Israel Permits Itself Anything

Even the use of mass starvation

Many people who have been deeply critical of Israel’s war in Gaza, myself included, have felt nevertheless that it was important to distinguish those very bad acts–bombings that killed tens of thousands of civilians, restrictions on the delivery of aid, the use of Gazans as human shields–from the yet more grave allegation of genocide. Now that Israel has openly adopted mass hunger as a tactic of war, that conscientious distinction-making seems pointless. The fact that mass hunger is not genocide does not make it any less shocking.

It is true that in recent days, under intense international pressure, Israel has begun permitting what UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres calls “a teaspoon of aid” to enter Gaza. But 9000 trucks are idled at the border while bakeries remain shut for lack of flour and fuel and three-quarters of Gaza’s population now suffer from an acute lack of food. “We do not need to wait for a declaration of famine in Gaza to know that people are already starving, sick and dying,” as Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization put it . And that was on May 12.

Is it fair to say that Israel is consciously using starvation as a war tactic? Of course it is. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has admitted—or perhaps boasted—that he is now allowing a “minimal” amount of aid to reach civilians only because foreign “friends” told him “we cannot accept images of hunger.” Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu’s extremist Minister of Finance, has openly asserted that allowing all 2 million Gazans to starve to death would be “justified and moral” in order to end the threat from Hamas. Netanyahu, whatever he thinks privately, publicly asserts that aid is helping the enemy because Hamas is stealing most of it, and that withholding it might force Hamas to yield up the remaining hostages. Maybe he doesn’t want Gazans to starve to death; he simply accepts it as the necessary consequence of his strategy.

This form of collective punishment is, of course, extremely common in the history of war. Russia bombed breadlines and hospitals in northern Syria in the hopes of turning the population against anti-Assad rebels. (It didn’t work.) Boyd van Dijk, an Oxford historian, recently wrote that both sides in World Wars I and II used blockades to starve their adversaries into submission. At the 1949 Geneva Convention, both the United States and the United Kingdom opposed a prohibition against blockades. However, the 1998 Rome statute establishing the International Criminal Court codified intentional starvation as a war crime. Like indiscriminate bombardment, mass starvation was seen as acceptable in an era of total warfare; now it is rightly thought obscene.

Yet Israel is now doing in Gaza what Russia did in Syria (and does in Ukraine). As a Jew, and an American–and thus an enabler–I feel a terrible sense of shame in the face of this moral descent. Israel has not had a leader I’ve admired since Ehud Olmert fifteen years ago (though he did wind up in jail). But I always felt that I could say, as sympathetic Europeans did about the United States, I love the people but not the politics. But just as our old friends now have to admit that we’re the people who chose our leaders, so we are now compelled to say about Israel and Israelis. Yes, these are the people who flooded the streets to defy Netanyahu and defend the principle of judicial independence; yet they appear to be utterly unmoved by the suffering of the Palestinians.

I claim no special expertise on Israel. When I try to make sense of the silence in the face of war crimes, I think about a passage on the 1948 war in Ari Shavit’s extraordinary 2013 My Promised Land, a book I have taught as an exemplar of moral honesty. Shavit describes in pitiless detail the expulsion of the ancient Arab community in Lydda, now the Israeli city of Lod, in order to remove potential collaborators in the desperate struggle with Arab armies. The Jews did to the Arabs what Pharaoh-and so many others–once did to the Jews. And yet, Shavit reflects, “If Zionism was to be, Lydda could not be. If Lydda was to be, Zionism could not be.” He goes on to describe how the imperative to destroy the enemy turned the classical-music loving Jewish boys from the commune near Lydda into hardened killers. “The thirst for revenge found its fountain,” one of the commune girls later wrote, “and the comrades lost all humanity. …Day by day, the human feeling in us became duller and duller.”

One can, of course, read Shavit’s narrative and conclude, “In that case, no Israel.” (I believe that is the moral Peter Beinart draws in Being Jewish After The Destruction of Gaza.) That was never my view. I thought, rather, that Israel was the kind of exceptional nation that could accept the possibility of tragedy, even in its very birth. Now I understand the story in a different way: if you regard the stakes before you as existential, you will permit yourself anything. If you live for three-quarters of a century with the belief that you are faced with an adversary bent on your destruction, then you harden yourself to the adversary’s humanity so that you can do what you feel must be done. October 7 registered as the supreme proof of the existential stakes–not a one-time event, like 9/11, but the confirmation of one’s worst fears. The atrocity gave full permission to dehumanize the Palestinians.

Early in the war, a friend of mine pointed out that the Israeli Defense Force’s code of ethics had been written (in fact, co-written) by the moral philosopher Moshe Halbertal. Ergo, Israel could not be committing war crimes. That is, in effect, the Shavit argument: Israel is forced to do terrible things but will not surrender its conscience. But is the intentional infliction of mass hunger consistent with Israel’s code of ethics, not to mention the laws of war? I doubt Halbertal would say so. In a debate in the early months of the war, he defended Israel by saying, “It’s not an indiscriminate, intentional attack on civilians, which is the worst thing a country can do.” That may have been true then; it’s not now.

It’s fortunate that Donald Trump regards mass hunger as a bad look; he, and Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, are the friends who told Netanyahu to start letting aid in. Netanyahu may now dial the pressure back so that most Gazans are desperate and miserable and frightened, but not starving. (The recent news that Israeli officials have been working with private contractors since last year on an alternative plan to deliver aid only further points up the cruelty of Netanyahu’s decision to totally suspend aid this past March. And even that half-baked plan may now be falling apart) But we know that if many did starve, Netanyahu would be content to blame it on Hamas. And it seems that most Israelis would be content to let him do so.

Collective punishment is monstrous because it treats people as a means to some alleged good. That may not be a war crime in itself, but it is, as Moshe Halbertal would tell us, a violation of Kant’s categorical imperative, which bids us treat others as ends, as we would ourselves wish to be treated. Starving a child in order to blackmail a terrorist is not only futile but cruel. It puts you on the level of the terrorist.