By John Pickard
The ‘liberal’ wing and ‘centre-left’ of Israeli politics – albeit a minority – is far ahead of the leadership of the British Labour Party in acknowledging genocide and the deliberate starvation of the people of Gaza. Not only is the Netanyahu government depriving hundreds of thousands in Gaza of food and water as a deliberate act of war, but it is clear from Israeli one civil rights organisation that exactly the same policy is used on Palestinian hostages held in Israeli prisons.
Hundreds of humanitarian and aid organisations have been calling for all the necessary aid to be allowed to enter Gaza in sufficient quantities to feed the population. The mis-named ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ (GHF) boasts about the ‘meals’ it has distributed, but says nothing about the fact that much of the food they distribute requires cooking – which is virtually impossible – that it lacks specific nutritional provision for babies, like formula milk, and that it requires clean water, which is in very short supply. Journalists who are still reporting from Gaza, and medical workers are themselves starving and many are on the point of physical collapse.
One of the worst features of the Israeli policy of drip-feed is that it promotes a chaos and violence around distribution points. Nir Hasson, writing in Haaretz, July 23, noted that “Unlike the UN and other humanitarian organizations, which use hundreds of distribution points and orderly recipient lists, law and order doesn’t exist at GHF facilities. Everyone grabs what they can and then flee for their lives. Consequently, the people who need food the most – young children, women, the elderly and the sick – are left empty-handed…”
The chaotic scenes around food distribution, according to Haaretz, have allowed criminal elements to corner disproportionate amounts of the supplies, to ‘sell’ to starving people. Israel has deliberately killed off anything resembling a police force in Gaza, to further promote chaos so that the propaganda coming out of Jerusalem can dwell on the lack of order around food distribution.
In an opinion piece in Haaretz, yesterday entitled “The Disgrace of Deliberate Starvation: Israel’s War of Hunger in Gaza” Gideon Levy wrote, “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,” he wrote, “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 harrowing pictures of starving children are now on the front pages of newspapers around the world. If there were any doubts that the policy of the Israeli government is deliberate starvation, these are blown away by the revelation that exactly the same policy is followed against Palestinian hostages held in Israel.
The thousands of Palestinians arrested and held without trial – never referred to by the western press as “hostages”, although that is the best description of them – are held in appalling conditions and many have died in detention. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) reported this week that their case regarding the the starvation of prisoners – submitted more than a year ago – has finally had a hearing in the Israeli Supreme Court.
“This policy”, ACRI argues, “is not only immoral and illegal, it also had deadly implications for the prisoners and for the [Israeli] hostages…”. While they were at the court, the staff and legal team of ACRI were subjected the “a barrage of harassment, verbal abuse, and intimidation from right-wing activists, and extremist Knessent members, Itamar Ben Gvir, Tally Gotliv and Almog Cohen, who attended the hearing for the sole purpose of harassing ACRI.”
For extreme right wing Israelis, Arabs are inferior to Jews, and this racism underpins their whole political outlook. They, and their supporters gloat over the starvation and death of children in Gaza. But they are supported politically by Netanyahu, who is in turn supported by the Labour Friends of Netanyahu. All of these people, therefore, are complicit in war crimes, mass murder and genocide.
It is astonishing, and a disgrace, that even a former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert – and a right-wing minister at that – is far more in tune with what is happening in Gaza than the leaders of the British Labour Party. Two months ago, he wrote in Haaretz that “Israel Is Committing War Crimes”.
He wrote, ““”The government of Israel is currently waging a war without purpose, without goals or clear planning and with no chances of success. Never since its establishment has the State of Israel waged such a war. The criminal gang headed by Benjamin Netanyahu has set a precedent without equal in Israel’s history in this area, too”.
The only people who didn’t see it coming, or covered their eyes, were Keir Starmer, David Lammy and large numbers of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and not to forget, the Labour Friends of Israel.
[Feature photo via Mohammed Ajaz, forwarded from Gaza. See letter here]
