I did not want to be writing this post. I wanted to write about the topic of property/land ownership, income disparity and gender. I hope I remember to write that post in the future, because I think it is important to understand how patriarchal misogyny has woven capitalism into gender identity…but thousands of babies are likely to starve in Gaza, perhaps in as little as 48 hours and this is not something anyone in the world can stand by and let happen and still call themselves a human being. Does this topic belong in a blog about patriarchal misogyny? Does women and children dying of starvation have anything to do with a system designed to allow men to treat women and children as property that can be confiscated, controlled and destroyed? I hope that answer is pretty obvious, and I don’t intend to spend much time tonight trying to explain that in the face of what is happening, because letting the people that are murdering children have any opportunity to side track the immediate conversation of “how do we stop this now?” with a debate about definitions is letting children die.
This is also why I am not going to write about whether it is necessary or valuable to call what Netanyahu and his Likud party’s war of the mass murder of children a “genocide” or why it has been such a colossal waste of time trying to create international courts with precise legal definitions of crimes, that have to be proven to judges that powerful nations have now had decades to position and control, because those conversations too are useless to saving children who are starving today.
The state of Israel is already playing games with people’s lives in many different ways, and for this specific issue, of stopping babies from dying in mass from starvation, they are keep engaging in acts of murder, like pretending to try to provide food to starving mothers, but doing it so slowly and in such restricted quantities that other nations of the world will feel comfortable threatening them with meaningless gestures instead of taking action to remove IDF soldiers from Gaza and accelerate food distribution. The political and military leadership of Israel is playing these games intentionally because they believe that it is ok to threaten children (thousands and thousands of children) with one of the slowest and most painful deaths imaginable, in order to apply political pressure to an unpopular (only about a fifth of the people in Gaza currently support Hamas) political party.
The State of Israel is not the First Nation to use the starvation of children as a weapon of war, and it will only be the last when the people of the world hold political and military figures that do so to a level of accountability that is far more serious than anything the International Criminal Court has done in 60+ years. That probably feels like a hopeless endeavor to many people, because the wealthiest and most powerful nations of the world have colluded with each other to make holding the leaders of these countries accountable for their crimes against humanity…a hopeless endeavor. Hopelessness guarantees complacence and complicity. We need to believe that people want to put an immediate end to the use of starving children as a weapon of war and bend our rhetoric and our actions to making that happen as immediately as possible.
I personally think the best way to accomplish that is to save conversations about how this happened or what needs to happen for restitution for a future where the mass-murdering of children for political gain has been put to a stop, and focus relentlessly on the goals of removing the IDF from Gaza and making sure that food is getting to the people in Gaza as immediately and effectively as possible, even if that means handing all of the food aid directly over to Hamas and letting them distribute (or shoulder the consequences of failing to distribute that food) for themselves as they see fit.
I think many supporters of the State of Israel will argue that Hamas will try to manipulate the distribution of aid, holding it back from many of the most vulnerable people in Gaza and then claim that it was the Israeli’s fault; that there wasn’t enough food, or it wasn’t coming in fast enough, or that they will try to use the distribution of that food to motivate fighters into increasingly desperate acts of violence. They will try to argue that this is what Hamas has done in the past and what they will continue to do until they are eliminated.
To which I say, “maybe so.” Maybe Hamas will let 14,000 of Palestinian children starve to death in an attempt to somehow “make Israel look worse”…but I don’t care if they actually have done anything remotely close to as bad as starving 14,000 children in the past before or if that is purely false rhetoric to justify endless war…because massive amounts of children are starving (some already to death) and allowing large quantities of children to die by starvation, even the children of my worst-of-the-worst-imaginable enemies, would be the complete surrender of my humanity to cruelty and destruction.
Children are already dying and thousands of more might die within less than two days. That isn’t anyone who is reading this post’s fault, and political urgency always ends up being used as a weapon against the emotional and mental health of the people it is directed at. I accept that my alarmism around this might very well be an act of emotional violence against people I care about deeply, who don’t feel like know what to do or have the ability to do what they think might actually make the message clear that the mass killing of children will never be tolerated or forgiven. Calls to action always cary that potential consequence, and should weigh heavily on the hearts and minds of the people who make them. But silence has consequences too, and I don’t think I could ever forgive myself if I wasn’t acknowledging that there are no political leaders that are supposed to represent me that are going to do anything to stop this, and thus it falls on all of us.
600 trucks a day are going to be necessary to tackle the humanitarian crisis happening in Gaza right now. Today 93 entered Gaza, but 0 have had their aid distributed (see the article I linked to at the beginning of this post). This is a crime against humanity. I hope, I pray, and I call myself in to have the courage and strength to do more myself tomorrow, but at least today I can at least refuse to be a silent observer to the murder of children.