Starving Gaza

Israel moves to forcefully relocate Palestinians into detention camps, then out of the country.

“A full-blown humanitarian emergency in Gaza is no longer looming. It is here, and it is catastrophic,” Sean Carroll wrote in The New York Times print edition, May 9.

Carrol is the president of the nonprofit American Near East Refugee Aid. He describes the horrific conditions that over two million Palestinians now confront in Gaza under Israeli rule. Since Israel ended its ceasefire agreement two months ago, it has imposed a total blockade of all food, medical supplies and other goods into Gaza.

“Two million Palestinians in Gaza, nearly half of them children, are now surviving on a single meal every two or three days,” says Carroll. The World Central Kitchen charity was forced to halt its work in Gaza this week saying that after “serving more than 130 million total meals and 26 million loaves of bread over the past 18 month” they “no longer has the supplies to cook meals or bake bread in Gaza.” UNICEF reports that “the situation is getting worse every day…You have a big pile of rubbish on top of which children are digging for a little bit of food.”

On May 7 almost 100 Democratic Members of the House of Representatives wrote “in opposition to the current Israeli government policy to block all humanitarian aid.” The pro-Israel, pro-diplomacy group J Street, which backed the letter, said “As Jews and as Americans, the humanitarian blockade is a painful violation of our values…Families in Gaza should not be made to pay for Hamas’ vile crimes.”

Why is Israel doing this? Why has it renewed the bombing of civilians in Gaza, killing scores of women and children every day? Why, at the same time has it brought Gaza tactics to the West Bank, razing villages, raiding homes, displacing tens of thousands, killing children there?

This week, I spoke with Zerlina Maxwell on her daily Sirius/XM radio show. I recalled with her what we had discussed last November: The Israeli plan is not simply one of retribution for the October 7 massacre or about “defending Israel.” This is a plan to “take over the occupied territories that they have held since 1967 and formally make them part of Israel. “

The Conquest of Gaza

The intent was obvious months ago, but now Israel has taken off the gloves. Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed a plan to call up tens of thousands of reservists to launch a new ground invasion of Gaza next month. This time, they will not just level buildings and kill innocents (Israeli forces have killed or wounded over 170,000 Palestinians thus far in the war), but seize and hold the territory.

The plan is to forcefully move all Palestinians from the north of Gaza into the south. There, Israel would set up ten “aid distribution centers” surrounded by barbed wire. All Palestinians wanting food would be forced to come into the camps, be subjected to biometrical scans and then given a meal for the day. Private companies would control the camps. President Donald Trump is now pressuring aid organizations to cooperate with this ghettoization of Gaza. The plan is to make things so miserable for Gazans that they would flee.

This week, Israel Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said out loud what other officials only say euphemistically. “Gaza will be completely destroyed. Simply because it is one big terror infrastructure, above and below the surface. The civilians will be concentrated to the south, to a humanitarian zone without Hamas or terrorism. And by the way, from there they will start to leave in large numbers to third countries. That will change the reality, the history of the state of Israel for decades to come.”

As MSNBC host Chris Hayes pointed out on his show May 7, Smotrich is not the only Israeli politician saying this. “Gaza must endure hell. Hell means bombing all the aid depots that Hamas hold” as well has halting the supply of electricity and water, Itamar Ben Gvir told reporters this week. This, he said, “will cause mass starvation of Hamas terrorists and their supporters in the Gaza Strip and will allow us to return to war with tremendous force, when Hamas terrorists are weak and exhausted, without any significant ability to fight back — and we can crush them without difficulty.”

Instead of opposing these war crimes, the Trump administration is enabling them, says Hayes, engaging in “negotiations to see what countries would be take the Palestinians forced to flee in desperation. Facilitating what would essentially be mass population transfers. And that’s a phrase that rightly recalls some of the worst episodes in human history.”

U.S. and Israeli policy, Hayes says, “is more aggressively radical and extremist, more flagrantly in violation of international law and human rights then we’ve seen before.” But if you protest, if you speak out, particularly on college campuses, “the Trump administration may label you a terrorist and have you removed from the country or put into detention for months.”

Indeed, David Rothkopf, writing on “the catastrophe of US support for Netanyahu” begins his Substack post this week with “This is the kind of post that could have me targeted by the federal government.”

If I were an academic, I could get fired for writing it or lose the grants on which my research might depend. If I were a visitor to the U.S., I might be stopped at the border and denied entry to this country or, were I already here, I might be arrested, sent to a federal concentration camp and/or deported. If I were a speaker at a public event, I might see a pressure campaign to deny me a platform. If I were working in a law firm or other business that did business with the United States, I might see those business ties cut off.

I might be attacked by top U.S. officials or by big well-funded special interest groups for being an anti-Semite. This despite the fact that I am Jewish, the son of a Holocaust refugee from a family that saw forty aunts, uncles, cousins murdered in Nazi concentration camps. This despite the fact that the vast majority of Jews share my views. This despite the fact that what I am arguing for is not only consistent with Jewish values but in the best traditions and interests of the Jewish people.

The same is true of my writings. Or those of my friend, MJ Rosenberg, a former AIPAC staffer who now forcefully condemns Israel’s extremist policies (and whose Substack I strongly recommend).

We cannot allow these policies to continue. We cannot stand by. Now, more than any time that I can think of since the mass protests against the Vietnam War, we all must speak out more forcefully, more frequently and with more commitment: Not in my name.