Americans must speak out on the catastrophe in Gaza

How Netanyahu caused a famine and empowered Hamas

Over the past year in Gaza, humanitarian groups have been criticized for crying wolf about famine when the territory was experiencing a “mere” food crisis. Their defense was that the time to raise the alarm was before the most acute phase of starvation and death arrived. Now, as even Israeli skeptics have acknowledged, that deadly milestone has been reached.

Famine did not come to Gaza as an inevitable side effect of war. It came because of a decision in March by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to block international agencies from delivering aid. His plan was to feed Gazans by channeling them through what amounted to just four massive, militarized soup kitchens (replacing what had been around 400 United Nations food distribution sites), run by a mercenary outfit called the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF). The Israeli military is now suggesting it advised against the plan.

There was chaos and confusion at these sites: Hungry people surged forward, and Israeli soldiers and GHF guards often responded with deadly fire. As most experts warned, the experiment proved a calamity. Ironically, the GHF might go down in history as the only ostensibly humanitarian organization to have killed more civilians than it saved.

The Israeli government justified the arrangement as necessary to keep Hamas from stealing U.N. food aid. There are now serious questions about how much aid Hamas was taking. But there is a more basic objection to this defense. As anyone with experience in humanitarian operations knows, if men with guns are operating in a war zone full of civilians, those men will always take at least their share of what food is available. It is a fantasy to think one can feed a civilian population while starving an armed group circulating within it.

Further, the Israeli government’s restrictions are, perversely, the reason why Hamas can profit from humanitarian aid. The more one limits the supply of food, the more expensive food becomes, and the more incentive the armed group has to seize, hoard, and sell it. The only way to prevent that in Gaza also happens to be the only way to avoid famine—by flooding the zone with so much food that it becomes too cheap to be worth stealing.

There was, of course, another, reason for the aid blockade—to pressure Hamas to surrender. Israeli government ministers have been open about this. The argument is implicit even in statements from some American elected officials: the suffering of Gazans must be addressed, but Hamas could end it today by releasing its hostages and dropping dead.

This is plainly true. The problem is that Hamas doesn’t care. Hamas is pure evil. It is happy to see Gazan civilians starve and have Israel be blamed for their deaths. Telling Hamas that Gazans will suffer until it releases the hostages only encourages it not to do so.

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Any debate involving Israel has become fraught in the United States. We live in a time of rising antisemitism, propagated in part by a movement on the far left that sees the suffering of Palestinians as an opportunity to demand not just a ceasefire in Gaza but also the end of Israel as a Jewish state, and to hold the Jewish people as a whole responsible for that state’s abuses. The meaning of phrases like “globalize the Intifada” is not academic to the families of the two young Israeli embassy staffers gunned down by a terrorist in Washington in May or the 82-year-old woman killed in an antisemitic attack in June in Boulder, Colorado. I know leaders in the Jewish community who can’t stand what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza and in the West Bank but who worry that they’ll be accused of fueling more hatred if they speak out.

I get it. I just don’t think it’s sustainable for responsible people in the pro-Israel community to remain silent, or in denial, about plainly indefensible actions that the entire world is now anguished and shouting about.

Almost two years have passed since the monstrous massacre Hamas perpetrated on Oct. 7, 2023. Yet Hamas still rules the ruins of Gaza. And it has become harder to argue that ridding Gaza of Hamas—the one goal that could possibly justify a fraction of the resulting sacrifice—was ever the Netanyahu government’s primary goal. Achieving that would have required Israel to engage in a counterinsurgency campaign in Gaza that separated civilians from the terrorists, planning an alternative post-war governance structure that would have been credible to non-Hamas Palestinians, and accepting the historic opportunity to normalize ties with Arab states.

But Netanyahu would not consider such compromises. He fired security ministers who urged them. He opted instead for an endless war that would keep him in power and out of jail, one in which the Israeli military keeps killing Hamas fighters who keep being replaced—the definition of military failure—with a twisting of the laws of war and images of suffering that Israel and the United States will forever be blamed for.

Israeli soldiers keep dying in this war, too. And there is a rising epidemic of suicides among those who have been deployed again and again to Gaza with so little to show for it.

I consider myself as pro-Israel today as I was when I was a member of Congress, in the sense that I believe Israelis deserve to live in safety in a Jewish and democratic state, and that the United States has both a practical and moral interest in partnering with them to achieve that goal (including by continuing the remarkable progress in weakening Hezbollah and Iran).

But if we are genuinely pro-Israel, not in the performative style of my former congressional colleagues who hang an Israeli flag on their office door without ever building a true connection with the place, but in the sense of actually caring about Israel’s fate, how can we justify unconditional support for policies that are so clearly harming Israel and eroding bipartisan American support for a relationship with it?

When the leader of Israel is under daily pressure to intensify the war from right-wing fanatics in his country who threaten to destroy him politically if he refuses but his American partners upset about harm to civilians and to Israel’s own interests won’t even voice their concerns publicly, that leader will have every reason to keep making things worse. If the American pro-Israel community’s answer to every disagreement between the two countries is to push the U.S. government to accommodate whatever the Israeli government’s view is, that, too, creates perverse incentives that will make the relationship impossible to sustain in the long run.

It’s good to see that more Israelis are objecting to what their government is doing in Gaza, demanding a shift in focus to release of hostages, removing restrictions on aid, and ending a war that cannot be won as Netanyahu is waging it. That capacity for democratic debate is one reason Israel (if not its current government) has merited American support. The time has come for more Americans who care about Israel to stand with those Israelis and speak truth to power in Jerusalem as vigorously as they have long done in Washington.

Tom Malinowski is a former member of Congress from New Jersey who was an assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration.

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