catastrophic hunger lived in Gaza. That \u201cdiet\u201d has now become starvation.<\/p>\n

Control of food is also applied<\/a> by Israel to the West Bank, from the dividing up of Palestinian agricultural areas, the destruction of orchards, the attempts to restrict the olive harvest, and the control of over 85 percent of the West Bank\u2019s water<\/a>. Israel also controls the tax revenue collected in the West Bank and often refuses<\/a> to turn it over to the Palestinian Authority, thus purposefully starving the West Bank of access to resources. At least $1.25 billion has been withheld from the territory by Israel since October of 2023. The current starving of Gaza is a macabre continuation and escalation of these politics of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing across historic Palestine.<\/p>\n

The current focus of concern with the active starving of children in Gaza is depressingly welcome, just as it is criminally belated and too often skips over the role of the West and the U.S. in creating the very situation over which many are now acting surprised. Many of the same individuals who called those of us who marched and rallied to end the genocide in Gaza \u201cantisemitic\u201dare now admitting the genocide. To be clear, while we should wholly welcome those of our neighbors and co-workers who may, just now, be coming around to call Israel\u2019s actions a genocide, our attitude toward the Israeli apologists in power should be nothing but scorn and contempt.<\/p>\n