{"id":258186,"date":"2024-04-01T12:01:26","date_gmt":"2024-04-01T11:01:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=258186"},"modified":"2024-03-27T09:37:09","modified_gmt":"2024-03-27T09:37:09","slug":"when-starvation-is-a-weapon-the-harvest-is-shame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/04\/when-starvation-is-a-weapon-the-harvest-is-shame\/","title":{"rendered":"When Starvation Is a Weapon, the Harvest Is Shame"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Palestinians die of starvation under occupation, it brings grim echoes of another famine nearly two centuries ago in Ireland.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

14 Mar 2024 – <\/em>In a work entitled \u201cIrish Famine 4,\u201d Palestinian-American journalist<\/a> and artist<\/a> Sam Husseini combined grass and paint to commemorate a bitter time in Irish history when starving people died with their mouths stained green because, according to historian Christine Kinealy<\/a>, their last meal was grass. Shamefully, British occupiers profited from exporting out of Ireland<\/a> the food crops so desperately needed.\u00a0During a seven-year period beginning in 1845, one million Irish people died<\/a> from starvation and related diseases. It was a deliberate mass killing<\/a>, employing one of the most horrific means of execution imaginable\u2014an excruciating descent of weeks\u2019 duration into despair, delirium, and bodily immobility while one\u2019s attention, one\u2019s character, is gradually reduced to little more than appetite and pain.<\/p>\n

Now, in the occupied Gaza Strip, as weapons dealers benefit<\/a> from increasing military shipments to Israel, Palestinians have resorted to eating mixtures of grass and animal feed<\/a>. The past five months of Israeli siege, bombing, and displacement have killed more than<\/a> 31,000\u2014mostly women and children\u2014but a process of famine long underway is clearly about to expand that number exponentially<\/a>, particularly among children.<\/p>\n

Human Rights Watch says<\/a> the Israeli government is starving civilians as a method of warfare in Gaza. Aiding and abetting this war crime, the United States has approved 100 military sales<\/a> to Israel over the past five months. U.S. bullets, bombs, and guns have helped keep crucially needed aid from reaching millions of Palestinians. The bombs have buried or destroyed<\/a> much of the food supplies which could have mitigated this horror, and they have forced vast populations to flee attacks and huddle in the city that is Israel\u2019s latest target: Rafah<\/a>. The United States continues providing the muscle behind a starvation genocide.<\/p>\n

On March 11, eight U.S. Senators signed<\/a> a letter to President Joe Biden insisting that ongoing weapons shipments violate U.S. laws forbidding<\/a> military aid to regimes that are obstructing U.S. humanitarian aid.<\/p>\n

Twenty-five prominent humanitarian and human rights organizations delivered<\/a> a letter to the President echoing the Senators\u2019 message.<\/p>\n

Even as Israel\u00a0faces mounting pressure\u00a0from world leaders to stop impeding humanitarian relief shipments, Israel\u00a0turned back\u00a0another aid truck, this time because it contained children\u2019s medical kits.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even as Israel faces mounting pressure<\/a> from world leaders to stop impeding humanitarian relief shipments, Israel turned back<\/a> another aid truck, this time because it contained children\u2019s medical kits. These kits included scissors useful for applying bandages or cutting away clothing to reach shrapnel.<\/p>\n

The Israelis forbade the scissors as a potential dual-use weapon. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to send guns and bombs to Israel.<\/p>\n

Each day brings new reports of Palestinians, 40 percent of them<\/a> children, succumbing to disease and death because they are deprived of food, fuel, clean water, medicines, and shelter. Hellish conditions worsen as infectious contamination spreads from decomposing bodies and the chemical contaminants from thousands upon thousands of Israeli and Western-supplied bombs that have been dropped on Gaza.<\/p>\n

In Northampton, Massachusetts, six activists are on the third day of an occupation <\/a>of the office of Representative Jim McGovern, demanding that he call on the President to immediately halt all weapons shipments to Israel and stop the United States from vetoing<\/a> United Nations cease-fire resolutions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are desperate times,\u201d says Peter Kakos, one of the occupiers. \u201cWe must call for immediate action, and nothing less.\u201d He\u2019s particularly mindful of 17,000 Gazan children<\/a> who are estimated by UNICEF to be currently unaccompanied or separated from their parents.<\/p>\n

We talk about the mental harm on children caused by COVID-19 lockdowns. A March 12, 2024, report<\/a> by Save the Children draws our attention to what five months of carnage, flight, starvation, and disease, on top of nearly seventeen years of apartheid conditions<\/a>, will have permanently done to the children of Gaza who survive the brutality now afflicting them.<\/p>\n

During a recent visit to Amman, Jordan, I witnessed the anguish and frustration felt by many Palestinians there, denied any means of relieving the suffering of loved ones. They had this response to photos taken of U.S. aid drops: \u201cAre you going to feed starving people so that they can then face genocide from the Israeli Army with a full stomach?\u201d asked my host. \u201cWhat\u2019s the logic in that? The only humanitarian thing to drop would be to drop all support for Israel\u2019s war on the people of Gaza.\u201d<\/p>\n

In May of this year, an Irish organization called AFRI (Action From Ireland) will hold<\/a> an annual \u201cfamine walk\u201d in an area of Ireland across which hundreds of desperate people trekked in cold and stormy weather in 1847 to beg mercy from those British officials designated to assess who would qualify for small portions of food or tickets to enter a workhouse.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe weather was terrible,\u201d notes<\/a> County Mayo\u2019s official record of the time, \u201cwith wind and hail beating down upon them. When they arrived in Delphi the [Board of] Guardians refused them food or their tickets to the workhouse. Needless to say many of them perished on the return journey as fatigue and exhaustion from hunger took hold. Some of those that had energy to start the journey back to Louisburgh were swept into the lake by the heavy squalls.\u201d<\/p>\n

Each year, the organizers of AFRI\u2019s famine walk focus on a place in the world where famine afflicts people today. \u201cThis year\u2019s famine walk will focus on the unspeakable horrors being visited on the population of Gaza,\u201d says AFRI\u2019s coordinator, Joe Murray, \u201cwith \u2018Irish\u2019 President Biden forgetting his history and playing the part of a \u2018Black and Tan\u2019 in providing the means to obliterate an entire population.\u201d<\/p>\n

People in the United States ought to occupy the local offices of every elected official, denouncing all forms of violence and insisting on an immediate end to any support for Israel\u2019s genocidal war against Gaza.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s heinous to ignore the plight of starving people as was done by the British relief officials in the spring of 1847. But it is even more cruel to bomb the people you are deliberately starving, forcing them to wonder if they will face a quick death or a long and tortuous one.<\/p>\n

Yes, these are desperate times. People in the United States ought to occupy the local offices of every elected official, denouncing all forms of violence and insisting on an immediate end to any support for Israel\u2019s genocidal war against Gaza. It\u2019s time to acknowledge the futility of war and call for a collective home to be shared by Musims, Jews, Christians, Bahais, Druze, and many others in a secular democratic state encompassing Israel and Palestine. Similarly, our elected representatives should occupy the Oval Office until the President takes action.<\/p>\n

_________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Kathy Kelly is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>, an American peace activist, pacifist and author, one of the founding members of <\/em>Voices in the Wilderness, and currently a co-coordinator <\/em>Voices for Creative Nonviolence<\/a>. Three times since 2000, she has been nominated for the <\/em>Nobel Peace Prize. As part of peace teamwork in several countries, she has traveled to Iraq twenty-six times, notably remaining in combat zones during the early days of both US-Iraq wars. Her recent travel has focused on Afghanistan and Gaza, along with domestic protests against U.S. drone policy. She has been arrested more than sixty times at home and abroad, and written of her experiences among targets of U.S. military bombardment and inmates of U.S. prisons. She lives in Chicago.<\/em> Kathy@vcnv.org<\/em><\/a> – info@vcnv.org<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 progressive.org<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Join the<\/em><\/strong> BDS-BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, SANCTIONS campaign<\/em><\/strong><\/span> to protest the Israeli barbaric siege of Gaza, illegal occupation of the Palestine nation\u2019s territory, the apartheid wall, its inhuman and degrading treatment of the Palestinian people, and the more than 7,000 Palestinian men, women, elderly and children arbitrarily locked up in Israeli prisons.<\/p>\n

DON’T BUY<\/strong> PRODUCTS WHOSE<\/strong> BARCODE STARTS WITH<\/strong> 729<\/strong>, which indicates that it is produced in Israel. DO YOUR PART! MAKE A DIFFERENCE!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

7 2 9:<\/strong> BOYCOTT FOR JUSTICE!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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