Starvation = Genocide

It is a terrifying synchrony that in the last week of July, when Gaza was approaching level 5 conditions of famine, where widespread malnutrition will cause more and more civilian deaths, we read about the worst genocide in the whole Torah. It is a terrifying synchrony that the following week, with nothing changing, the verses we read in Lamentations on Tisha B’Av will be true in opposite ways for the Jewish people and for Gazans. For the Jewish people: “My daughter people – so cruel, like ostriches in the desert.” And for Gazans: “At the cost of our lives, we bring bread.”

The cruel conditions in Gaza are imposed by the government of Israel: thousands upon thousands wait in interminable lines and swollen crowds for not enough food, often shot at by soldiers who are given zero necessary training or means for non-lethal crowd control. The many organizations with expertise in Gaza have been replaced by the tragically amateur Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), while hundreds of trucks of food wait to be let in.  

The genocide in Torah portion, Matot, is of course worse than anything happening in Gaza – but perhaps our scripture is helping to create permission in the minds of the people leading Israel’s government that it would be ok to let genocide unfold in Gaza. God knows the fascist members of government have said so out loud.

It is found in Numbers chapter 31, where God tells Moses to go to war against the Midianites. The people do go to war, with God on their side they win, and they demolish Midian’s army and put all the men to the sword. They also take captive all the women and children. Then Moses becomes angry – the women were the ones who caused the Israelite men to sin by having sex with them and inviting them to sacrifice to the Midianite god Baal Peor.

Moses commands the men of war to murder all the captive women, “all who are able to have known a man”, along with all the male children, even the infants. He seems to do this on his own initiative, without being commanded. Afterwards, the women captives killed are not important enough to be numbered. All we know is that after they were murdered, 32,000 Midianite women and girls remained. It’s a horror in the Torah that feels like it has no mitigating holiness or redemptive lesson.

The current food blockade on Gaza is its own horror: it will kill the most vulnerable, the children first, and the sick and the pregnant, striking down so many people who have no relationship to the October 7^th attack.

Israel must take moral responsibility for this starvation, for every death due to malnutrition, simply because Israel has complete control of three quarters of Gaza. The opposing “argument”—that Gaza could get food if “they” (Hamas) would just release the hostages—is one we hear again and again. It’s a feeble argument to absolve Israel of responsibility by making it Hamas’s fault. We hear it from those Jews whose passionate attention on the remaining hostages is matched by an equal passion to turn a blind eye to the sufferings of Gazans. As if that could make up for the horrors perpetrated by Hamas on October 7.

But Gazans are not Hamas; starving Gazans will not starve Hamas. But it will wither the Jewish people, morally and spiritually from within, and without from condemnation, even as it physically withers the people of Gaza.

In May, Israel proposed carefully rationing food aid to individual Gazans who are known to not be Hamas, alerting them of rations by cell phone, without having a practicable way of getting enough food to the people actually starving. But if Israel can distinguish the people who are not Hamas, then they could let those human beings into refugee camps inside Israel, where they could get all the food they need. In fact, they could have done that in the beginning of the war, and saved tens of thousands of innocent lives lost in the bombing destruction of whole city blocks and ultimately, whole cities.

That is not what Netanyahu’s government wants, however. It doesn’t want a ceasefire; it doesn’t want our hostages back; it doesn’t want to protect innocent Gazans. What it wants is an excuse to “complete” its war on Gaza, to ultimately turn Gaza into Israeli territory, and for many factions, to settle Gaza. Gaza has literally no connection to the ancient Jewish homeland, and the Jews do not even have a Biblical claim to that land, which was Philistine territory, but that does not stop all the settlement talk among the religious right.

After Shabbat ends, I will be observing Tisha B’Av. We will read in Lamentations 5:9: “At the cost of our lives, we bring bread.” Over a thousand Gazans have already been killed seeking bread from the GHF distribution sites.

We also read in Lamentations 4:3: “My daughter people – so cruel, like ostriches in the desert.” Ostriches were thought to be cruel because a dominant female in a group will share a nest with other females, and actually push out the eggs belonging to the other females, leaving them to die without incubation. For our ancestors, who were not tracking which egg came from which female, this was a mother killing its own babies. That is how we see Tisha B’Av – a people killing its own children. But the so-called Jewish state is using its power like the real ostrich, letting an adjacent group of people die or forcing them to leave, in order to maximize itself.

The terrific irony of course is that this government is fulfilling Hamas’ wildest dreams of what it hoped for when it carried out its ruthless and vile attack. Israel took over Gaza, took responsibility for Gaza, and is starving Gaza. This side of Israel is what is being “revealed” to the world.

Israel is now operating within a long tradition: most genocides have occurred not through the use of technology, like the Holocaust, or with machetes, like the Rwandan genocide, but through manufactured famine. The Herrero tribe in South West Africa was driven into the desert to starve by the Germans at the beginning of the 20^th century. The Armenians were driven from their land by Turkey’s ruling “Committee for Union and Progress” (a faction of the Young Turks), to undergo a long march towards death through starvation. The Ukrainians were starved to death by Stalin in the Holodomor, The Hunger Extermination. The Irish were starved in the great potato famine, called “An Gorta Mór” – The Great Hunger, by the British (some would say this was not the British plan but the consequence of foolish capitalist policies, as if that were an excuse). And there are the manufactured famines in South Sudan and Somalia and other places where famine was and is a tactic used by one side in a civil war.

Two adult deaths per 10,000 per day, or four children’s deaths, will make it a level 5 famine, as measured by the UN. A famine manufactured by one side in a war against another is never just an “unintended consequence”. No one can say, starvation of innocents civilians was just collateral damage. Famine cannot be targeted; there is no such thing as collateral damage; all damage is direct, and always affects the whole population. That is what makes starvation genocide in the full legal and moral sense.

The simple equation is that starvation = genocide. The distance between the current conditions in Gaza and genocide through starvation is small indeed, and there is very little time to change the course of events. And none of us can say, we didn’t know.