Protesting over Gaza's starvation feels like screaming into a void – but we mustn't stop
Last week, over a period of just 72 hours, 21 children died in Gaza of malnutrition and starvation. The path to death from starvation is a slow and agonising one, especially in a territory suffering shortages of not just food, but medicine, shelter and clean water. The total death toll from hunger surpassed 100 at the weekend; 80 of those were children. An aid worker reported that children are telling their parents that they want to die and go to heaven, because 'at least heaven has food'.
Every single one of these deaths, and those that will come, is preventable. The World Health Organization described the starvation as 'man-made', but it is more than that. It is foreseeable and thus deliberate. Israel's siege on Gaza has blocked tonnes of aid from entering, or being distributed to those who need it, according to humanitarian organisations there. The 'tactical pause' of military operations for a few hours a day in three parts of the Gaza Strip to allow in some aid is a measure that does not ameliorate a crisis accrued over time. The starvation, long warned about, is the latest phase of a campaign almost two years long, for which words are now entirely inadequate.
Genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass punishment – all these descriptions still somehow do not capture the lurid and varied ways in which Palestinians in Gaza are being killed: bombed in their homes, and in their tents, burned alive in their hospital beds, shot while queueing for food and now starved. It almost doesn't matter what it is called any more, because all you need to see to know that what is happening is a crime that requires immediate action is the bones of a child sticking out of its thin skin, while the food it needs is being blocked by Israeli soldiers.
The time for justifications, arguing about semantics and hand-wringing over the 'complexity' of the conflict has long passed. The only question now is, how is it that the world cannot get Israel to allow a morsel of food into a starving civilian's mouth? How is this a government still not decisively cut off, sanctioned and embargoed? How is this a government, still, that David Lammy thinks he can 'urge' to do the right thing? The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, posted on X calling the images from Gaza 'unbearable', and called for more aid to be let in and for Israel to 'deliver on its pledges'. This, and other EU social media statements, was described by an Oxfam official as 'hollow' and 'baffling'.
Benjamin Netanyahu has proved, over and over, that he has no intention of complying with anything. Only last week, a minister said that 'there is no nation that feeds its enemies', and that the government was 'rushing toward Gaza being wiped out' while also 'driving out the population that educated its people on the ideas of Mein Kampf'. The truth is that there is no strategic goal for defeating Hamas, only constantly shifting goalposts, under a prime minister who has yoked his political survival to the indefinite extension of an assault on Gaza.
And in the meantime, the escalating horrors and their relentless continuation unsettle and reconfigure the world. But the more the hard, cold core of support for Israel's actions is revealed, the more credibility and legitimacy drains away from it. The result is a head-on confrontation between political establishments and the public in a situation that is no longer manageable. The recent escalating rhetoric, for it is only that, from Keir Starmer is an indication that Gaza is now an issue that must be paid lip service to if it is not to further coalesce into a domestic problem for an already embattled government.
But still, that rhetoric seems to be part of an elaborate game, in which everyone dances increasingly performatively around what needs to happen. That game is to maintain, no matter the violation, the tenability of Israel as a moral player, while pretending that when it transgresses it will be scolded back into compliance. The 'when' here is important. The players of this game are constantly inventing new beginnings, new red lines, new watersheds, which mean the necessary point of rupture with Israel is constantly moved to a new point on the horizon. Whether it is the killing of aid workers, the killing of those actually seeking aid, or now the starvation, each escalation of Israel's campaign seems to trigger a fresh wave of finger wagging.
The result is a permanent moment of impending action, as threatened by Lammy. Action that never comes. And while we wait, the status quo is maintained in a holding pattern until the latest horror fades from our screens and front pages. Or Israel applies some temporary measure, such as its 'tactical pause' in the fighting, that does not address the fundamental conditions of siege, blockade and civilian killings.
But protest, no matter how ostensibly ineffective, remains the only way any pressure can be applied on those who have the power to censure Israel in ways that are meaningful, by ceasing military and trade relations. Protesting might feel like screaming into a void, but even the little change we have seen – the pitifully few trucks of aid now rolling into Gaza – is down to the strain of that confrontation with the political establishment. What else public anger is capable of achieving can only be realised if it does not relent.
The way that strain translates into something meaningful can be impossible to divine, because being subjected to these placatory ruses for almost two years has been enough to inflict a sort of cognitive injury. We are told by powerful politicians that things cannot continue as they are, and then, suddenly, it is another few months and things have not only continued but worsened. There is something genuinely mind-bending about it, something exhausting and scattering of resolve when it seems that finally, something seems to be shifting and sanity is prevailing, and then it doesn't.
The purpose is to quieten the public through verbal laudanum, or distract it by the lowest-cost calls for recognising a Palestinian state. These are phantom wins, a grotesque exercise in crowd control, reputation laundering and public opinion management. Innocents are now starving to death. All that is not action is noise.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
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