The Granary Washington Won’t Fill

On Monday in Paris, on the sidelines of the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting, Marco Rubio said two things that cannot both be true.

The first concerned the United Nations. The secretary of state told reporters that the UN is not at the centre of any of the world’s current crises and has not played a meaningful role in a major one for quite some time.

[https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesman/2026/11/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-remarks-to-the-press-22]

The second concerned Gaza. Asked about the ceasefire, Rubio spoke of shelter, of heat, of the winter now approaching. Parts of the plan, he conceded, had fallen behind schedule. He pointed to American coordination with the World Food Programme, and to the need to rebuild bakeries so that Gaza can one day feed itself.

The World Food Programme is the United Nations. In Gaza it is the United Nations at the very centre of the crisis. And it is running out of money.

Last month the agency said funding shortfalls were forcing it to cut its monthly assistance from 1.6 million people to 1.1 million. By the WFP’s count, about 1.4 million people, two thirds of Gaza, still face crisis levels of hunger or worse. Carl Skau, the WFP’s deputy executive director, said after his eighth trip to Gaza since the war that, a year into the ceasefire, little had changed. The agency asked for $450 million to sustain its work in Gaza and the West Bank for six months, warning that the cuts were landing just as Gaza faced its fourth winter.

Where did the money go? Part of the answer is Washington. Last December the administration pledged $2 billion for UN humanitarian work in 2026, routed through a new pooled fund, and the State Department warned individual agencies that they would have to “adapt, shrink, or die.” American officials put previous voluntary humanitarian funding at between $8 billion and $10 billion a year. Other donors have tightened their belts too. The squeeze was the point.

There is a respectable case for it. The UN humanitarian system is bloated, duplicative and too often unaccountable. Europe and the Gulf have long let American taxpayers carry too much. And Rubio has drawn one line with conviction. A year ago, at the American coordination centre in southern Israel, he called UNRWA a subsidiary of Hamas and said it would play no role in delivering aid. In the same breath he praised the WFP’s work.

That is precisely the problem. Washington chose its instrument. It excluded one UN agency and leaned heavily on another. Having made the WFP a main beam of the humanitarian arrangement, it cannot then call the UN irrelevant while the agency it selected strikes half a million people off its lists for want of cash.

Rubio understands this better than most. In May 2025, as Israel’s blockade of Gaza was being lifted, he told House appropriators that it had been damaging Israel’s own security and international standing, and that he had spoken with the WFP’s Cindy McCain about how it would distribute food. He grasped then that hunger in Gaza is a strategic question, and that the strategy is Israel’s.

The oldest food policy in the Hebrew Bible is worth recalling here. Joseph, sold into Egypt by his brothers, rose to power because he read Pharaoh’s dream as an economic forecast: seven years of plenty, seven of famine. His answer was not a speech. It was a granary. Grain was stored in the fat years and released in the lean, and when famine came the whole region, his own brothers included, came down to Egypt to buy grain. The granary was the state.

Israel had its own Joseph. Dov Yosef led Jewish Jerusalem’s emergency committee through the siege of 1948, managing the city’s dwindling food and water, and then became its military governor. As minister of rationing and supply in the first government, he ran the austerity of the young state’s first years. Israelis who queued under him did not think of food as charity. They thought of it as survival, and as security.

Israel’s interest in Gaza’s granary is not charity either. A hungry Gaza is Hamas’s best recruiting sergeant and its most effective press office, and every bread queue is filed as evidence against Israel, from The Hague to the campuses. In Paris, Rubio threatened to inflict tremendous damage on the International Criminal Court. The cheapest defence against that court is a full granary.

The arithmetic has also changed. Rubio confirmed in Paris that roughly $4 billion a year in American military financing to Israel is to be phased out, on the president’s view that Israel is now prosperous enough to be a sales country. That is a mark of Israeli strength. It also removes an excuse. A country rich enough to buy its own weapons is rich enough to ensure that flour, fuel and the materials to rebuild ovens cross the border on time. On Monday the Board of Peace itself urged Israel to do more on shelter and winter needs after severe flooding.

None of this requires Washington to love the UN. It requires coherence. Either the United States funds the agency it has chosen to rely on in Gaza, or it says plainly who will: the Gulf states that want a voice in Gaza’s future, the Europeans who issue statements about it, or Israel, which must live beside it. The WFP’s request is about a ninth of the military financing now being wound down.

Rubio is right that the UN needs reform. But in Gaza it is present, and Washington chose to lean on it. Calling it irrelevant while cutting its rations is not reform. It is arranging a failure and then pointing at it.

Joseph filled the granary before the lean years came. In Gaza the lean years are already here. Walk into a bakery there this winter: four walls, an oven, a queue at the door before dawn. The room is full of people waiting. It is empty of bread.