As the horror in Gaza continues, Americans in particular should repeat one simple proposition to themselves: Their government is complicit in prolonging a war in which their close ally Israel is actively engaged in starving the Palestinian population of Gaza into submission. The United States of America, the supposed pillar of an international rules-based order, once in the vanguard of humanitarian interventions worldwide, is today the patron of a government that is indifferent to even the most basic humanitarian principles.
“Everyone in Gaza is going hungry. About 2.2 million people are surviving day by day on almost nothing, routinely going without meals. The desperate search for food is relentless, and usually unsuccessful, leaving the entire population—including babies, children, pregnant or nursing women and the elderly—hungry.” This clarification is not by a foreign nongovernmental organization or the United Nations—usual targets of Israeli rancor—but by B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, in a report the center placed under the stark headline: “Israel is Starving Gaza.”
Countless UN and humanitarian officials have warned of the risk of famine in Gaza, including Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, and Cindy McCain, the executive director of the World Food Program. Despite this, Israel continues to block vital food aid, including aid provided to UNRWA, which has been held up in Ashdod port by Israel’s extremist finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich. Israeli protestors have also been hindering the delivery of food at the Kerem Shalom and Nitzana crossings for the past two months. According to an Israeli poll conducted on February 12–15, a majority of Israelis, 68 percent, oppose the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Under Article 54 of the Additional Protocol (June 1977) of the Geneva Conventions and Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, using starvation as a weapon of war is prohibited and considered a war crime. Israeli responsibility has been recognized even by officials in the Biden administration, with Vice President Kamala Harris stating on March 3: “People in Gaza are starving. The conditions are inhumane and our common humanity compels us to act. The Israeli government must do more to significantly increase the flow of aid. No excuses.” Harris’ words notwithstanding, Israel has continued with its appalling actions, bombing an aid truck in Gaza on Monday, killing nine people.
Five months into the Gaza slaughter, the United States is to a large extent responsible for what is taking place. Harris’ remarks were a vain attempt at a whitewash. Washington has persisted in vetoing all UN resolutions calling for a ceasefire; it has opposed the South African case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of genocide; and it has continued to supply Israel with the weapons its armed forces are using to bomb civilians in Gaza.
American officials may shudder at such an accusation, but if that’s the case, it might be worth for them to read the report prepared by the Israeli commission established after the killings in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in September 1982. At the time, the Israeli army, which controlled Beirut, had allowed into the camps Lebanese Forces militiamen, who proceeded to kill anywhere between several hundred to several thousand Palestinians. The international outcry forced Israel to set up the so-called Kahan commission to investigate what had happened.
In imparting responsibility, the commission found that Israel bore indirect responsibility for what had taken place. It made the case in a striking passage:
When we are dealing with the issue of indirect responsibility, it should also not be forgotten that the Jews in various lands of exile, and also in the Land of Israel when it was under foreign rule, suffered greatly from pogroms perpetrated by various hooligans... The Jewish public’s stand has always been that the responsibility for such deeds falls not only on those who rioted and committed the atrocities, but also on those who were responsible for safety and public order, who could have prevented the disturbances and did not fulfill their obligations in this respect.
Why is this relevant? Because the war in Gaza has provoked a legal maelstrom that encompasses the possibility of acts genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. If the United States is implicated, and failed to prevent crimes when it could have done so, there will be profound ramifications. From the outset, the Israelis responded to the October 7 attacks by going beyond self-defense to address core Israeli anxieties pertaining to the Palestinians. This included advancing an ethnic cleansing project for Gaza by trying to expel its population to Egypt, thereby reducing the Palestinian demographic advantage with regard to Israeli Jews. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to convince European leaders to pressure Egypt into accepting the Palestinians. When this failed, the Israelis made Gaza uninhabitable, so its population would seek to emigrate in the years ahead.
From there, we moved to South Africa’s genocide case against Israel before the ICJ. The Americans dismissed the accusation, even after the court stated in its interim decision issued on January 26: “In light of the considerations set out above, the Court considers that there is urgency, in the sense that there is a real and imminent risk that irreparable prejudice will be caused to the rights found by the Court to be plausible, before it gives its final decision.” In other words, the ICJ affirmed it was urgent to ensure there would be no irreparable prejudice to Palestinian rights under the genocide convention, meaning the South African case was plausible. In response, the U.S. doubled down, insisting, “There’s no indication that we’ve seen that validates a claim of genocidal intent or action by the Israeli defense forces.” This was, strangely, irrelevant. Few really cared about the American interpretation, because everything they’ve said is so plainly political, not legal.
So, the United States has the means to prevent Israel from continuing the war in Gaza, but has done nothing to stop them. It has the latitude to withhold arms shipments to Israel and compel the Israelis to accept a ceasefire, but instead has blocked all permanent ceasefire proposals. It has the leverage to push Israel to implement the ICJ’s interim decision, but instead has chosen to discredit the court’s ruling. It has acknowledged that Israel is, at the very least, limiting the entry of food into Gaza, which even Israeli organizations have identified as a policy of starvation, but has persisted in publicly supporting those responsible for this outrage.
And the United States has behaved in this way knowing that Israel, from the very beginning, has carried out war crimes and crimes against humanity, such as targeting civilians and seeking to ethnically cleanse the Gaza population. Therefore, even if the accusation is harsh, the Americans must think through whether they are willing to carry on with this policy of passive permissiveness, and perhaps one day even face a legal accusation that they were participants in the mass killings in Gaza.
