I discovered from a younger age that you simply shouldn’t let your neighbor go hungry. Benjamin Netanyahu would do properly to revisit this custom.
Palestinians, fighting starvation, type a line to obtain sizzling meals in Gaza’s al-Zeitoun neighborhood on July 31, 2025.
(Abdalhkem Abu Riash / Anadolu by way of Getty Photographs)
For a lot of the previous 21 months, I’ve sparred with buddies and colleagues who labeled Israel’s response to the October 7 assault as “genocidal.” I’ve written, at The Nation and elsewhere, about my issues with a few of the evaluation on the left. In my internal monologue as a lot as in dialog with others, I’ve argued that whereas what Israel was doing militarily was brutal, and that whereas in lots of situations it was committing crimes in opposition to humanity, finally it wasn’t a genocide.
Over the previous weeks, nevertheless, as photos of mass starvation have emerged out of Gaza, as a whole lot of determined Gazans have been mown down at meals distribution facilities—all the time accompanied by a cacophony of disingenuous disclaimers from the far-right thugs working the Israeli authorities—it has grow to be ever tougher to achieve some other conclusion however that Israel’s leaders have embraced a coverage of complete annihilation. Having destroyed the bodily infrastructure of Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu and his authorities appear now intent on making life solely untenable for the remaining residents. At this level, it will be reckless to imagine in any other case.
If, in actual fact, Israel had any form of exit technique or plan for completely ending its struggle on Gaza, it will have to acknowledge the humanity of its opponents and acknowledge their have to survive. At a most elementary stage, it will have to see the world from their perspective, with all that that acknowledgement entails. For empathy includes, in such circumstances, understanding that even these we combat in struggle love their kids as we love ours, that they mourn as we mourn, that they endure as we endure, that their stomachs growl when hungry simply as ours do.
As an alternative, almost two years after Hamas’s vile assaults of October 7, Israeli public opinion, manipulated by Netanyahu and his solely unscrupulous cupboard, appears ever-less able to making these imaginative leaps. True, a majority of Jewish Israelis mistrust Netanyahu and suppose he needs to be doing extra to carry house the hostages. However that doesn’t translate to a need to discover a real path to long-term peace with their neighbors. Certainly, a Pew Research Center poll from earlier this yr discovered that solely 16 p.c of grownup Jews in Israel imagine peaceable coexistence with a Palestinian state to be attainable. A more moderen ballot discovered that greater than four in five Jewish Israelis supported the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, and upwards of half favored Palestinian expulsion from Israel.
That goes an extended technique to explaining why there haven’t been huge protests or acts of civil resistance in Israel as its leaders have, prior to now couple of months, embraced the abominable technique of wholesale hunger and the herding of Palestinians into ever smaller, extra susceptible enclaves throughout the decimated Gaza Strip. It’s why most Israelis have stayed silent within the face of Protection Minister Israel Katz floating the thought of forcing Gaza’s 2 million residents into an Orwellian-named “humanitarian city” atop the ruins of Rafah. And it’s why, when Israel’s ex–prime minister Ehud Olmert warned that such a metropolis can be a “focus camp,” the assertion didn’t serve to pressure a day of ethical reckoning inside Israel—a rustic based, in any case, within the wake of the commercial slaughter, inside loss of life camps, of Europe’s Jews. It’s why there weren’t huge protests after Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu publicly said that the federal government’s intent is to “wipe out” Gaza and exchange the inhabitants with Jewish settlers. And it’s why, over the previous six months, Israelis have been broadly supportive of Trump’s felony thought to expel all Palestinians from Gaza and create as a substitute a “Riviera” resort for rich Western and Gulf-state vacationers.
Certain, a rising variety of scholars and Israeli human rights groups are warning that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. However so far their assertions have been broadly brushed apart by an Israeli public so traumatized by the horrors of October 7 that it appears keen to provide its leaders carte blanche to pursue their without end struggle with Hamas by any means obligatory, irrespective of the dimensions of the “collateral harm.”
That silence is turning into more and more untenable. Particularly contemplating Jewish historical past and beliefs, there’s something uniquely appalling a few coverage of deliberate hunger on thousands and thousands of civilians. Sure, the deprivation is each dehumanizing and inhumane all by itself. Nevertheless it additionally goes in opposition to Jewish traditions, just like the mandate to feed the stranger. It’s unfathomable to me that this custom is being so egregiously breached by Israel’s leaders—and that these leaders dare to say that those that oppose the cruelty of mass hunger are one way or the other shoring up an antisemitic undertaking.
Among the many many Jewish beliefs and traditions that ought to make this weaponization of meals in Gaza unthinkable, the thought of tikkun olam is that one has an obligation to restore, or to heal, the world. I witnessed this idea in follow, watching my grandparents open their home to buddies, kin, strangers—and all the time show their hospitality by offering their visitors with plates of home-cooked meals. For my grandmother Mimi, meals was not simply her love language; it was core to her being. If somebody was hungry—or even when they weren’t—you fed them. If somebody was worn down with the cares of the world, you lifted a few of these worries by feeding them. If somebody was searching for good firm and good dialog, you offered each… and also you fed them.
You fed them even in case you, your self, didn’t have a lot to spare.
My grandparents welcomed folks into their house in north London throughout the darkish days of the Second World Conflict and the austere years of rationing that adopted the struggle. All the time, one way or the other, they discovered sufficient to go round. That fundamental understanding of the significance of meals, not only for survival however for tradition and for group, continued all through their lengthy lives.
Once I was rising up, within the Eighties, I may carry a whole group of buddies over after faculty, and, at brief discover, my grandmother would rustle up meals for us all. As I wrote in my guide on my grandparents, The House of Twenty Thousand Books—a guide in regards to the folks, the concepts, and the dialog that crammed my grandparents’ house over greater than half a century—there are actually hundreds of individuals dotted across the globe who at one level or one other stayed at my grandparents’ home or, on the very least, had been fed and entertained by them.
It ought to go with out saying that one doesn’t heal the world by permitting kids to die as a result of you’ve denied them meals. One doesn’t heal the world by indiscriminately firing into crowds of determined folks making an attempt to safe a number of energy of donated meals to take again to their households. One doesn’t heal the world by the mass killing of docs and nurses, of educators, of humanitarian staff, of journalists, of farmers, or, above all, of new mothers and their babies simply beginning out on their life journeys.
Israel’s try and wipe out Gaza isn’t struggle; at this level it’s collective punishment on a very hideous scale. It’s as violative of collective ethical norms as any of the opposite myriad nice atrocities of the previous century. And, whereas Netanyahu and his colleagues promote this homicide spree as being obligatory for the protection of world Jewry, in actuality it’s a merely grotesque inversion of Jewish traditions of hospitality, of generosity, of empathy, and of the ethical crucial that one doesn’t let one’s neighbor, one’s fellow human being, go hungry.
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