Politics
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Hiding in Plain Sight
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August 1, 2025
I realized from a younger age that you just shouldn’t let your neighbor go hungry. Benjamin Netanyahu would do properly to revisit this custom.
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Palestinians, fighting starvation, type a line to obtain sizzling meals in Gaza’s al-Zeitoun neighborhood on July 31, 2025.
(Abdalhkem Abu Riash / Anadolu through Getty Photographs)
For a lot of the previous 21 months, I’ve sparred with associates and colleagues who labeled Israel’s response to the October 7 assault as “genocidal.” I’ve written, at The Nation and elsewhere, about my considerations with a few of the evaluation on the left. In my interior 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 cases it was committing crimes in opposition to humanity, finally it wasn’t a genocide.
Over the previous weeks, nevertheless, as photos of mass hunger have emerged out of Gaza, as lots of 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 change into ever more durable to achieve another conclusion however that Israel’s leaders have embraced a coverage of whole annihilation. Having destroyed the bodily infrastructure of Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu and his authorities appear now intent on making life completely untenable for the remaining residents. At this level, it could be reckless to imagine in any other case.
If, the truth is, Israel had any type of exit technique or plan for completely ending its conflict on Gaza, it could must acknowledge the humanity of its opponents and acknowledge their must survive. At a most simple stage, it could must see the world from their perspective, with all that that acknowledgement entails. For empathy includes, in such circumstances, understanding that even these we struggle in conflict 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 completely unscrupulous cupboard, appears ever-less able to making these imaginative leaps. True, a majority of Jewish Israelis mistrust Netanyahu and assume he must be doing extra to convey dwelling the hostages. However that doesn’t translate to a want to discover a real path to long-term peace with their neighbors. Certainly, a Pew Analysis Middle ballot from earlier this yr discovered that solely 16 p.c of grownup Jews in Israel imagine peaceable coexistence with a Palestinian state to be potential. A more moderen ballot discovered that greater than 4 in 5 Jewish Israelis supported the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, and upwards of half favored Palestinian expulsion from Israel.
That goes a protracted solution to explaining why there haven’t been huge protests or acts of civil resistance in Israel as its leaders have, up to now couple of months, embraced the abominable technique of wholesale hunger and the herding of Palestinians into ever smaller, extra weak enclaves throughout the decimated Gaza Strip. It’s why most Israelis have stayed silent within the face of Protection Minister Israel Katz floating the concept of forcing Gaza’s 2 million residents into an Orwellian-named “humanitarian metropolis” 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 power a day of ethical reckoning inside Israel—a rustic based, in spite of everything, within the wake of the economic 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 change the inhabitants with Jewish settlers. And it’s why, over the previous six months, Israelis have been broadly supportive of Trump’s prison thought to expel all Palestinians from Gaza and create as an alternative a “Riviera” resort for rich Western and Gulf-state vacationers.
Certain, a rising variety of students and Israeli human rights teams are warning that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. However to this point 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 endlessly conflict with Hamas by any means vital, regardless 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 couple of coverage of deliberate hunger on hundreds of thousands of civilians. Sure, the deprivation is each dehumanizing and inhumane all by itself. But it surely 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 assert that those that oppose the cruelty of mass hunger are one way or the other shoring up an antisemitic venture.
Among the many many Jewish beliefs and traditions that ought to make this weaponization of meals in Gaza unthinkable, the concept 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 associates, kin, strangers—and all the time exhibit 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 supplied each… and also you fed them.
You fed them even when you, your self, didn’t have a lot to spare.
My grandparents welcomed folks into their dwelling in north London through the darkish days of the Second World Struggle and the austere years of rationing that adopted the conflict. At all times, 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 neighborhood, continued all through their lengthy lives.
Once I was rising up, within the Eighties, I might convey a complete group of associates over after college, and, at brief discover, my grandmother would rustle up meals for us all. As I wrote in my ebook on my grandparents, The Home of Twenty Thousand Books—a ebook in regards to the folks, the concepts, and the dialog that stuffed my grandparents’ dwelling 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, have 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 gotten denied them meals. One doesn’t heal the world by indiscriminately firing into crowds of determined folks attempting 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 employees, of journalists, of farmers, or, above all, of latest moms and their infants simply beginning out on their life journeys.
Israel’s try to wipe out Gaza isn’t conflict; 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 vital 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.
Sasha Abramsky
Sasha Abramsky is The Nation’s Western correspondent. He’s the creator of a number of books, together with The American Approach of Poverty, The Home of Twenty Thousand Books, Little Surprise: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Feminine Sports activities Famous person, and most not too long ago Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle In opposition to the Far-Proper Takeover of Small-City America. Comply with him on Bluesky at @sashaabramsky.bsky.social.
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