Gaza's Famine and Biden's 'Extreme Pressure'

The gap between Washington’s empty humanitarian rhetoric and its enabling of a famine could scarcely be greater.

Jonathan Katz discusses what Biden told him in a recent interview and compares it with the administration’s record:

But his avoidance of specifics spoke to the other side of that coin: the fact that there has been zero evidence of any serious consequences in the seven months of this ungodly war. So far the U.S. response to countless war crimes in Gaza has been to briefly threaten symbolic sanctions against individual Israeli units and officials, then reverse them immediately. And to allow a weakened ceasefire resolution to pass the U.N. Security Council, then pretend like the resolution doesn’t count.

All the while, Biden — personally annoyed or otherwise — has kept the bombs and billions flowing.

Biden insisted that he has been “putting extreme pressure on the Israelis to back off and … open up humanitarian access in Gaza,” but this doesn’t line up with what the U.S. has done since the war began. Whatever pressure the president may have put on the Israeli government through verbal rebukes, it has been anything but extreme when it comes to actions. It gives us a good idea of how little real pressure the administration is prepared to put on Netanyahu if the president thinks that the minor token actions he has taken count as “extreme.” The mismatch between the gravity of the situation and the penny-ante response would be comical if hundreds of thousands of lives didn’t hang in the balance.

The administration’s project for delivering relief to Gaza—the ill-advised and inadequate floating pier scheme—is still in the process of being built. As expected, it is proving to be far too little and too late to contain the crisis. It was never a serious attempt to fight the mass starvation of Gaza’s population. Aid delivery continues to be severely limited by Israeli restrictions. The man-made famine created by the Israeli government is underway, as the IPC warned us about six months ago. There is still no major international response to the catastrophe unfolding before us. That U.S. leadership that Biden likes to celebrate so much is nowhere to be found.

The administration can’t claim ignorance as their excuse. They know very well how terrible the conditions are in Gaza. Their own officials have been warning them, but they don’t listen. According to a recent report at Devex, a confidential paper prepared by USAID for Secretary Blinken concluded that the Israeli government is in violation of the U.S. directive that recipients of military aid comply with international humanitarian law and allow unimpeded delivery of humanitarian aid. The USAID paper agreed with the assessments of outside groups that Gaza is swiftly plunging into famine:

The “deterioration of food security and nutrition in Gaza is unprecedented in modern history, exponentially outpacing in six months the long-term declines that led to the only other two famine declarations in the 21st century [bold mine-DL]: Somalia (2011) and South Sudan (2017),” the memo states.

The hunger crisis in Gaza is unparalleled in its speed and scale, and it cries out for a suitably urgent emergency relief effort. There is no such effort in the works, and no one in Washington appears to be in any hurry to change that. The administration will pull out all the stops to hasten weapons shipments to facilitate more destruction, but it will do only the bare minimum in response to a man-made famine created by a U.S. client state.

Despite its extraordinary speed and severity, the famine in Gaza receives remarkably little attention in media coverage of the war. As Howard French notes, this is “a dismal statement about the Western press’s interest in the life of the residents of Gaza,” whose deliberate starvation is there for all to see but somehow still goes largely unnoticed.

The famine in Gaza was foreseen early on, and there were many opportunities for the U.S. and other governments to act to avert it. A purely man-made famine like this one is caused by policy decisions, and the U.S. could have used its leverage to try changing the relevant Israeli policies. There was simply no desire and no political will on the part of the Biden administration and other Western governments to prevent this catastrophe from swallowing up tens of thousands of innocent lives. The gap between Washington’s empty humanitarian rhetoric and its enabling of a famine could scarcely be greater.