Although U.S. television news has firmly swept Gaza under the rug, the campaign against its civilians of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is ongoing. On Saturday morning, an Israeli airstrike on a house in Jabalia killed 32 Palestinians, bring the death toll to 44 just in the early morning alone.

Some 70% of those killed by Israeli forces in Gaza have been women and children, according to UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR). Counting confirmed deaths, the US said that Israeli forces killed eighty percent in residential buildings. CNN reports that OHCHR announced that it had found a consistent pattern of “high numbers of babies and young children, women, older persons, and families killed together in residential buildings.”

Regarding the famine, the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, posted on “X”:

Deeply alarming — @theIPCinfo warns there is a strong likelihood that famine in northern #Gaza is imminent.

We call for an immediate scale-up and safe access for humanitarian aid — primarily food and medicines for severe malnutrition — within days not weeks. https://t.co/YZtdPs4RXk

— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) November 8, 2024

The IPC panel report “classified the entire Gaza Strip in IPC Phase 4 (Emergency) acute food insecurity.”

Phase 4 is defined as follows: “At least 20 percent of households in an area are experiencing Phase 4 or worse outcomes, and acute malnutrition rates are expected to be between 15 and 30 percent.”

The panel report added, “One hundred and thirty-three thousand people were classified as facing catastrophic food insecurity.” That is the entire population of Pasadena, California.

Catastrophic food insecurity is defined as “Even when using all of their coping strategies, people have almost no food and cannot support their basic needs. Starvation, death and destitution are apparent.”

They say that a risk of famine exists for all of Gaza for the next five months, and the odds would rise with heavy fighting.

“Famine,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024.

The IPC panel observed, “On 6 October 2024, Israel designated all of the northern Gaza Strip as a combat zone and ordered the entire civilian population to evacuate.”

The panel cautions that the availability of food in the Gaza Strip must be understood in the context of a collapsed food system. The report says that aid shipments into Gaza were lower in October, 2024, than at any time since the conflict began over a year ago. The panel says that the World Food Program is reporting that the average daily number of trucks entering Gaza dropped to just 58, the lowest since November 2023. Before the war, as many as 500 aid trucks entered Gaza daily — a necessity, since the Israeli government had blockaded the Strip.

And this low number of food shipments is being recorded at a time when severe food insecurity, escalating malnutrition, and the looming threat of famine were already evident in the northern governorates. The threat is especially potent in places where there is armed combat.

The International Medical Corps, an NGO working in Gaza alongside UNICEF and other organizations, reports this week that “according to a recent needs assessment by the Global Nutrition Cluster, the situation in Gaza is alarming: the ongoing conflict has significantly worsened child malnutrition from a Global Acute Malnutrition rate of 0.8% to 16% in northern Gaza and 7% in the rest of Gaza.”

That “7% in the rest of Gaza” figure will skyrocket by July to levels similar to what now exists in North Gaza.

The report says that 1.7 million people are internally displaced in Gaza, which means homeless and without a source of income. The first four months of Israel’s total war on Gaza destroyed an entire year’s GDP for the entirety of Palestine: “As of end of January 2024, the cost of direct damage inflicted on infrastructure in the Gaza Strip was equivalent to 97 percent of the total GDP of West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 2022.” That would be like doing $27 trillion worth of damage to buildings, roads, water pipes, and sewage treatment centers in the United States. Quarterly inflation in the Strip was 120% in the first quarter of this year, while GDP had plummeted by 80%.

Amartya Sen argued that famines do not occur because there is no food. They happen because food becomes too expensive and isn’t distributed to the people who need it even as people lose the income necessary to purchase it.

This point is an important reply to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertion that Israel is allowing enough food into Gaza for the population calorie-wise. This assertion is, according to UN and NGO aid organizations on the ground, a bald-faced lie. But even if it were true, having food in trucks at the border would not necessarily forestall famine if it cannot be distributed efficiently, if people cannot get to the distribution centers, etc.

The report says ominously:

Between mid-March and mid-July, half of the population of the Gaza Strip (1.1 million people) is expected to face catastrophic conditions (IPC Phase 5), and the entire population of the Gaza Strip is expected to face Crisis or worse (IPC Phase 3 or above) levels of acute food insecurity.

Phase 3 malnutrition is defined as: “Phase 3 – CRISIS: At least 20 percent of households in an area are experiencing Phase 3 or worse outcomes, and acute malnutrition rates are expected to be between 10 and 15 percent.”

Phase 5 malnutrition is defined as: “FAMINE: At least 20 percent of households in an area are experiencing Phase 5 outcomes, acute malnutrition levels exceed 30 percent, and more than 2 per 10,000 people are dying each day.”

Al Jazeera English: “Aid group fears famine-like conditions may already be present in south Gaza”

That is bad for North Gaza, but things get much worse, expanding to the whole Strip:

According to the IPC Famine Review Committee, as of March 2024, all evidence pointed towards a major acceleration of starvation-related death and malnutrition.

Food insecurity in Gaza is not moving along at a steady pace. It is speeding up alarmingly. And it has been speeding up for some time:

Malnutrition rates had doubled since January 2024 in the northern governorates, with 1 in 3 children under 2 years of age being affected. As of March 2024, famine was projected and imminent in the North Gaza and Gaza governorates, in the absence of an immediate cessation of hostilities, unrestricted humanitarian access and a restoration of health, water, sanitation and electricity.

So, just this spring a third of toddlers and infants in North Gaza were visibly malnourished. Please note that children don’t come back from malnutrition. It has permanent cognitive and affective impacts. They will never achieve their full potential regarding intelligence and emotional regulation.

And here’s the kicker:

Moreover, for the southern and middle governorates, the IPC Famine Review Committee concluded that there was a risk of famine during the projection period of mid-March to mid-July, in a reasonable worst-case scenario.

Famine is spreading inexorably from north Gaza to the south and by mid-July will very likely have encompassed the entirety of the Gaza Strip, with its 2.2 million people.

Given a population of 2.2 million, one in 10,000 would equal 220 persons if famine conditions really did spread throughout the entire strip. If more than 2 per 10,000 died daily, that would imply at least three dead every day. That figure would yield a death toll of 660 per day dying of starvation. That death toll would equal 19,800 per month.

If the Israeli-imposed famine remained in place for two months, it would kill more than all the Israeli bombs have in the nine months of the total war on Gaza.

( Middle East Monitor ) – Two Palestinian children died last week of starvation, dehydration and lack of medicine amid desperate conditions in the southern areas of the besieged Gaza Strip.

The Ministry of Health announced the death of Abdulqader Sirhi, 13, and seven-month-old Fayiz Abu Ataya, from malnutrition and lack of food and medicine at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah. The ministry said that the number of famine-related deaths has risen to 37, with only those who reached the hospitals able to be counted. It added that many died in their homes and their deaths have not been registered, while others are fighting for their lives.

Over 3,500 children, under the age of five, are facing an imminent risk of death due to shortages of food, nutritional supplements and vaccinations.

Fayiz Abu Ataya’s father said: “My child was born at the beginning of the current sweeping pogrom, in our shelter school, and died in it. He needed a special kind of formula and food missing in Gaza.” The infant’s short life is a chronicle of the deprivation overwhelming aid-starved Gaza.

In a statement, 70 international rights organisations – including the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Geneva International Centre for Justice, and Brussels Court – called on all relevant authorities and international institutions to officially declare a famine in the Gaza Strip. The statement stressed that food insecurity is increasing across the tiny enclave because of Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war against the Palestinian people.

The joint statement also warned:

With the crossings closed and humanitarian aid being prevented from entering by Israel, the threat of famine and acute malnutrition has resurfaced and swiftly spread.

“This affects the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip, half of whom are children, and particularly the people in the northern Gaza Valley, where supplies have run out.”

Before Israel unleashed its current carnage, the poverty and unemployment rates in Gaza had reached heights of 64 per cent and 45 per cent respectively, according to data from the World Bank and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS). Some 63 per cent of the people of the Strip were food insecure, while 80 per cent of Palestinians in the besieged enclave depended on international aid. Now, living under the genocidal war, things are aggravated. All families in the narrow enclave depend on foreign humanitarian aid, so their basic survival needs are affected by its cessation.

Um Firas Ghanem, a Palestinian mother who was displaced from Gaza City and forced to move to Deir Al-Balah, has three children, the eldest just six years old. “I fear for my kids, and I know, if we survive, the malnutrition and dehydration will impact their brain and growth,” she said. “There is no milk or eggs or meat or fruits, and if they are found, it’s very few, and extremely expensive that I can’t afford to buy it.” Um Firas’s family, like most of the displaced families, relies entirely on charities who provide them a meal every day. She is worried that if the Rafah Crossing remains closed, they will reach the point where no flour or canned food is available and children and patients will die in large numbers.

The Rafah Crossing has been closed since Israeli occupation forces took control of the vital area on 7 May, raising the Israeli flag to highlight its control. Now, thousands of trucks of food, water and medical supplies are stranded on the Egyptian side of the crossing awaiting Israel’s approval to enter the besieged Strip to help alleviate the crises facing Palestinian civilians.

Israel’s forced starvation in Gaza has killed dozens of children | Al Jazeera Newsfeed Video

This is not the first time Israel has weaponised water as a weapon of war. For almost two decades the occupation state has besieged Gaza, limiting the entry of food and medical supplies in an effort to pressure the Palestinian resistance to make concessions. Prior to the current bombing campaign only 500 trucks of goods were allowed into Gaza a day, insufficient for the enclave’s 2.3 million population. Since the end of October 2023, when Israel allowed aid to re-enter the Strip, after closing all the crossings for three weeks, only between 100-150 trucks have been allowed to enter Gaza each day, when deliveries have been approved

The humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza is only a fraction of what is needed to answer the enormous needs of an exhausted people. Since Israel stormed Rafah a month ago, no humanitarian aid has been allowed through the crossing and no injured Palestinians have been able to leave the Strip to access lifesaving medical care abroad. Now, even the few remaining devastated hospitals risk being out of service as fuel supplies dwindle.

In her partially damaged house in Gaza City, Amani Junaid, a mother of five, describes their life as a living hell. “Our lives have completely stopped: no school, no hospital, no markets, no homes, no entertainment areas for kids, scarce clean water and food,” she tells MEMO. “Before March, we ate animal fodder. Now we have only flour, but we can’t find anything to dip it in. We skip meals.”

“My children keep asking me for chocolates, snacks, lollipops and I am in agony not being able to meet their needs,” she adds. Amani has already lost her father during Israel’s war, he died as a result of his inability to obtain the medication needed to stabilise his health.

In addition to Israel’s control of the supply of humanitarian aid, it has also targeted food production factories, warehouses, markets, shops, stores, and bakeries, ensuring it controls access to all life saving supplies.

In spite of this, a famine has not been declared in Gaza. The delay in changing the conditions for the Palestinians of the Strip is another blow to a people who have struggled for decades under siege and occupation and a nod for Israel to continue its annihilation of the indigenous population of Palestine.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – On April 22nd, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for Grants Pass v. Johnson, a case that focuses on whether unhoused — the term that has generally replaced “homeless” — people with no indoor shelter options can even pull a blanket around themselves outdoors without being subject to criminal punishment.

Before making its way to the Supreme Court on appeal, the Ninth Circuit Court held that municipalities can’t punish involuntarily homeless people for merely living in the place where they are. This is exactly what the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, did when it outlawed resting or sleeping anywhere on public property with so much as a blanket to survive in cold weather, even when no beds in shelters were available. The law makes it impossible for unhoused residents to stay in Grants Pass, effectively forcing them to either move to another city or face endless rounds of punishment. In Grants Pass, the punishment starts with a $295 fine that, if unpaid, goes up to $500, and can escalate from there to criminal trespass charges, penalties of up to 30 days in jail, and a $1,250 fine.

The issue before the court is whether such a law violates the Eighth Amendment’s restrictions against cruel and unusual punishment. The city is asking the court to decide that the Eighth Amendment doesn’t impose any substantive limit on what can be criminalized, so long as the punishment itself isn’t considered cruel and unusual. If so, municipalities across the nation would be free to make involuntary homelessness unlawful.

In response, more than 40 amicus briefs with over 1,100 signatories were filed against the city’s case, representing millions of people concerned about or potentially affected by the far-reaching consequences of such a decision. The Kairos Center for Religions, Rights & Social Justice — to which the two authors of this piece belong — submitted one such brief together with more than a dozen religious denominations, historic houses of worship, and interfaith networks. Along with the 13 official signatories of that brief, many more clergy, faith leaders, and institutions support its core assertion: that the Grants Pass ordinance violates our interfaith tradition’s directives on the moral treatment of poor and unhoused people. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s decision could dramatically criminalize poverty and homelessness nationwide, especially if cities near Grants Pass, in the state of Oregon, and across the country, put in place similar restrictions.

Sadly, such a scenario is anything but far-fetched, given not just this Supreme Court but all too much of this country. Since the early 2000s, our nation has regularly turned to policing and “law and order” responses to social crises. Often wielded against poor and low-income communities in the form of fines, fees, and risks of jail time, such threats are regularly backed up by police in full body armor, using tactical gear and, in this century so far, hundreds of millions of dollars of military equipment transferred directly from the Pentagon to thousands of police departments nationwide.

All of this has made the possibility of using violence and brute force more likely in relation to many situations, including the world of the unhoused. Most recently, of course, militarized police have swarmed campuses to help quell largely peaceful student protests over the war on Gaza. Consider it anything but ironic that when Northeastern University students were arrested for their Gaza encampment, they were taken to the same facilities where unhoused people were being processed during homeless encampment sweeps, as local contacts in Boston have told us.

Poverty and Housing Insecurity

The homelessness and housing crises unfolding today reflect a broader national crisis of economic insecurity. In 2023, after all, approximately 135 million people or more than 40% of the nation, were considered poor or low-income and just one crisis away from becoming homeless. In a dramatic return to pre-pandemic conditions, this included 60% of Latinos (38.9 million), 59% of Native Americans (2.3 million), 55% of Blacks (22.5million), 36% of Asian people (8 million) and 32% of Whites (61.8 million).

Among those tens of millions of Americans, housing insecurity is alarmingly widespread. Before the pandemic, there were approximately 8 to 11 million people who were homeless or on the verge of becoming so, relying on a crumbling shelter system and a growing constellation of informal encampments on America’s streets, or trapped in a rotating series of sleeping places, including cars and couches, or doubled or tripled up in apartments. Worse yet, even those numbers were likely an underestimate: when the pandemic hit in 2020 and millions of people lost their jobs, 30 to 40 million people suddenly found themselves at risk of becoming homeless.

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In a nation once known as “the home of the brave” and “the land of the free,” there are untold numbers of brave souls who are without homes or on the verge of homelessness. Today, there is not a single state or county where someone earning the federal minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment.

As reported this May, between 2019 and 2023, rents rose by more than 30% nationally. Despite a number of local and state increases in the minimum wage this year, a living wage adequate to cover housing and other basic needs would often have to be at least twice as high as what those hourly increases add up to. In California, where the minimum wage rose to $16 an hour, single parents would need to earn at least $47 an hour to meet their basic needs, whereas a household with two working adults and two children would need close to $50 an hour. In Alabama, where the minimum wage is just $7.25, a single parent would need an hourly wage more than four times as high to meet basic household needs.

This, of course, means that tens of millions of people of every race, age, and gender identity, in every state and county in the country, are facing multiple forms of deprivation daily and will do so for years to come.

Although the depths of this crisis are hard to fathom, it can be measured in death. In 2023, researchers from the University of California, Riverside, found that poverty is the fourth-leading cause of death nationally, claiming 183,000 of us in 2019. Their research also showed that cumulative or long-term poverty was associated with 295,000 deaths annually, or 800 deaths a day. During the pandemic crisis, poor and low-income counties experienced Covid death rates that were three to five times higher than wealthier counties, while the mortality rate among renters facing eviction was 2.6 times higher than that of the general population. Housing insecurity led to increased death by Covid and had negative health impacts more generally.

Underestimating the Crisis

The extent of the (un)housing crisis is so much greater than the systems and structures that exist to respond to it. In part, this is because, as with poverty, measures of housing insecurity generally underestimate the need at hand. The most commonly used reference point on housing is the point-in-time (PIT) homeless count. The “PIT count” includes both the number of the unhoused who are in shelters and a street count of unsheltered homeless people. However, it only deals with those it can reach and so literally count. It also leaves out some forms of homelessness, including the millions of people who are living “doubled up” or “tripled up” with friends, family members, or even strangers.

In the pre-pandemic years, the PIT count was often around half a million people, but didn’t include the 2.5-3.5 million people living in temporary homeless shelters, transitional housing centers, and informal encampments or tent cities, or the estimated seven million people who had lost their own homes and moved in with others. In other words, the PIT count was short by about 9 to 11 million people (and that was before the pandemic caused greater homelessness and housing insecurity).

Although grossly inadequate, the PIT count remains the measure used to allocate federal resources toward homelessness. Unfortunately, when a housing program is designed for tens or even hundreds of thousands rather than millions of people, it will fail. For this reason, housing organizers and advocates have for years been pushing alternatives and urging the consideration of housing solutions that could actually respond to this crisis at scale. The Housing First model is one of those solutions, prioritizing access to permanent and stable housing, alongside wraparound services for employment, recovery, and greater housing stability for those in need. The use of this model has been shown to result in higher rates of housing retention among previously unhoused people, with (not surprisingly) an improved quality of life as well.

In fact, some pandemic policies did temporarily (even if unintentionally) implement and expand on the Housing First model. They moved people into hotels or other available, unused rental units, stopping all evictions and foreclosures; distributed economic stimulus payments; and built up this country’s decrepit social welfare system by expanding unemployment insurance and food security programs, while issuing monthly payments to households with children. All of this did, in fact, prevent massive dislocations of millions of people between 2020 and 2022, while providing more housing and keeping at least 20 million people above the poverty line.

A common thread of these programs was that they prioritized financially vulnerable households over Wall Street, real estate tycoons, and corporate landlords. Years later, a majority of Americans continue to support many of these policies, which were put in place alongside breakthrough organizing among poor, unhoused, and housing-insecure people.

During the early weeks of the pandemic, unhoused people living in encampments also fought to become certified as “essential workers” so that they could get protective equipment for their community members. Around the same time, low-income housing organizers and tenant associations became acutely aware of the vulnerabilities of low-income tenants who couldn’t then afford to pay their rent and feed their families. Despite fears of eviction, rent strikes broke out in March and April 2020, as tenants decided to withhold their limited resources to ensure that they could provide food to their families. This happened weeks before the federal eviction moratorium was enacted. When it expired months later, communities blocked eviction hearings to make sure as many people as possible could stay in their homes.

Despite widespread support for a more robust right to housing, it didn’t take long for powerful interests to begin pushing back. The real estate industry spent upwards of $100 million lobbying against pandemic eviction moratoriums at both the federal and state levels. In 2022, the Cicero Institute created a template for state legislation that would criminalize unhoused people. That model legislation would have banned encampments on public land and diverted funds from Housing First programs to short-term shelter programs, while forcing unhoused people into state-run encampments. Versions of this bill have been introduced in half a dozen states and passed in Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas.

Recently, in New York (where we live), Governor Kathy Hochul enacted a budget that prioritized the state’s wealthy residents over its poor and low-income ones. Not only did she refuse to increase taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and corporations, losing billions of dollars in new revenue, but her housing policies provided tax incentives to developers rather than focusing on creating stable housing for housing-insecure and homeless New Yorkers.

According to the New York Labor-Religion Coalition and the Housing Justice for All Coalition, at least 3.4 million tenants will be excluded from good-cause eviction protections, among them all upstate municipalities, while those who are eligible may not be able to exercise their rights unless they have adequate legal representation in housing court. That budget also rolls back rent-stabilization measures, making elderly tenants in particular more vulnerable to eviction, while failing to allocate a single dollar to move homeless New Yorkers into stable housing. And in all of this, New York is anything but out of the ordinary.

What You Do to the Least of These, You Do Unto Me

Although America’s political leadership is generally failing to respond to the need at hand, millennia of religious teachings have helped shape society’s views on our responsibility to care for, not punish, poor and unhoused people.

Indeed, there are over 2,000 Biblical passages that address poverty — most of them focusing on those made poor by a society that fails to provide for all our needs. As Jesus says to his followers in Matthew 25:

“[F]or I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me. Then [the nations] also will answer, Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and did not take care of you? Then [Jesus] will answer them, Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”

This responsibility rests not only on individuals, but those in positions of authority in society. As Isaiah 10:2 puts it: “Woe to those who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right.” Instead, Isaiah 3:15 instructs those who make the laws and issue decrees not to “grind the face[s] of the poor,” making their already difficult conditions worse. Such teachings are consistent not just with the Abrahamic tradition but other belief systems like Hinduism, which prioritizes non-violence and non-injury as a core moral responsibility.

A law like the one now before the Supreme Court in Grants Pass v. Johnson that would punish unhoused people for simply living departs from such moral wisdom in a radical fashion. As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out during oral arguments over the case, “For a homeless person who has no place to go, sleeping in public is kind of like breathing in public.” How true! If only four other justices would see the situation similarly.

Our faith traditions and constitutional values certainly should be clear enough that it is cruel and unusual punishment to treat the homeless the way Grants Pass wants to do. The court and the nation should respond to this moral crisis with care and compassion, with housing, not handcuffs.

May it be so.

Copyright 2024 Liz Theoharis and Shailly Gupta Barnes

Via Tomdispatch.com

(The Conversation) – Amid persistent calls from the United States and other countries that Israel needs to make it easier for life-saving aid to reach Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military closed two of the region’s few operating border crossings in Rafah, a southern Gazan city, on May 7, 2024.

Responding to political pressure and alarm, Israel then reopened a different border crossing into Gaza, called Kerem Shalom, on May 8.

These border crossings are crucial for aid workers and deliveries of food, fuel and other supplies, especially as commercial imports have stopped entering Gaza. The amount of aid going into Gaza each day has varied since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. But the overall number of aid trucks flowing through the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings is down 75% from before the war, according to the United Nations. Aid workers say they are unable to meet Palestinians’ needs in Gaza, even with the aid air drops and boat shipments that the U.S. and other countries are doing.

I spent 20 years as the president of Oxfam America, an international humanitarian organization, and have overseen humanitarian responses to some of the biggest crises of the past three decades, from the war in Kosovo to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. I know from experience that the major aid organizations know how to run large, well-integrated operational responses to emergencies like Gaza. However, this is not happening, in part because Israel is not giving aid groups what they need to do so.

The needs in Gaza

After seven months of conflict, the international community has not set up the kind of well-coordinated response it would normally provide during a crisis.

There are several reasons why enough aid deliveries are not quickly entering Gaza. First, Israel controls all of the border crossings into Gaza and does intensive searches of trucks for security reasons, slowing down the deliveries. Even if aid does cross into Gaza, it does not mean the goods will reach people in need.

There have also been reports of people dying and being injured when trying to collect aid packages that are air-dropped, as well as Hamas and other groups intercepting aid deliveries and either hoarding the items or selling them at high prices on the black market.

In early May, northern Gaza passed a critical threshold and is now entering into a “full blown famine,” according to the United Nations.

Bombings in Gaza have destroyed water and energy systems, leaving 95% of the population without access to clean water.

There’s a fairly standard playbook for how aid organizations respond to humanitarian crises like the one playing out in Gaza. In most cases, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, a designated U.N. office that focuses on humanitarian affairs and is typically called OCHA, takes the lead in defining what exactly different U.N. agencies should do to help people in a crisis.

The World Health Organization, World Food Program and other U.N. agencies all have their own specialties – be it health, housing, hunger, education or other issues. The U.N. agencies coordinate their work, while OCHA also assigns an international nonprofit organization to help each U.N. agency share their workload with other international and local nonprofits.

CBS News Video: “U.N. agency: No humanitarian aid able to enter Gaza

In most emergencies, there is clear coordination among international aid agencies from day one. This is a well-oiled machine with decades of experience in meeting people’s immediate needs in some of the world’s most challenging circumstances.

Aid work in Gaza is different

However, Gaza does not align with this typical system of aid work.

In Gaza and the West Bank, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, or simply UNRWA, has been the main U.N. agency that has been focused only on providing a full suite of services to Palestinians since the late 1940s, when Israel was created and many Palestinians were pushed out into what are now the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank.

Over the years, UNRWA’s role has evolved from meeting Palestinians’ basic needs for food and water, for example, to also providing health care and education. While other U.N. agencies like the World Health Organization work in Gaza, UNRWA is by far the largest aid organization there – and after Hamas is the second-largest employer in Gaza.

Both the Israeli and Egyptian governments have long recognized UNRWA as the main coordinator for trans-border aid shipments, especially those for other U.N. agencies and nonprofits that work with it.

While the UNRWA was accustomed to operating a large humanitarian operation in Gaza before the war, the agency is not equipped or staffed to help provide housing for the more than 1.7 million people in Gaza who have had to flee their homes.

Additionally, Israel and the UNRWA have a long, complicated relationship that came to a peak in March 2024, when Israel said that it would stop working with the agency altogether because of allegations – which have not been independently verified – that UNRWA staff participated in the Oct. 7 attacks and held hostages captive.

Israel no longer working with the UNRWA creates new logistical challenges that prevent a coherent, organized humanitarian response in Gaza. This may force other U.N. agencies to suddenly take over UNRWA’s long-established roles in Gaza.

Border closings and other challenges

Israel’s intermittent closing of border crossings into Gaza – and continued long delays for arriving aid trucks – is another crucial factor that is hampering aid delivery.

Aid experts also say that the number of aid trucks entering Gaza, which in May 2024 reached an average of 180 per day through the two main crossing points combined, is inadequate to address the hunger crisis.

Achieving what’s actually needed, they say, would require many more trucks, an influx of aid workers, training of Palestinian medical personnel to treat people suffering from malnutrition and gastrointestinal diseases, the restoration of medical facilities and, above all, an end to the military conflict.

Meanwhile, international nonprofits and their staff are facing their own safety challenges. At least 224 aid workers, most of them Palestinians, have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. Indiscriminate bombings of residential neighborhoods have forced other aid workers to move their families multiple times to find safety and shelter, making it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs.

Possible reforms

I think there are certain things that the U.N. could do to help make it easier for aid deliveries to reach people in Gaza.

First, OCHA could step in to better coordinate all of the relevant U.N. agencies that may need to join or take on a larger role in the Gaza humanitarian crisis.

I also think that the U.N. could insist that Israel help create safe and secure conditions for a well-coordinated and comprehensive U.N. response. This includes guarantees to open additional border crossings as needed, and increase the number of daily aid deliveries – especially food – as well as ensuring more consistent access and supplies.

Professional humanitarians are prepared to sacrifice ourselves to preserve and protect the dignity of all, both Israelis and Palestinians. History has taught that the only lesson from all wars is that no one really wins and millions suffer quietly well into the future.

Humanitarians’ job is to find and create safe spaces and save as many lives as we can, with the experience and resources at our disposal. We carry no weapons and rely entirely on respect for international humanitarian law and other rules of war to ensure our safety as we carry out this dangerous mission. But in order to carry out this work, we need access and minimally safe and secure conditions that let us do our jobs.

Raymond Offenheiser, Professor of global affairs, director of the McKenna Center for Human Development and Global Business, University of Notre Dame

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The best scenario, they said, is that our three ships–one carrying 5,500 tons of humanitarian aid and two carrying the passengers–will reach Gaza and accomplish our mission. Another scenario would be that the Turkish government might cave to pressure from Israel, the United States and Germany, and prevent the boats from even leaving Istanbul. This happened in 2011, when the Greek government buckled under pressure and ten boats were stalled in Greece. With our boats docked in Istanbul today, we fear that Turkish President Erdogan, who recently suffered a crushing blow in local elections, is vulnerable to any economic blackmail the Western powers might be threatening.

Another possibility is that the ships take off but the Israelis illegally hijack us in international waters, confiscate our boats and supplies, arrest and imprison us, and eventually deport us.

This happened on several other voyages to Gaza, one of them with deadly consequences. In 2010, a flotilla of six boats was stopped by the Israeli military in international waters. They boarded the biggest boat, the Mavi Marmara. According to a UN report, the Israelis opened fire with live rounds from a helicopter hovering above the ship and from commando boats along the side of the ship. In a horrific display of force, nine passengers were killed, and one more later succumbed to his wounds.

To try to prevent another nightmare like that, potential passengers on this flotilla have to undergo rigorous training. We watched a video of what we might face—from extremely potent tear gas to ear-splitting concussion grenades—and we were  told that the Israeli commandos will  be armed with weapons with live rounds. Then we divided up into small groups to discuss how best to react, non-violently, to such an attack. Do we sit, stand, or lie down? Do we link arms? Do we put our hands up in the air to show we are unarmed?

 Photo credit: Medea Benjamin

The most frightening part of the training was a simulation replete with deafening booms of gunfire and exploding percussion grenades and masked soldiers screaming at us, hitting us with simulated  rifles, dragging us across the floor, and arresting us. It was indeed sobering to get a glimpse of what might await us. Equally sobering are Israeli media reports indicating that the Israeli military has begun “security preparations,” including preparations for taking over the flotilla.

That’s why everyone who has signed up for this mission deserves tremendous credit. The largest group of passengers are from Turkey, and many are affiliated with the humanitarian group, IHH, an enormous Turkish NGO with 82 offices throughout the country. It has consultative status at the UN and does charity work in 115 countries. Through IHH, millions of supporters donated money to buy and stock the ships. Israel, however, has designated this very respected charity as a terrorist group.

The next largest group comes from Malaysia, some of them affiliated with another very large humanitarian group called MyCARE. MyCARE, known for helping out in emergency situations such as floods and other natural disasters, has contributed millions of dollars in emergency aid to Gaza over the years.

From the U.S., there are about 35 participants. Leading the group, and key to the international coalition, is 77-year-old retired U.S. Army colonel and State Department diplomat Ann Wright. After quitting the State Department in protest over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Wright has put her diplomatic skills to good use in helping to pull together a motley group of internationals. Her co-organizer from the U.S. is Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian American attorney who is a co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and who ran for congress in 2022. Arraf  was key to organizing the very first flotillas that started in 2008. So far, there have been about 15 attempts to get to Gaza by boat, only five of them successful.

The incredible breadth of participants is evident in our nightly meetings, where you can hear clusters of groups chatting away in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Malay, French, Italian, and English in diverse accents from Australian to Welsh. The ages range from students in their 20s to an 86-year-old Argentine medical doctor.

What brings us together is our outrage that the world community is allowing this genocide in Gaza to happen, and a burning desire to do more than we have been doing to stop people from being murdered, maimed and starved. The aid we are bringing is enormous–it is the equivalent of over 100 trucks—but that is not the only purpose of this trip. “This is an aid mission to bring food to hungry people,” said Huwaida Arraf, “but Palestinians do not want to live on charity. So we are also challenging Israeli policies that make them dependent on aid. We are trying to break the siege.”

Israel’s vicious attacks on the people of Gaza, its blocking of aid deliveries and its targeting of relief organizations have fueled a massive humanitarian crisis. 
The killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers by Israeli forces on April 1 highlighted the dangerous environment in which relief agencies operate, which has forced many of them to shut down their operations.

The U.S. government is building a temporary port for aid that is supposed to be finished in early May, but this is the same government that provides weapons and diplomatic cover for the Israelis. And while President Biden expresses concern for the suffering Palestinians, he has suspended aid to UNRWA, the main UN agency responsible for helping them, after Israel made unsubstantiated claims that 12 of its 13,000 employees in Gaza participated in the October 7 attacks.

Given the urgency and danger this moment presents, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition is entering rough and uncharted waters. We are calling on countries around the world to pressure Israel to allow us “free and safe passage” to Gaza. In the U.S., we are asking for help from our Congress, but having just approved another $26 billion to Israel, it is doubtful that we can count on their support.

And even if our governments did pressure Israel, would Israel pay attention? Their defiance of international law and world opinion during the past seven months indicates otherwise. But still, we will push forward. The people of Gaza are the wind in our sails. Freedom for Palestine is our North Star. We are determined to reach Gaza with food, medicines and, most of all, our solidarity and love.

In this episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient, we continue our conversation about forced famine and its use as a powerful tool to control people, land and resources. Starvation has, for centuries, been a part of the colonizer’s “playbook.”

We speak with two scholars to explore two historic examples: the decimation of Indigenous populations in the Plains, North America, which historian David Stannard has called the American Holocaust and in India, the 1943 famine in Bengal. According to a recent BBC story, the Bengal famine of 1943 killed more than three million people. It was one of the worst losses of civilian life on the Allied side in the Second World War. (The United Kingdom lost 450,000 lives during that same war.) [SEE INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT BELOW.]

Although disease, environmental disasters and famine were features of life before colonialism, decades of research has shown how these occurrences were manipulated by colonial powers to prolong starvation and trigger chronic famine. In other words, starvation has been effectively used by colonial powers to control populations, acquire land and the wealth that comes with that. This colonization was accompanied by an “entitlement approach” and the belief that Indigenous populations are inferior to the lives of the colonizer.

According to scholars, prior to the arrival of colonialists, both populations at the heart of today’s episode were thriving with healthy and wealthy communities. And although disease and famine existed before the arrival of Europeans, it cannot be denied colonial powers accelerated and even capitalized on chronic famine and the loss of life due to disease and malnutrition.

As the famous economist Amartya Sen has said, famine is a function of repression. It springs from the politics of food distribution rather than a lack of food. Imperial policies such as the Boat Denial Policy and Rice Denial Policy meant that, as curator Natasha Ginwala wrote: “freshly harvested grain was set on fire, or even dumped into the river.”

Joining on this episode were two experts on the North American and Bengal famines.

James Daschuk is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies at the University of Regina. He is the author of Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life.

We also spoke with Janam Mukherjee, an Associate Professor of History at Toronto Metropolitan University, and the author of Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire. Mukherjee was recently a primary historical advisor on the BBC Radio 4 series “Three Million,” a five-part documentary on the Bengal famine of 1943.

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You can read the transcript of this episode here:

THIS IS AN UNEDITED, UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

INTRO

Vinita Srivastava: For centuries, starvation has been effectively used by colonial powers to control populations, to acquire land, and the wealth that comes with that.

This colonization was accompanied by an entitlement approach, the belief that the indigenous populations are inferior to the lives of the colonizer. So today we’re looking at two historic examples, the decimation of indigenous populations in North America, what has been referred to as a cultural genocide, or the American Holocaust, and the famine in Bengal, India, in 1943 under British rule.

According to a recent BBC story, the Bengal famine killed more than three million people. It was one of the worst losses of civilian life on the Allied side during the Second World War. Of course, these are two vastly different populations that were decimated by a complex set of factors. But both populations had a few things in common.

They were thriving with healthy and wealthy communities. And although disease and famine existed before the arrival of Europeans, it cannot be denied that they accelerated and even capitalized on chronic famine and the loss of life due to disease and malnutrition. In other words, as the famous economist Amartya Sen has said, chronic famine springs from the politics of food distribution rather than a lack of food.

With us today are two experts on the famines I just mentioned. James Daschuk is an associate professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies at the University of Regina. He is the author of Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. And Janam Mukherjee is an associate professor of history at Toronto Metropolitan University, and the author of Hungry Bengal: War, Famine, and the End of Empire.

Thank you so much both for being here.

INTERVIEW

Janam Mukherjee: Thank you, Vinita.

James Daschuk: Thank you.

Vinita Srivastava: So, today’s conversation is a bit of an experiment, and something that we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. And that is, can we talk about the tools of colonialism as a playbook across different regions? So, let’s give it a try, and let’s jump into this conversation.

James, in your book, you mention a scholar who describes what happened in North America as an American Holocaust. This is a very complicated history with many different factors impacting things. But can you describe generally what this means?

James Daschuk: I think standards approach to American holocaust talk about the apocalyptic events that happened after the arrival of Europeans.

So not only was, They’re the displacement of indigenous people, but the diseases that came with them, unbeknownst even to the Europeans themselves, it was before the days of germ theory or anything like that. So I think the arrival of Europeans and, and all the baggage, the biological baggage they brought with them brought such monumental events that’s standard to use that term, like you said, an American Holocaust.

Vinita Srivastava: I remember reading in the very beginning of your book that stayed with me is that The indigenous population declined by almost 90 percent and that they were basically destroyed, as you’re saying. I’m wondering if we can talk a little bit about what contributed to that decline of population.

James Daschuk: It’s more than biology, for sure, but I think one of the things to think about is, Indigenous people in North America and other places around the world that didn’t have a long tradition of, for example, uh, domestication of animals.

We know now in the 21st century that animals are the reservoir of diseases. So because indigenous people in America didn’t domesticate animals, they hadn’t had the, the biological experience of passing germs or viruses between animals and humans. Europeans arrived with endemic smallpox, the people who they encountered had no biological resistance.

There’s a new interpretation that it’s more than just that. It was, it was the violence enacted by the Europeans, by the new arrivals. But I think those two things combined to create standards, Holocaust like situation.

Vinita Srivastava: One of the things I really liked about reading your book, James, is that every single thing is, is really sourced. You provide all of this information. It’s like thousands of years, like 2000 years, and you take us through this history. And one of the most famous lines that’s quoted from your book is this line that the first prime minister of Canada said, which is that we’re doing all we can basically to refuse food to Indians who are on the verge of starvation to reduce the expense. So first of all, hearing that quote, it might explain why we had this problem with statues of John A. Macdonald in Canada, why they were being asked to be taken down, why some of them were taken down. But can you explain a little bit more in the context of that very famous quote? Now, what was happening at that time?

James Daschuk: For sure. This wasn’t me being a conspiracy theorist. This was me cutting and pasting from Hansard, the official record of the house of commons. One thing we don’t tend to think about is that really provocative statement by Prime Minister Macdonald about keeping people on the verge of starvation to reduce the expense.

He was being criticized by the Liberal Party for spending too much money on food. So, there didn’t seem to be too many sympathetic actors in 19th century Canadian Parliament with regard to the well being of Indigenous people. I think he was bragging that he was controlling the population, weaponizing food, and he wasn’t embarrassed about it.

He was actually quite proud that he was able to control 20, 000 Indigenous people as cheaply as possible. He wasn’t wasting the taxpayers money, which is a very cynical thing to say. What that did was, that food as a, as a means to control the population, ensured the, the quick construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which is the backbone of the nation, especially here in Western Canada.

Vinita Srivastava: So he sacrificed Indigenous populations to build a train across Canada and to help settlers come into this nation, into this land.

James Daschuk: Yeah. And once you had an industrial means of bringing settlers in, they were coming in potentially by the hundreds every week. So the population here in Saskatchewan. Rose like a rocket over the decades after that, First Nations people were barred from leaving their reserves with a pass system. They were excluded from the commercial economy with a permit system that lasted until the 1960s. So that hunger, the initial hunger was institutionalized for decades.

And the abduction of children into the residential schools program, which we all know about. The hunger was institutionalized to such an extent that tuberculosis broke out almost universally in those kids. And Ian Mosby from Toronto Metropolitan has, has written that things were so institutionalized in the mid 20th century that there were nutritional experiments undertaken on residential school children by Canadian government physicians and scientists.

Vinita Srivastava: I saw that instead of feeding the children, they, or instead of feeding indigenous populations, they decided to study the impact of hunger and starvation. Janam, moving forward into a different time period, but also a different continent, You’ve researched and published a book about the 1943 Bengal famine in India.

Even though there’s now books published on the famine, it’s still a relatively unknown history that in the 1940s that more than 3 million people died in eastern India. It was one of the worst losses of civilian life on the Allied side in the Second World War. I know it is complicated, but I’m wondering if you could help unpack what happened in that era.

Janam Mukherjee: I think the prevailing condition of India at the inception of World War I is colonialism. Colonialism is the most dominant force politically, societally, geopolitically, etc. So we have to see colonialism itself as a sort of authoritarian regime with resort to famine throughout the colonial period.

Famine is used throughout the colonial period as a way to subjugate the colonized population. And then in particular, the other main vector creating famine in Bengal in the 1940s is war itself. So the pressures of war, particularly on Bengal in Eastern India, once Japan takes Burma and India becomes the front of the war against the Axis powers, tremendous pressure to produce for the war effort is made in Bengal.

So there’s a huge extraction of goods, uh, commodities, resources, as well as people, that puts tremendous economic pressure. And then the colonial system overlaying it. So in the name of war, they’re also claiming certain emergency powers that amount to a totalitarian state. They’re also facing armed rebellion and active rebellion from the Bengali population in particular.

So famine is a very. Useful tool in a sort of collective punishment of Bengal and India at large. So if we see these two factors of colonialism and then empire at war as being the kind of concrete context of famine, we can expand that and look at famine around the world and see the relationship between authoritarianism, war and famine quite broadly.

And I think explains a lot of modern famines.

Vinita Srivastava: Many of us are a victim of a lot of brainwashing. You know, we’ve been taught certain things in school. We’re talking about John A. Macdonald in the case of Canada, similar to what John A. Macdonald said. There’s a famous quote by Winston Churchill, who lays the responsibility of the famine on the too high population of Bengal.

That’s been a standard trope in the West that people in the Global South starve because they’re just simply too many people. And what you’re saying, I think is something very, very different that famine across the board, almost you can point to certain factors. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, like responsibility behind the famine, who was responsible for it.

Janam Mukherjee: I think famine is, is most commonly seen as a kind of by product of various systems, whether that’s economic systems or environmental systems or political systems. When you have empire at war, the kind of will towards power becomes totalitarianism, as Winston Churchill famously called the war effort, a total war.

During total war, extreme measures are taken, and those extreme measures are also categorical. I believe that famine defines a certain category of people who are beyond the pale of our humanity, who are outlined and then marked as outside of human life itself. Authoritarian regimes often resort to famine and torture.

These are the most direct, biopolitical, Aspects of a structural violence on population. And I think famine has to be seen not as a consequence of certain orders of power, but it’s really necessary of certain power structures to delimit a population that is beyond human concern or compassion or life itself, because to starve a population is a collective act, whereas torture, for instance, is an act upon individual parties.

Famine is a collectivization of a kind of torture of populations. So you starve an entire population, which is a collective punishment, whereas torture is an individualized punishment.

Vinita Srivastava: In your book, you said, the mute complicities of an increasingly callous society at large grew more indifferent month after month and year after year.

Janam Mukherjee: So, because famine, as I say, delimits a population that is understood through public discourse to be outside of human concern. I think this is why famine is allowed to occur in the world in places like Yemen today, which has been suffering a famine situation for many years. And the concern of the world is not there.

And in kind of solidarity with the people of Yemen or the people of Sudan or the people of Afghanistan, for that matter, as well as Gaza, starvation in being seen as a consequence of certain orders of power and of war is seen as an incidental. I think it needs to be seen rather as a part and parcel of certain orders of power and authority and in relation to conflict occupation and territorial expansion, as in the case in North America.

Vinita Srivastava: James, I see you nodding your head. I wonder if you want to jump in.

James Daschuk: I think here in the Canadian West, it was, it was more of a slow burn, but I’m thinking of the idea of settler colonialism. It’s not an event. It’s a structure. And here in Western Canada, our founding mythology of the Canadian society is that we’re the breadbasket of the world and we’re a haven for dispossessed European peoples and people came here to have a good life and that may all well be true, but that society is founded on the institutionalized structural In position of, if not outright starvation, of generational food insecurity that continues into the present.

We’ve got hungry kids going to bed without supper here in Saskatchewan every single night.

Vinita Srivastava: Last week on this podcast, Hilal Elver, who is the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, talks about the famine in Gaza. And then she talks about the lingering intergenerational impacts of starvation.

Not only are people living through it in the present day, but she talks about the impact on future generations. She talks about especially the impact on children. How three months or longer of malnutrition can impact so much in one’s little body. James, you write extensively about this, the lingering effects from the North American famine. That’s one of the reasons you wrote your book. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of those lingering effects?

James Daschuk: Yeah, for sure. Well, I teach in the Faculty of Health Studies. We use as an interpretive model the social determinants of health. One thing to think about, across Canada, a former federal government cabinet minister, Jane Philpott, in 2018, said there was a 15 year life expectancy between Indigenous people and the rest of the population in Canada.

So what that means is, if you’re Indigenous, you can expect to lead a shorter, sicker, hungrier life. And it’s really based on poverty. There’s no biological difference. What it is, is it’s the social forces, the structures that have kept people poor, that have created that intergenerational trauma. Think about a hundred years of a family having their children taken away from them, abducted by the authorities, sent to a place where they’re institutionally malnourished, potentially abused.

They have their language taken away from them, generation upon generation. And actually, there’s a class action lawsuit. That, that’s being organized for the survivors of intergenerational trauma. So not only are the, the survivors of schools going through that, the legal system, now the children of, of, of those people are, are starting the process of restitution.

You can physically see the impacts of two generations, three generations later. And I want to turn to Janam to talk a little bit about it because you, you talk about in your book, how directly tied you are personally to the Bengal famine. It’s part of the reason you started your research there. Your dad lived through it. Can you tell us a little bit about your personal journey?

Janam Mukherjee: My interest in the, in the spirit of time in India, in Bengal, the 1940s is the period of my father’s childhood. He was born in 1932. I was born in the U. S. in my own childhood. I heard these stories that were very disconnected from my own reality about the things that my father had seen when he was a child, and that was aerial bombardment by the Japanese on Calcutta.

His house was very close to the docks that were bombed, and he remembered the foundation cracking, The sound of the bombs, the famine, and then the civil war between Hindus and Muslims in India at the end of colonial rule. So that’s essentially what I knew of India, but famine itself in particular, I found when much later in life, I began researching it and traveling to Calcutta to do that research.

Had written a deep script in Bengali population at large. The 1943 famine was told about by parents and then grandparents and now great grandparents. It had influenced the culture of Bengal in deep ways and abiding ways in terms of aesthetics, art, food, culture, et cetera. So famine is very much with Bengali people.

I think it will remain as such in many ways. It’s also a collective experience, often of populations. You see that in Ireland. You see that in Ukraine with the Holodomor famine, where, you know, it is also a cultural foundation or, or starting point and often a nationalist, uh, starting point, it triggers off resistance and collective understanding of a collective plight, uh, so famine has that boomerang effect.

Vinita Srivastava: You said it. Resistance. I have to say that since I’ve been thinking about this, I just keep writing down in a piece of paper resistance and putting a big square around it. How do we start to talk about resistance?

In your book, Janam, there’s a scholar that talks about How people in Bengal, quote, died without a murmur. James, in your book, you talk about the collective punishment that would happen if there was resistance, that food would be withheld for a whole week. The ration of food would be withheld on that reserve. So I do want to ask you both about if you can think about instances of resistance that you can draw from in your work and in your research about these famines. Janam I can start with you and then go to James.

Janam Mukherjee: What I really aim to detail is that the Bengal famine was resisted at every stage. You can’t expect people in the last throes of starvation who are walking skeletons, who are ridden often with madness because of the condition, their physiological condition is such.

that you can’t really expect resistance from already starving masses. What you see is resistance to the policies that lead to starvation. Often those policies, particularly in the context of the Bengal famine, were related to war. So the wartime efforts to appropriate rice were resisted. The efforts to collectively punish various parts of the population were resisted in the form of armed resistance often.

So these all have to be seen as part and parcel of resistance to the power structure that is exacting famine. So resistance, I think has to be seen more broadly, but it often does delineate the power structure itself. It sheds light on the power structure. It, in a sense, exposes its weakness. Because famine is often the result of a dying power structure, of a power structure in a desperate attempt to maintain its order of power.

It’s often a last ditch of empire in particular. So we see famines at the end of many of the colonial states as empire is coming apart and colonialism is being ejected from the colonized world.

Vinita Srivastava: James, what do you think?

James Daschuk: I think the resistance was at a different level here in Canada. With the Indian Act, during the patriarchal system, adult male First Nations people were made wards of the state.

So they had the legal sanctions of children. So instead of having an organized campaign, as Janam just mentioned, I think the, the resistance was more at the community level, at the family level. One of the things that comes to mind is a film that a friend of mine, Floyd Favel just produced. Ashes and embers.

And in 1948, the residential school children made a plan and burned the school down. They warned all the other kids when it was time to make a break for it, and they burned the school down. And there are plenty of instances of that without the structure actually changing. And I think at the end of the Second World War, there was an inordinate amount of First Nations men that volunteered for service, probably to get out of reserve conditions, whatever it might be.

Also to, to get back to traditional warrior societies, that kind of thing. But when they came back, they were fighting in the same trenches as non Indigenous people. And they organized politically and worked very hard and ultimately successfully to gain recognition. You know, that recognition is still coming, but you know, these things take time.

I think it’s important to talk about resistance and all, even if it’s like, as you say, kind of an everyday in community resistance, it’s, it’s it’s very challenging to talk about what we’re talking about. You guys have both written books, but these are very challenging things to engage with. I’m wondering, how do you both see these two very different chapters of history intersecting?

Janam Mukherjee: You know, I think the way you began, the question of territorial expansion, the question of control of populations, the role that food distribution and starvation play into those orders of colonial power. are certainly in conversation with each other and are related. I always see famine as delineating the other, the colonized other, more clearly than any other act of state.

It is to make of the colonized people, the wretched masses that the colonizer wants to understand them as. It’s actually to make them physically that. And the intergenerational connection then of devitalization, of impoverishment, of the long trajectory of slow famine, that also has close similarities in the North American as well as in the Asian context.

Vinita Srivastava: James, what do you think learning about the history of this famine, starving, clearing the plains you talk about, what do you think it can teach us?

James Daschuk: Well, the stories we’ve heard about Canada being, you know, one of the kindest nations in the world probably isn’t so true. But one thing, and this is in conversation with Janam and, and, and other scholars, is the British empire, when we were kids, when I was at the French school back in my hometown, we had that, to that map with all of the pink countries, that sort of, the sun never set.

Different manifestations of colonialism, different uses of food as a weapon, uh, it wasn’t just them. You know, all different strategies. And I guess we’re coming together to deconstruct that myth of the British empire, the benevolence of the British empire. We have a long way to go down that trail, but there are actually scholars now trying to defend the British empire and receiving a backlash.

I’m thinking of Nigel Biggar, a retired professor from Oxford, who’s written a book called the Colonialism, A Moral Reckoning in an attempt basically to explain the mixed legacy of colonialism. So in one sense, the anti anti colonialists getting organized is a sign that, uh, that we’re doing our job.

Janam Mukherjee: Good point.

Vinita Srivastava: I want to turn to the current situation in Gaza and I’m wondering if you think that there’s anything to learn from these chapters of history and can we apply it to the current situation in Gaza where experts are saying famine is imminent?

James Daschuk: I’m just a simple Canadianist. But on the radio, Antonio Guterres was speaking about there are truck convoys full of food, there’s a fence, and there are people who are in imminent danger of starving to death.

That’s not an absence of food. That is the organizing principle I’ve been looking at, that Janam been looking at, and that other scholars have been looking at.

Vinita Srivastava: That there is no lack of food, basically, that famine is a structure.

James Daschuk: Absolutely. And no matter what the geopolitical implications are, children should not be starved.

Janam Mukherjee: As is also well outlined in international law. I think all famines are very specific and as a historian, I always argue for the historical specificity and not to make too gross generalizations, but we can learn from previous famines about orders of authority, occupation, and war in particular. I would suggest that famine is not a consequence of war.

It’s incidental to war. Famine is the handmaiden of war. It has been for centuries. It is part and parcel of war, no matter what legislation is made to outlaw the directed use of starvation as a weapon of war. It seems that those international laws have not worked. And famine remains part and parcel of how war is fought.

Practiced on the face of the earth. So the question of the orders of authority that war allows and the decisions made in terms of sacrificing large populations of people and subjecting them to hunger remains with us. And I think there’s a lot to learn from history in that regard. And there’s unfortunately a lot to be seen in the present in that regard as well.

Not just in Gaza, but also in Yemen and also in Sudan and in other parts of the earth as well. So you still have one out of two people living in India under the nutritional kind of global standards or one half of this hungry people on earth live in India. So these orders of power still exist.

Vinita Srivastava: I think they exist right in Saskatchewan, as James was saying, too, where he says children are going hungry and this just seems to be unacceptable that if it’s about control, then it’s unacceptable.

Janam Mukherjee: And it’s about war and it’s about winning. The ideology of war is in the modern age, regardless of all kind of Codes of conduct otherwise, it’s still what it’s always been. It’s a brutal attack on whole populations that does not discriminate well or often between enemies and civilians. And we see that collapsing in all the wars around us. Those questions of who is the enemy and the civilian population most often becomes the enemy in relation to the opposing sides in conflict.

James Daschuk: It’s really interesting to have both of us, Vinita, because in Janam’s case, it’s a conflict. In my case, it’s the establishment of what is thought of as a peaceful society and it can structures continue.

I don’t know if they diverged food insecurity, famine, that whole continuum. In the case of my research is the structure of our province and potentially Canada.

Vinita Srivastava: I thank you both very much for taking the time to have this conversation. I appreciate your time today.

Janam Mukherjee: Thank you, Vinita, and nice to meet you, James.

James Daschuk: Thanks, Vinita.

OUTRO

Vinita Srivastava: That’s it for this episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient. You heard me say at the beginning that this was a bit of an experiment from us, and I would love to know what you thought. You can reach the team at dcmr@theconversation.com, and be sure to follow us on Instagram. @dontcallmeresilientpodcast.

Don’t Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation. This series is produced and hosted by me, Vinita Srivastava. Our associate producer is Ateqah Khaki. Our student journalist is Husein Haveliwala. Krish Dineshkumar does our sound design and mixing, and our consulting producer is Jennifer Moroz. Lisa Varano is the managing editor of The Conversation Canada, and Scott White is the CEO. Zaki Ibrahim wrote and performed the music we use on the podcast. The track is called Something in the Water.

We’d love to hear from you, including any ideas for future episodes.

Join the Conversation on Instagram, X, LinkedIn and use #DontCallMeResilient.

Resources

“When Canada used hunger to clear the West” (by James Daschuk, July 19, 2013)

Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Indigenous Life (by James Daschuk, 2013)

“Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952” (in Social History by Ian Mosby, 2013)

“Proposed class action seeks damages for intergenerational trauma from residential schools” (CBC News)

Ashes and Embers: Stories of the Delmas Indian Residential School (by Floyd Favel)

Churchill’s Secret War (by Madhusree Mukerjee, 2010)

Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (by Janam Mukherjee, 2015)

“Three Million” (The documentary podcast by the BBC)

“Witnessing famine: the testimonial work of famine photographs and anti-colonial spectatorship” (Journal of Visual Culture by Tanushree Ghosh, 2019)

“We are about to witness in Gaza the most intense famine since the second world war” (The Guardian, March 21, 2024, by Alex de Waal)

Ateqah Khaki, Associate Producer, Don’t Call Me Resilient, The Conversation and Vinita Srivastava, Host + Producer, Don’t Call Me Resilient, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

They said of the just-realeased Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) assessment, “This is unprecedented. No IPC analysis has ever recorded such levels of food insecurity anywhere in the world.” [Emphasis added.]

They continued, “Life-threatening levels of acute malnutrition have risen at an alarming rate since the last report, and we are already witnessing with horror the death of children due to starvation. Hunger cannot be used as a weapon of war. What we are seeing is not a natural hazard but a manmade disaster, and it is our moral duty to stop it.”

Borell said in Brussels, “In Gaza we are no longer on the brink of famine, we are in a state of famine, affecting thousands of people.” He added, “This is unacceptable. Starvation is used as a weapon of war. Israel is provoking famine.”

Sometimes a telling detail outweighs a statistic. Something like 25,000 babies have been born in Gaza since the Israeli campaign began.

According to reporters on the scene, many of their mothers are too malnourished to produce milk for them. Imagine the anguish and the guilt.

There is no powdered milk in the market. Most of the available water is full of bacteria, which kills newborns by giving them diarrhea and dehydrating them. One mother said that her two-month-old is like a two-week-old because of malnutrition.

Al Jazeera video: “2-month-old baby dies from hunger in Gaza | Al Jazeera Newsfeed”

The IPC review [pdf] found that 100% of the Palestinians in Gaza face food insecurity as a result of Israel’s war strategy. But matters have gone beyond the level of food insecurity in some parts of the Gaza Strip, for instance in the north.

The report says, “Famine is now projected and imminent in the North Gaza and Gaza Governorates and is expected to become manifest from mid-March 2024 to May 2024.”

We’re in mid-March. Something like 300,000 people remain in these two governorates.

People there are now suffering acute malnutrition.

Acute malnutrition, WHO explains, shows up in four broad ways: “wasting, stunting, underweight, and micronutrient deficiencies.” These conditions make people horrifyingly skinny, reducing their limbs to the dimension of sticks. Physicians measure limbs according to mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC), which tells them about the degree of Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM).

In Gaza’s children from a half-year old to 4.9 years in age, 1% were considered to be suffering from Global Acute Malnutrition according to their MUAC in September, 2023. By January it had risen to 6-9%. By February, just last month, it was 12%-16%. It has been just about doubling. So by the end of March you’re looking at at least 24%-26% of infants and toddlers and young children suffering from Global Acute Malnutrition so severely that their upper-arm circumference is tiny. But what if the numbers aren’t just doubling? The IPC provides a helpful graph of Israeli cruelty:

We don’t have the raw data to nail it down, but we probably aren’t seeing more than 2 deaths per 10,000 per day yet from malnutrition, according to the IPC. But that would be 60 people starving to death per day in north Gaza, or 1,800 a month.

The Israelis only let in half as many aid trucks in February as they had in January. That is a recipe for an exponential, not just serial increase in hunger. We could be going to half or more of north Gaza’s children suffering this extreme malnutrition. Of course, it isn’t just children, but children are half the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip.

The IPC expects a big spike in deaths from starvation beginning as early as now through May.

The worst level of malnutrition is Phase 5, which has two stages, famine and catastrophe.

The report found that fully 70% of the population of north Gaza is now in Phase 5-Catastrophe. That is 200,000 people.

An Israeli ground offensive in Rafah will push more 500,000 people into Phase 5-Catastrophe. If just 2 per 10,000 of them died daily of starvation as a result, that would be 100 per day or 3,000 a month, on top of the ones in the north. That is nearly 5,000 people a month dead of malnutrition, and that is if it stays at the rate of 2 per 10,000 per day. It won’t.

The IPC concludes, “The persistent attacks on hospitals, health posts, ambulances, water services, civilian telecoms services, and IDP sites must cease. Attacks against health care workers must cease. Civilians and civilian infrastructure must be protected, as required under International Humanitarian Law. (Already stipulated in the December 2023 FRC report.”

The authors note that the only proven way to avert famine is to deliver food to those threatened by it. Moreover, they point out that unless people are in fair health, they can’t take in the nutrition, so health care has to be restored as well.

Doğan and other volunteers were trying to bring food and medical aid to Gaza. After their cargo was seized by the Israelis, the latter actually delivered it to the UN for distribution in Gaza. This act served as an admission that the cargo was inoffensive, and there had been no reason to kill all those volunteers.

PBS NewsHour Video: “News Wrap: U.S. Army ship en route to Mediterranean for construction of pier for Gaza”

Doğan’s impulse has been vindicated by President Biden’s decision to send a US Navy flotilla to Gaza to succor the starving Palestinians. Biden’s action has the same legality as that of the crew of Mavi Marmara. Since Biden seems now to agree that someone should do something to stop Israel’s government from starving the Palestinians, he should give Doğan a medal for having thought of it first and having tried to do something about the food insecurity imposed by Israel on Gaza from 2006. Doğan gave his life at the age of 19 for a cause that Biden is now implicitly admitting was just.

On May 31, 2010, Israeli commandos boarded five humanitarian aid ships in international waters, whose crews and aid workers had expressed the intention of sailing to Gaza to break the Israeli embargo on aid to its occupied territory. The occupation of four of the five ships went smoothly, but it may be that some aid workers put up a fight on the fifth, the Mavi Marmara, finding anything to hand to fend off the Israeli parachutists. They had no firearms or formal weaponry. Since the ship was in international waters, they were within their rights to attempt to prevent the boarding of their ship. Encountering opposition, the Israeli commander ordered his troops to open fire on these unarmed civilians, killing ten noncombatants. One was Doğan, the American citizen, and the nine were Turkish nationals. The American was a journalist. No weapons were found aboard the ship, despite complaints by the Israeli military that a ship had some iron bars on it, which were wielded as bats. The world’s most whiny army initially tried to depict the ship has having had arms (it didn’t) and charged that the volunteers were terrorists (they weren’t, except insofar as having sympathies for oppressed Palestinians makes you a terrorist.)

A UN Human Rights Council report found the attack on the aid ships “clearly unlawful.” The report said that “there is clear evidence to support prosecutions of crimes such as wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, and wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health.”

VP Biden in 2010 justifying Israel's deadly raid on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla that was attempting to get humanitarian aid into Gaza 👇 @jricole https://t.co/6umdaWv8AX pic.twitter.com/K0QT6wqttM

— Fahad Desmukh (@desmukh) March 11, 2024

The UN concluded, “Furkan Doğan, a 19-year-old with dual Turkish and United States citizenship, was on the central area of the top deck filming with a small video camera when he was first hit with live fire. It appears that he was lying on the deck in a conscious, or semi-conscious, state for some time. In total Furkan received five bullet wounds, to the face, head, back thorax, left leg and foot. All of the entry wounds were on the back of his body, except for the face wound which entered to the right of his nose. According to forensic analysis, tattooing around the wound in his face indicates that the shot was delivered at point blank range. Furthermore, the trajectory of the wound, from bottom to top, together with a vital abrasion to the left shoulder that could be consistent with the bullet exit point, is compatible with the shot being received while he was lying on the ground on his back. The other wounds were not the result of firing in contact, near contact or close range, but it is not otherwise possible to determine the exact firing range. The wounds to the leg and foot were most likely received in a standing position.”

The ships were attacked to maintain illegal Israeli control over the Palestinians of Gaza.

Israel had withdrawn troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but retained control of its land borders, its air space, and its seacoast. After Hamas won the 2006 elections, Dov Weisglas, spokesman for the prime minister, explained of the Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” As a result of this policy of limiting aid into the Gaza Strip, a majority of the population was reduced to food insecurity.

The BBC reported that after a few years of this blockade, an Israeli report on it was released by court order: “The report cites a number of ailments suffered by Palestinian children in Gaza. Ten percent of children under 5 have stunted growth due to prolonged exposure to malnutrition. Anemia, caused by an iron-deficiency, affects 58.6 percent of schoolchildren, 68.1 percent of children nine to 12 months old and 36.8 percent of pregnant mothers.” That was in 2012.

Since the Israelis were allowed to get away all those years with half-starving the Palestinians, the Netanyahu government appears to have decided that it has carte blanche to up the ante from putting them on a diet to actually starving them to death. Biden has been forced by public outcry to at least try to put a band-aid on this problem by sending in the US navy with food aid. It is too little too late. If Biden had had Furkan Doğan’s empathy and decisiveness, we would not be in this mess.