They Will Starve You In A Killing Cage Too

Starvation is taking hold in Gaza.

Twenty-nine people have starved to death in the last few days.

Death by starvation is horrific, the body feeding on itself, first consuming carbohydrates and fats, and then moving on to the protein parts of tissue. Once these are used up, vital organs and tissues start to fail as they aren’t being nourished by essential nutrients. The heart, lungs, muscles, ovaries, testes and brain physically shrink and shrivel. The kidneys start to fail. Eventually the body begins scavenging muscle, including the heart muscle. When this starts to happen, death is hours away, preceded by hallucinations, severe mental disturbances and convulsions.

With less stored fat and higher metabolic needs, children die first. Starving parents hold their dying children, at this point nothing but skin and bone, in their arms. Adults can survive anywhere between twenty and forty days without food. Those already weak, chronically ill or immuno-compromised die quicker.

It’s no exaggeration to say that without sufficient food, this could very well be the final days and weeks for tens or hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. The entire population of Gaza, somewhere between 1.7 and 1.9 million people (no one really knows how many people have been killed and therefore how many Palestinians are left alive) could feasibly die.

This barbaric campaign of starvation follows nineteen months of the most sadistic murder spree imaginable, a frenzied assault that has killed, at a minimum, according to the Lancet and The Economist, over 100,000 people and destroyed all semblance of organised society in Gaza.

What did the Palestinians do to deserve this?

Nothing.

They were simply in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

1948, to be precise.

They simply lived in a place that one specific reading of a story book said was owed to a specific people, and these people, Zionist Jews, supported by the power of the colonial west, took the land and the homes and the farms of the people who lived there.

They just……took it.

And not before they had killed and raped significant numbers of the people who lived there, people who had nothing to do with the pretext used for taking this land, people who had nothing to do with Nazi Germany’s holocaust of the Jews.

It was imperialism and colonialism, undertaken with impunity.

Some Palestinians, rather than just lie down and accept this injustice, fought back, as did their children and grandchildren, and they were labelled terrorists for doing so. The people who took the land, who raped and murdered and displaced hundreds of thousands of innocent people, were labelled the good guys.

The fantasy most of us were raised with, of good wholesome Israel defending itself against evil terrorists, is a total inversion of reality. A true and stunning victory for western propaganda.

And now, nearly eighty years later, Israel, with the full support of the US, UK and much of the west, is starving the Palestinians who are trapped in a killing cage.

And none of us should for one second think that political elites wouldn’t starve us in a killing cage too, should we ever be an obstacle to their land and resource-grabbing desires.

Trump’s obsession with Greenland (a US obsession that long predates Trump, by the way), reveals that the imperial desire to grab resources from the lands of indigenous peoples is very much alive and well.

In the Congo, massive reserves of cobalt and lithium, critical components for mobile phones and batteries, are mined by children and bought by US tech companies who have no interest in knowing about the human rights abuses they are fuelling. Just a few weeks ago, Congolese leaders met with Trump officials to discuss a deal that would see ‘US military assistance’ provided in exchange for greater access to these minerals.

In the era of rampant capitalism allied with environmental breakdown, we should expect more people to find themselves on the wrong side of imperial quests for resources as scarcity replaces what has been, for many of us, relative abundance.

The Earth is careering across ecological boundaries, bringing us ever-closer to cataclysmic tipping points that threaten, among many other things, the global food system and our ability to comfortably feed ourselves, an ability so often taken for granted.

Six of nine planetary boundaries have already been breached, according to a 2023 report, moving humanity out of the safe ecological operating space we have existed in for tens of thousands of years.

The risk of civil conflict, war and famine stemming from what scholars call ‘simultaneous breadbasket failure’ in key growing regions, is rising. Scientists recently said the risk of global food system breakdown had been underestimated.

This is not in any way to detract from the unique horror the people of Gaza are experiencing right now. This horror, from mass death to starvation, is entirely man-made. Human failure, not crop failure. Aid trucks full of flour and food are in some cases just hundreds of metres from starving people. This is an entirely unconscionable and intolerable situation that should, as I argued before, be remedied by military intervention.

But we shouldn’t pretend what’s happening in Gaza doesn’t provide us an insight into the calculations of the political elites who rule over us. We shouldn’t pretend we couldn’t, like the Palestinians, simply be in the wrong place at the wrong time as conditions shift and break. We shouldn’t pretend we aren’t seen as expendable if our lives become a barrier to capital accumulation, access to resources and imperial conquest.

The pandemic has already given us a taste of this, the vulnerable sacrificed to a virus in the race back to capitalist business as usual. The horrors of Gaza, following so soon after this, have demonstrated definitively there is no sentimentality, no guardrails against a collapse into savagery directed by system elites.

If we’re in the way, if we don’t serve a useful purpose, no one will come to save us.

This is why the plight, and the fight, of the Palestinians, should be our fight too.

There is no worse crime than genocide.

Any group of humans committing genocide against another group of humans puts all of our humanity on the line.

In the words of a Republican poster printed during the Spanish civil war: if you tolerate this, your children will be next.