For the better part of two years now, we have watched in horror and helplessness as Israel has carried out its campaign of genocidal slaughter against the Palestinians of Gaza. We have seen tens of thousands of children murdered – blown to pieces, shot by Israeli snipers, crushed beneath the concrete of their ruined homes. We have seen cruelty and depravity almost beyond comprehension, and have heard countless statements of intent, from those who wield power in Israel, to continue this slaughter until there is no building left to be levelled, no life left to be crushed.
And in this time, those of us who have spoken out about this horror, who have called it by its proper name, have asked a single question: when will it be enough? When will those powerful people and institutions who have turned a blind eye to this savagery, or who have deemed it sadly necessary for the defence of a western ally against its enemies, say that even they can stomach no more?
That time, it seems, may finally have come. In recent days, as Israel’s deliberate starvation of the population of Gaza has been laid bare for all to see, a number of prominent and powerful people who have previously supported the Israel Defense Forces’s right to do whatever it pleases in Gaza have had a public change of heart.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, claims to have seen enough. “The images from Gaza are unbearable,” she announced in a social media post in late July, as the sickening reality of starvation became too forceful for even her to ignore. “Civilians in Gaza have suffered too much, for too long. It must stop now.”
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These sentiments, coming from a politician who has long been among the most steadfast and powerful facilitators of Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians, ring somewhat hollow. “In the face of genocide and engineered starvation,” as Hussein Baoumi, deputy Middle East and North African director of Amnesty International put it, her statement was “too little, too late”.
The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, has come to realise he cannot be seen to unquestioningly support Israel when it is deliberately starving the population of Gaza. He announced, in recent days, that his government will formally recognise a Palestinian state before the next meeting of the UN general assembly next month unless Israel commits to a ceasefire, and to a two-state solution.
The Palestinian people, of course, have a right to self-determination, and Palestinian statehood is already recognised by 147 of the UN’s member states including, as of last year, Ireland. So Starmer’s use of this recognition as a bargaining chip is profoundly questionable. The Canadian government has announced similar plans, as has France – though neither has included anything like the UK’s abject condition of qualification.
Starmer has, of course, been one of the most persistent supporters of Israel, throughout its long and bloody campaign of mass murder and ethnic cleansing. In November 2023, in response to the cutting off of water and electricity supplies to Gaza, he defended what he called Israel’s “right” to do so. He has since then gone out of his way to delegitimise and suppress protest against the genocide; in a highly controversial piece of recent legislation, his government designated the group Palestine Action a terrorist organisation, though its actions have been entirely non-violent.
[ MSF calls for immediate closure of ‘lethal’ Israeli Gaza aid sitesOpens in new window ]
Even the editorial board of The New York Times, a newspaper whose tendency to view everything from the Israeli point of view has been so overwhelming as to make it frequently useless as a source of information on the conflict, has seemed, in recent days, to question Israel’s actions in Gaza. Last week, in an op-ed tilted “Gaza’s Hunger Is a Moral Crisis”, the editorial board acknowledged people were now starving to death, and called for the Israeli government to allow food deliveries, and to work towards a ceasefire.
So what has changed? What is it about the spectacle of widespread starvation that has provoked the kind of moral response which endless months of genocidal slaughter did not? Why has hunger attained the status of “moral crisis”, when the deliberate bombing of civilian targets, the relentless killing of defenceless Palestinian men, women, and children, in their tens of thousands, never quite did?
One way of answering the question might be to look at the language of that New York Times editorial. Reread, first of all, that headline: “Gaza’s Hunger Is a Moral Crisis”. Not Israel’s use of starvation as a deliberate strategy of war, but Gaza’s hunger. You cannot prosecute a moral crisis in The Hague. Hunger is not a war crime. Contrast this language with that of the International Criminal Court, which, in issuing its arrest warrants against Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant, made special mention of Israel’s “use of starvation as a weapon of war”.
It is much easier to speak out about a famine than it is about a campaign of mass slaughter, about the relentless bombing of homes and schools and universities and hospitals and refugee camps, because it is easier to view famine as a kind of free-floating, atmospheric misfortune, as a regrettable byproduct of war, as opposed to what, in this case, it actually is: an act of war in itself, and one explicitly outlawed by the Geneva conventions and by the UN.
The New York Times invoking a “moral crisis”; Ursula von der Leyen announcing that Gaza’s civilians have suffered enough; Keir Starmer’s sudden realisation of what he calls “the pressing need for Israel to change course”: none of this is any more than a shift in rhetorical positioning, the striking of a pose of moral condemnation. And all of it is predicated on an increasingly preposterous political fiction: that Israel has temporarily, if disastrously, strayed from its path of justice and morality, and that it can be somehow prevailed upon to return once more to that path.
No one understands the hollowness of this rhetoric better than Israel’s government, who are perfectly content to let such rhetoric do its harmless work, seeming to launder the consciences of those who have, for close to two years, facilitated this campaign of genocide. And although the language may, for now, have changed its course, the weapons are still travelling in the same direction: from Europe and America to Israel, and onward, from there, to Gaza.
