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UN Declares Famine in Gaza: No Middle Ground on Genocide

Jamal Kanj

Israel war of genocide is not about October 7; it is not about freeing Israeli captives. It is, first and foremost, about preserving a racist Jewish governing coalition and seizing a historic opportunity while a submissive administration in Washington looks the other way. The aim is to advance a biblical expansionist project and create the conditions for “self” ethnic cleansing, as part of the permanent erasure of the Palestinian people from their homeland.

As the U.N. officially declared a famine in Gaza City, Israel rejected the ceasefire and threatened to flatten Gaza City “like Beit Hanoun.” On July 11, Israeli Minister of War Israel Katz openly flaunted an aerial image of the razed cities of Rafah in the south and Beit Hanoun in the north, vowing that Gaza City would suffer the same fate.

Intoxicated by international impunity, Israel plans to force one million civilians from the north into a concentration camp, euphemistically called a “Humanitarian (Tent) City” in the south. Stripped of homes, starved, and bombed, Palestinians are being herded into cages to prepare for the “voluntary” expulsion from their country. In this regard, racist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told the Israeli military chief Eyal Zamir, “Whoever doesn’t evacuate . . . No water, no electricity, they can die of hunger…”

In the occupied West Bank, Smotrich has dusted off the old Israeli blueprint to further carve Palestine into disconnected fragments. His plan dismembers any supposed “future Palestinian state” into three broken pieces: two sealed-off ghettos in the West Bank and another in Gaza. The aim is to undermine the geographical contiguity of any future Palestinian state, while cementing the Israeli “Jewish-only” colonial project of “from the river to the sea” as a permanent reality.

Europe knows this well. It condemns these illegal colonies, urges Israel not to expand them, and pretends to show indignation. And then? Nothing. Worse than nothing, Europe continues granting Israel privileged trade status, even importing goods produced in the very “Jewish-only” colonies it labels “illegal.” By financing Israel’s war economy while issuing toothless statements, Europe is complicit in the machinery of Jewish apartheid and war.

Across the Atlantic, the Donald Trump administration does more than enable Israel, it emboldens it. Washington has written Israel a blank check to flatten Gaza and strangle the West Bank, and even the killing of American citizens, along the way.

As children in Gaza starve, Trump, building on Joe Biden’s and Antony Blinken’s Israel-first diplomacy, is pushing to reward Tel Aviv with normalization deals with Arab regimes. In Paris, American mediator Tom Barak brokered a meeting between the Syrian foreign minister and Israel’s strategic affairs minister, while simultaneously pressuring Lebanon to disarm the resistance. All the while, Washington sanctions Israel’s occupation of strategic areas in southern Lebanon and its expansion deep into Syria in flagrant violations of ceasefire agreements.

Israel’s grip on Washington runs deeper than mere politics. The pro-Israel Zionist lobby, AIPAC, maintains bipartisan obedience through an “equal-opportunity” campaign financing. Beyond money, Israel has long wielded leverage through kompromat, media manipulation, and extortion. Its power is so pervasive it can even override the American justice system, enabling Israeli citizens, or American Jews, to evade accountability for crimes committed on U.S. soil. Tom Alexandrovich is just one new case, arrested in a recent sting operation for luring American children for sex. He was released from a Las Vegas prison after posting a $10,000 bail and allowed to leave the country.

But he is not an exception. From financial fraud, organ trafficking to sexual pedophiles, Alexandrovich was but one of many who escaped American justice. He joins a long list of offenders who found home in Israel, or what has become the global sanctuary for foreign Jewish pedophiles.

Furthermore, through potential Mossad sayanim from Jeffrey Epstein’s blackmail networks to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Israel has been suspected of exploiting political weaknesses to bend American, and world leaders, to Israel’s will. Through bribes, sex, threats, and relentless lobbying, they steer the U.S. foreign policy to serve Tel Aviv over the interests of the American people.

Trump, like his predecessors, appears to be entangled in the same AIPAC’s web of influence and corruption.

The cost of all this is measured in Palestinian lives. Gaza lies in ruins, and its residents are victims of a U.N. declared Israeli-made famine. The starved are forced to line up for food under drones and sniper scopes at the misnomer “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.” In the West Bank, daily life is a gauntlet of checkpoints, Jewish-only roads, home demolitions, and marauding Zionist Youth mobs emboldened by the state.

Ironically, Israel has never hidden its goals: ethnic cleansing, no Palestinian sovereignty, no right of return, and Jewish apartheid imposed on the indigenous people of the land. Gaza is being emptied, and the West Bank is fragmented into Bantustans. The so-called international community—Europe, the U.S., and Arab regimes foremost among them, are complicit through coverup, silence, and betrayal.

We have been here before. South African apartheid did not collapse because it grew a conscience. It collapsed because the world forced it down, through boycotts, sanctions, and the moral power of global grassroots solidarity. The same must happen now. Every bomb dropped on Gaza, every burned olive tree, every acre stolen to build Jewish-only homes in the West Bank, carries not just Israel’s fingerprints but also those of the governments and institutions that finance, directly and indirectly, these racist policies.

Palestinians will not survive on hollow statements or empty promises. Europe’s recognition of Palestine means nothing without concrete action: sanctions, divestment, and an end to trade with Israel and its illegal Jewish-only colonies. Meanwhile, Trump, a master of hypocrisy urges Russia and Ukraine to stop the killing, while he backs Israeli resumption of the genocide and prodding it to finish its murdering job. Arab dictators must stop hiding behind so-called “international obligations” when those obligations translate to mass starvation and genocide.

Until then, Israel will press on with its war of genocide, shielded by Trump’s unconditional support and Europe’s double standards. Its arrogance and apartheid are fueled not only by bombs and bulldozers, but by the absence of accountability, Western collusion, and Arab paralysis.

Just as with the Holocaust, there is no middle ground on the Palestinian genocide: you’re either with it or against it.

[Jamal Kanj is the author of Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Arab world issues for various national and international commentaries. Courtesy: CounterPunch, an online magazine based in the United States that covers politics in a manner its editors describe as “muckraking with a radical attitude”. It is edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank.]

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Famine and Mass Murder in Gaza: A Crime of Zionism and World Imperialism

Andre Damon

On Monday, the Israeli military carried out two airstrikes, one after another, on Nasser Hospital in the south of the Gaza Strip, killing over 20 people. The second strike deliberately targeted and killed five journalists covering the aftermath of the first strike, including correspondents for Reuters, the Associated Press, Al Jazeera and others.

So far, Israeli troops have killed 192 journalists during the Gaza genocide, most of them directly targeted in precision strikes. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, more reporters have been killed in Israel’s onslaught on Gaza than in any other modern war.

Monday’s deliberate, targeted murder of journalists and medical workers follows the announcement Friday by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification food monitor that famine has officially set in in Gaza City. The report stated bluntly that this famine is “entirely man-made” and added that “this is the highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded by the Integrated Food Security Classification system.”

On Sunday, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported that 289 people, including 115 children, have died of malnutrition and starvation since October 2023. On Sunday alone, eight Palestinians in Gaza, including one child, died of starvation or malnutrition.

On November 21, 2024, the International Criminal Court formally charged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the war crime of “starvation as a method of warfare.” This charge reflects the undeniable fact that the Netanyahu government, with the open support of the United States (under Biden and now Trump) and the tacit backing of all of the imperialist powers, is using deliberate mass starvation as a policy tool in its plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza.

Israel’s offensive on Gaza City, launched last week, is a step in this systematic plan, which aims for the total military occupation of Gaza, the displacement of its population into concentration camps in the country’s south, and from thence their forcible transfer to other countries, such as South Sudan.

As Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich made clear in May, “Within a year, … Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to … the south to a humanitarian zone … and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries.”

On Friday, Defense Minister Israel Katz vowed to ruthlessly attack Gaza City, the last area of Gaza outside direct Israeli military occupation. “Soon, the gates of hell will open upon the heads of Hamas’s murderers and rapists in Gaza, until they agree to Israel’s conditions for ending the war, primarily the release of all hostages and their disarmament.”

But just a day earlier, Netanyahu said that the planned onslaught on Gaza City would take place regardless of any ceasefire agreement with Hamas. “We’re gonna do that anyway. There was never a question that we’re not going to leave Hamas there,” Netanyahu told Sky News.

In other words, Israel plans to open “the gates of hell” regardless of anything Hamas does, including laying down arms. These statements make clear that the Israeli “war” in Gaza is, and has always been, an effort to annex and ethnically cleanse Gaza, using the events of October 7, 2023 as a pretext.

Friday’s declaration of a famine in Gaza City and Monday’s massacre of journalists at Nasser Hospital, have prompted completely hypocritical condemnations of Israel’s actions by officials of several European imperialist powers.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy wrote in a post on X that he is “horrified” by the attack and that “civilians, healthcare workers and journalists must be protected. We need an immediate ceasefire.”

But this same man declares, virtually with every breath, “We support Israel’s right to defend itself” against a defenseless population that Israel illegally imprisons and occupies and which it is seeking to exterminate. The British government has declared the anti-genocide group Palestine Action a “terrorist organization” and has arrested hundreds of people merely for taking part in demonstrations supporting the group.

Whatever their verbal protestations about one or another massacre carried out by Israel, Washington, London, Paris and Berlin have enabled and defended the Gaza genocide.

Responding to the latest atrocities, UN Secretary-General Guterres said that the deliberate famine is “a failure of humanity itself,” and UNRWA head Lazzarini said, “The world’s indifference and inaction is shocking. Like Hannah Arendt said, ‘The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.’”

One must be blunt. The crimes being committed in Gaza are not “a failure of humanity,” nor are they the product of “the world’s indifference.”

Billions of people all over the world oppose the Gaza genocide. The US-Israeli campaign to exterminate the Palestinian people has been met by one of the largest—if not the largest—globally coordinated mass protest movements in world history. Countless thousands of students, artists, and professionals have protested the Gaza genocide at grave risk to their careers and personal safety.

What is lacking is neither “humanity” nor “empathy,” but perspective. The Gaza genocide is not “a failure of humanity,” but a crime of capitalism and imperialism. It arises not from the human condition, as a sort of existential barbarism pouring out of the human soul, but from a definite and concrete set of social relations.

In 2017, the Oxfam charity reported that the world’s eight wealthiest billionaires own the same amount as the 3.6 billion people who form the poorer half of the world’s population. Since then, the financial oligarchy has only grown richer, with Oxfam noting that the wealth of the world’s billionaires rose three times faster in 2024 than in 2023.

It is the vast expansion of the wealth and power of this oligarchy, whose riches are derived from the exploitation of the working class all over the world, that forms the social basis of the eruption of all forms of social barbarism.

The capitalist ruling elites are waging an escalating global war, of which the genocide in Gaza is a component part and a precedent. With the Gaza genocide, the capitalist class is abandoning all restraints on the use of unbridled violence in the waging of imperialist war.

In domestic politics, the domination of the oligarchy expresses itself in the open turn to dictatorship and mass repression, and the crossing of all boundaries that previously limited the use of domestic repression.

The same Trump who proclaims that Gaza will become the “Riviera of the Middle East” once its population is expelled and its cities are plowed under declares that “there will be no better place on earth” to “build factories or grow a company” than the American police state he is constructing through military occupation and mass repression. Trump administration officials use virtually the same language to describe American cities as Netanyahu and his gang of fascists use to describe the Palestinians.

Every capitalist party, in every country, is implicated in the Gaza genocide. All factions of the US political establishment, Democrats and Republicans alike, have repeatedly voted to arm Israel and proclaim the eternal right of “Israel to defend itself.”

The Gaza genocide is not a cancerous growth on an otherwise healthy society but a symptom of the inner malignancy of capitalism. Moral appeals to the capitalist oligarchy are, in the words of Leon Trotsky, no “better than prayers for rain.”

Stopping the genocide requires a direct assault on the entrenched socio-economic interests driving it. The social force capable of stopping the extermination of the Palestinian people, together with all other manifestations of capitalist barbarism, is the working class.

Workers must be armed with the understanding that the fight against imperialist war and genocide is inextricably connected with the struggle against inequality and the rule of the capitalist oligarchy.

The fight against war and genocide must be united with the struggle to defend the social and economic rights of workers in the fight for socialism. The independent intervention of the international working class, mobilizing broader sections of the middle class and youth of society behind it, is the only way to end the global eruption of capitalist barbarism.

[Andre Damon is writer and editor for the World Socialist Web Site. Courtesy: World Socialist Web Site, the online publication of the International Committee of the Fourth International.]