Forced famine is a grotesque reversal of Jewish traditions

For many of the last 21 months, I have fought with friends and colleagues who qualified Israel’s response to the attack on October 7 as “genocidal”. I wrote to The nation And elsewhere, on my concerns concerning part of the left analysis. In my inner monologue as much as in the conversation with others, I argued that if what Israel was militarily was brutal and that, in many cases, he committed crimes against humanity, it was ultimately that it was not a genocide.

In the past few weeks, however, as mass famine images have come out of Gaza, because hundreds of desperate Gazans have taken place in food distribution centers – still accompanied by a dishonest non -responsibility cacophony on the part of the wealth lots which led the Israeli government – it has become more difficult to reach any other conclusion, but which adopted the leaders of Israelis. After destroying Gaza’s physical infrastructure, Benjamin Netanyahu and his government now seem determined to make life entirely untenable for the remaining residents. At this point, it would be unlikely to believe the opposite.

If, in fact, Israel had a kind of outing or plan strategy to permanently end his war against Gaza, he should recognize the humanity of his opponents and recognize their need to survive. At a most basic level, he should see the world from their point of view, with all that this recognition implies. Because empathy implies, in such circumstances, the understanding that even those that we fight in war love their children as we love ours, that they cry as we cry, that they suffer as we suffer, that their stomach growls when it is hungry like ours.

Instead, almost two years after the vile attacks of Hamas on October 7, Israeli public opinion, manipulated by Netanyahu and his entirely unscrupulous cabinet, always seems less capable of making these imaginative jumps. Admittedly, the majority of Jewish Israelis are wary of Netanyahu and think he should do more to bring the hostages back to house. But that does not result in a desire to find a real path to long -term peace with their neighbors. Indeed, a survey of the Pew Research Center earlier this year revealed that only 16% of adult Jews in Israel believe that peaceful coexistence with a Palestinian state was possible. A more recent survey revealed that more than four Jewish Israelis out of five supported the forced expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza, and more than half favored the Palestinian expulsion of Israel.

This greatly contributes to explaining why there have not been enormous manifestations or acts of civil resistance in Israel, because its leaders have, in the past two months, adopted the abominable strategy of fatty famine and the breeding of Palestinians in ever smaller and more vulnerable enclaves within the decimated Gaza Strip. This is why most of the Israelis remained silent against the Minister of Defense, Israel Katz, floating the idea of forcing the 2 million residents of Gaza in a “humanitarian city” called Orwellian at the top of the ruins of Rafah. And that is why, while the former Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, warned that such a city would be a “concentration camp”, the affirmation was not used to force a day of moral calculation within Israel – a country founded, after all, following the industrial massacre, within the death camps, of the Jews of Europe. This is why there were no massive demonstrations after the Minister of Heritage Amichay Eliyahu declared publicly that the government’s intention was to “eliminate” Gaza and replace the population with Jewish settlers. And that is why, in the past six months, the Israelis have largely supported Trump’s criminal idea to expel all the Palestinians from Gaza and create a “Riviera” station for the rich Western tourists and the Gulf State instead.

Of course, an increasing number of Israeli human rights researchers and groups warn that Israel commits a genocide in Gaza. But to date, their claims have been widely dismissed by an Israeli audience so traumatized by the horrors of October 7 which he seems willing to give to his carte blanche leaders to continue their war forever with Hamas by all the necessary means, regardless of the scale of “collateral damage”.

This silence becomes more and more untenable. Above all, given the history and Jewish beliefs, there is something particularly terrible in a deliberate famine policy on millions of civilians. Yes, deprivation is both dehumanizing and inhuman on its own. But it also goes against Jewish traditions, such as the mandate to feed the foreigner. It is unfathomable for me that this tradition is so deliciously raped by the leaders of Israel – and that these leaders dare to affirm that those who oppose the cruelty of mass famine suffocate in a way an anti -Semitic project.

Among the many Jewish beliefs and traditions that should make this weaponment of food in Gaza unthinkable, the idea of Tikkun Olam Do you have a duty to repair or heal the world. I witnessed this concept in practice, looking at my grandparents to open their house to friends, relatives, foreigners – and always demonstrate their hospitality by providing their guests with homemade food. For my grandmother Mimi, food was not only her language of love; It was at the heart of his being. If someone was hungry – or even if he was not – you feed him. If someone was exhausted with the concerns of the world, you raised some of these concerns by nourishing them. If someone was looking for a good business and a good conversation, you provided both … and you fed it.