The World’s Famine
The UN has declared famine in Gaza. It is the first officially recognized famine in the history of the Middle East. This is a human-made crime, not a natural tragedy. Israel is deliberately starving Gaza before the eyes of the world. Tom Fletcher, the UN head of humanitarian aid, has made an impassioned plea for international action, as he confirmed a famine created by Israel is threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. He also said the famine is being used as a “weapon of war.”
The Gaza Famine is the world’s famine. A preventable, predictable famine. Enough. Ceasefire. Open all crossings, north and south. Let us get food in, unimpeded and at massive scale. pic.twitter.com/eB1x8uEgpV
— Tom Fletcher (@UNReliefChief) August 22, 2025
You might say this is too late and of little consequence. You might say it’s stating the obvious. You might say declaring a famine with no means to stop it or intervene is a worthless statement. It may be all of these things. But at least those who deny genocide will now have to actively deny famine too.
How we respond to this abomination is important. A military operation that has deliberately targeted journalists for murder places an extra moral responsibility on journalists outside Palestine to do what they can to report the truth.
Israel has killed nearly 270 journalists and media workers since it launched its war on Gaza.
This makes it especially strange to read the writings of people such as Iain Macwhirter who engages in a weird both side-ism in his Substack column. He writes: “Is Israel conducting genocide in Gaza? By whose definition? Are people seriously arguing that the very people who actually suffered true genocide – the Jews – are now inflicting it on Arabs?”
Seemingly incredulous he continues: “A country bent on genocide does not open aid stations and food distribution sites, however chaotically administered, if it is intending to kill an entire race. For that is what genocide means. A genocidal army does not remove civilians en masse from conflict zones, as the IDF has been doing, and give warnings of missile strikes. No credible authority has claimed that Israel is intentionally seeking to eliminate the Palestinian people in Gaza.”
Arguing for ‘balanced reporting’ Macwhirter concludes: “Israel remains the only true democracy in the Middle East …. Both sides are at fault in this war, which is why only telling one side of the story is an abdication of journalistic morality.”
I wonder if Macwhirter denies the famine declared by the UN as well as denying the genocide we have all been witnessing?
Our darkest hour.
We are all Palestinians; if USreal are not stopped somehow, the technofascists are, eventually, coming for us.
McWhirter squirming on the dilemma- what happens to his pay when he has the balls to acknowledge it’s binary, stoopid! – courage, mon brave! – not caveats!
“A country bent on genocide does not open aid stations and food distribution sites, however chaotically administered, if it is intending to kill an entire race.” – Iain Macwhirter
Off-the-scale naïveté. In the 1940s, a country bent on genocide constructed show-piece villages and maintained orchestras composed of prisoners within its death camps.
On reflection, I could have been clearer- McWhirter no doubt has his reasons for his feartie equivocation, next, he’ll start saying there may be genocidal tendencies/ direction, but no elimination= no genocide- coward..
Aye.
Is there any limit to the lows to which Macwhirter will sink?
It’s obvious that the Israeli Government have tried to hide and cover up what they are doing in Gaza. The spokespeople they put up appear increasingly deranged.
All the more important therefore are those Israelis, including prominent Jewish Israelis like Gideon Levy of Haaretz, who speak out powerfully and repeatedly against the genocide, the famine, the interminable brutality and its cover-up by the Israeli Government.
Tom Fletcher gave a very powerful statement on behalf of humanity.
Ian McWhirter in trying to prolong his career by becoming increasingly contrarian just exposes himself to ridicule writing nonsense like this.
Defenders of Israeli government keep clinging to fact that Israel is a democracy as if this somehow gives it a free pass to inflict mass murder and starvation on civilians. In some ways it makes these actions even less defensible because in a democracy it means that the killings and starvation are supported by a significant section of population as opposed to being imposed by a small number of number of individuals in an autocracy.
@John, an apartheid state is not a democracy.
https://www.btselem.org/publications/202210_not_a_vibrant_democracy_this_is_apartheid
In the recent Decolonised Transformations: Confronting the University of Edinburgh’s History and Legacies of Enslavement and Colonialism, the authors devote Research Strand 3 to The University of Edinburgh and the Question of Palestine: Balfour’s Imperial Legacy and its Afterlife. There is also a longer appendix which I have not read.
https://www.ed.ac.uk/about/race-review/read-the-review
Arthur James Balfour served as University of Edinburgh Chancellor 1891–1930, and wrote the Balfour Declaration in 1917, as well as serving as British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary during an imperialist political career.
The authors supply a relevant Balfour quote (which I will replicate in full for context) from Jason Tomes, Balfour and Foreign Policy: The International Thought of a Conservative Statesman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.65
“Where racial differences are clear cut and profound […] where a [white] race obviously superior is mixed with a race obviously inferior, the superior race may be constituted as a democracy, but into that democracy the inferior race will never be admitted. It may be kept out by law, as in South Africa, or it may be kept out by practice, as in the Southern States of America; but kept out it will be.”
The report has a number of recommendations regarding Palestine which are relevant to the ongoing contention here.
SD – thanks for links. My point wasn’t about whether Israel should be called a democracy or not but how its defenders claim you shouldn’t criticise its behaviour because it is a democracy. This is arrant nonsense IMO as the mass murder and starvation of civilians is indefensible regardless of whether country inflicting this death is a democratic or not. To some extent it reflects even more badly on citizens of country inflicting the suffering if it carries democratic approval of population.
@John, yes, I generally agreed with your points, it’s just that the label ‘democracy’ is almost always inaccurate and often weaponised.
The ‘rule of law’ can be more objectively assessed, and Israel fares poorly here (and crucially is a rare non-codified constitutional jurisdiction like the British Empire, and retains much of the structure of government the colonial British laid down, including sweeping security-state and military powers like unto the royal prerogative they were based on). I don’t know who the Israel Democracy Institute is, but apparently they have detailed concerns about this kind of executive action:
Back Into the Abyss: Israel’s Government Fires Attorney General, Supreme Court Blocks the Move
https://en.idi.org.il/articles/61527
It’s all rather Trumpy. They even have another article called ‘Loyalty Over the Rule of Law’.
Indeed, Amartya Sen posited that famines don’t happen in democracies, although there are always special circumstances (something of an interesting contrast was the political treatment of autocracy under such conditions in the 2017 Korean movie The Fortress).
To take up your last point, nationwide sanctions are one type of legal collective punishment that could be applied to the population of Israel, who seem to be complicit in large numbers, although dissent for various reasons (perhaps even the fear of future sanctions) is reportedly growing.
On a more general point, although I cannot unreservedly recommend it (the series starts with a very conservative almost boosterish view of Western democracy, which acts as a foil, I guess) the Democracy:Differently podcasts presents some quite interesting critical views on contemporary flaws in such political systems.
Sadly the response to the UN declaring a famine, by many of our “leaders”, will be to simply get rid of the UN.
Oh yeah, and those “Woke” Human Rights too.