How to Hide a Genocide

This Tuesday, President Donald Trump rejected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that talk of famine in Gaza is a ​“bold-faced lie,” saying, ​“That’s real starvation. I see it and you can’t fake that.”

The same day, hardcore MAGA Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) — who in November 2023 called to censure Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) for accusing Israel of genocide — became the first Republican in Congress to use the term herself.

As we near the two-year mark of Israel’s war on Gaza, are we quickly coming to confirm writer Omar El Akkad’s bitter prediction that ​“one day, everyone will have always been against this”?

That depends on what ​“this” means.

While any recognition of the severity and worsening of Palestinian suffering might seem like a victory, it’s a mistake to see these statements as evidence of a pivot in the political and media mainstream towards finally confronting Israel’s war against the Palestinian people — let alone doing something about it. Presenting Israel’s policy of starvation in Gaza solely as a ​“humanitarian crisis” is a means of deflecting the moral, political, legal and economic consequences of acknowledging Israel’s genocidal intent.

The implicit argument is that only recently was some kind of threshold passed: a just war has become unjust, too many have died, the strategy is no longer working, etc. It echoes the ​“revisionism” denounced by Palestinian legal scholar Nimer Sultany, criticizing those belatedly concerned scholars and commentators ​“who did not have the courage to recognize the genocide and to call it out earlier” and who now unpersuasively argue that the criteria for this designation were only recently met.

Recent statements on famine in Gaza also suggest that Israel can path-correct and address this humanitarian crisis while obscuring how its official pronouncements and military actions reveal that the subjugation, displacement and destruction of the Palestinian people remain its guiding mission.

The discursive shift among Israel’s allies is taking place as Israel’s continuing and new policies show that Gaza’s starvation crisis is no accident but part of a plan for expulsion and resettlement. Israeli cabinet ministers and coalition parliamentarians are demanding permission from the Ministry of Defense to allow the extreme Right Nachala settler movement to scout locations for new construction in the devastated northern Gaza Strip. In southern Gaza, the aim — announced this July by Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz — is to turn the rubble of Rafah into a concentration camp and enact what Netanyahu termed Trump’s ​“voluntary migration plan” (and what Trump himself crudely calls ​“clean[ing] out” Gaza).

There is also considerable support in Israeli society for the most extreme measures. In late May, a Penn State poll reported that 47% of Israeli Jews answered affirmatively to the question: ​“Do you support the claim that the [Israeli army] in conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites did when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, ie to kill all its inhabitants?”

Even when U.S. politicians and pundits acknowledge Israel’s responsibility for mitigating the lethality of its own siege warfare, they do so in order to deny that death and suffering are the strategy, that famine is ultimately the policy — and has been from the start. In his October 9, 2023 order for a ​“complete siege” of Gaza, then-Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant explicitly declared, ​“there will be no electricity, no food, no fuel.” In August 2024, far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich suggested ​“it may be just and moral” for Israel to ​“starve and thirst two million citizens” in Gaza, while lamenting that ​“no one in the world would let us.”

Calling famine a humanitarian crisis here means refusing to recognize it as part of Israel’s genocidal policy — separating the bombed from the starving. It means ignoring that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation set up not an inefficient food distribution system, but deliberate ​“death traps,” and that this entire arrangement is part of an open design to ethnically cleanse and reoccupy the Gaza Strip.

The humanitarian framing also serves a crucial PR function that the Right likes to call ​“virtue signaling”: a gesture that one recognizes the horrifying effects of Israel’s war — the object of widespread and growing revulsion across the world — while still obscuring the underlying reasons for its brutality.

The equivocation in these belated recognitions of Gaza’s unlivable conditions is not just an indictment of the cynicism and bad faith of our political and media class; it also prejudices any future political response to the catastrophe itself.

A ​“humanitarian crisis” seems to demand better food distribution; confronting a policy of genocide would, at the very least, require the kind of concerted action recently proposed by the Hague Group: two-way arms embargos, economic sanctions, breaking diplomatic relations, action on international legal rulings against Israel and its political leaders. 

As United Nations special rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s multiple reports have shown, understanding the violence in Gaza as a case of genocide allows us to link mass civilian suffering with Israel’s declared intent, state policy, economic relations and military strategy. 

Conversely, the humanitarian frame — at least as wielded by mainstream politicians and pundits — is a tool for not thinking about any of this. 

Actions to stop — rather than just chide — Israel for its systematic violence against Palestinians are precisely what Israel’s stalwart defenders, newly concerned about famine, are trying to avoid. Just two weeks before their recent declarations on the starvation crisis, Booker and Klobuchar were among the bipartisan group of senators who stood behind Netanyahu for a group portrait in mid-July. Booker additionally posed with Gallant last December, only weeks after the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for him and Netanyahu, charging that each man bears ​“criminal responsibility” for ​“the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” And on July 30, Booker voted against Bernie Sanders’ Senate resolution to block weapons sales to Israel. (Klobuchar was among the 24 Democratic or independent senators who voted for it.)

Douthat’s New York Times op-ed tellingly begins with the declaration that ​“Israel’s war in Gaza is not a genocide,” and obligatory denunciations of the ​“potentially genocidal” Hamas, before acknowledging that Israel’s failed strategy is leading to an ​“unjust waste of life.” Likewise, the Free Press’s grudging, recent recognition of famine conditions in Gaza is hedged by its odious accusation that earlier reports of starvation amounted to ​“crying of wolf.”

It’s easy enough to understand why so many are rushing to distance themselves from the horrors Israel is perpetrating in Gaza. When famines begin, fatalities rise precipitously and continue to do so even after relief is made available. That also suggests that the death toll recorded by Gaza’s Health Ministry — widely acknowledged to be a severe undercount — will likely leap in the coming weeks and months.

But there’s a deeper function still to naming the mounting famine in Gaza as a humanitarian crisis and not as a facet of genocide: It allows Western powers to continue their unshakable alliance with Israel and their rejection of all serious efforts to hold it accountable. Refusing to admit that Israel has consistently used starvation as a method of warfare means that there will be no consequences for an obvious war crime. It even allows those Western allies to commend Israel for unblocking aid, as the Canadian Foreign Minister did this week.

As journalist Nesrine Malik observed, this is all part of a game played by Israel’s allies ​“to maintain, no matter the violation, the tenability of Israel as a moral player, while pretending that when it transgresses it will be scolded back into compliance.”

The bad faith efforts, including by Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, to relaunch a zombie ​“two-state solution” — while massacres continue unchecked and the Israeli Knesset announces further annexations of Palestinian land — is testament to this. So is French President Emmanuel Macron’s offer to recognize Palestinian statehood — on condition of its complete demilitarization—and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s vapid threat to do the same unless Israel calls a ceasefire. Likewise, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared this week that Canada will recognise Palestine’s statehood in September—while its weapons continue to flow to Israel.

All of these ignore the systematic nature of Israel’s obliteration of Gaza and its ethnic cleaning of the West Bank, while subordinating Palestinian self-determination to a principle of absolute security for Israel that is indistinguishable from total domination and unending impunity.

The urgency of the situation is so extreme that one can only hope these self-interested turnabouts will translate into some kind of relief from the most immediate crisis. But unless starvation in Gaza is understood as a necessary consequence of Israel’s policies — an instrument, not an accident — any action will turn into a cruel form of mitigation. Delivering subsistence rations to a besieged people that continues to be massacred with impunity, its society deliberately and systematically destroyed, is not justice. This is not a humanitarian catastrophe to be met with humanitarian solutions. It is a settler-colonial genocide that can only be stopped through concerted international action.