A grim and powerful act of protest has taken place in Gaza.
In the midst of the Israeli-US-imposed blockade on food and humanitarian aid – a policy that has already caused many Palestinians to die – a significant public figure has himself gone on hunger strike.
On Sunday, 20 July, Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza and long persecuted by the Israeli occupation for documenting conditions on the ground, announced a hunger strike.
“I am Mahmoud Basal, a Palestinian citizen, a free human being,” he declared. “For days now, I have been living on scraps of food, like more than two million citizens. Due to the lack of basic food in the Gaza Strip, I declare a full hunger strike in protest against the catastrophic famine striking Gaza, and in solidarity with more than two million people who have been left to face death by starvation amid shameful global silence.”
While Israel has long used food as a weapon – measuring out the bare minimum number of calories required to keep Gaza’s population on the brink of malnutrition – we are now witnessing the radical consequences of restrictions and blockades that have been normalised over decades.
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This strategy was infamously outlined in a 2008 Israeli position paper, Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip – Red Lines.
‘Unbearable loss’
Incremental yet relentless waves of dehumanising propaganda in western media and political discourse, reinforced by repeated Israeli assaults on Gaza that leave mass death and devastation in their wake, have brought us to the horrific present reality.
Now, Israeli forces target unarmed, starving people in search of food using snipers, artillery and drones – people who are then presented not as victims, but as trespassers on their own land.
Relentless propaganda and repeated Israeli assaults have brought us to this horrific present reality
On the same day Basal announced his hunger strike, poet and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Mosab Abu Toha – displaced from his destroyed home in Beit Lahia to Egypt and, eventually, the US – posted on X: “Today was a day of unbearable loss. My cousin was killed, my wife’s brother and another cousin were wounded, and many of my friends from the neighbourhood returned with amputated limbs. These were young men – sons, fathers – who had to set out, desperate to bring back even a little food for their families.”
While Israel foments further chaos in Syria and Lebanon to divert attention and consolidate territorial control – part of a meticulously planned attempt to fully dominate the region – British surgeon Nick Maynard has reported consistent patterns of gunshot injuries at newly established aid distribution sites.
Noting “clear patterns of injury”, Dr Maynard described victims – mainly teenage boys – as being deliberately targeted in different parts of the body, depending on the day.
“On one day they’ll all be abdominal gunshot wounds, on another they’ll all be head or neck gunshot wounds, on another they’ll be arm or leg gunshot wounds…It’s almost as if a game is being played, that they’re deciding to shoot the head today, the neck tomorrow, the testicles the day after,” he said.
Campus complicity
Meanwhile, in the US, the news cycle functions as a constant distraction – through contrived political scandals, economic chaos driven by the tariff mood of the day, or congressional hearings on “antisemitism” at US universities.
At these show trials, the university administrators summoned for questioning are themselves among the institutional actors who have hollowed out academia to its core.
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Research fields that develop the technical means to kill and control populations that resist, while manufacturing consent for those very policies, receive institutional priority due to corporate sponsorship.
Yet these same administrators stand accused of not doing enough to ban, silence, arrest, or otherwise suppress any expression of free speech on campus – so long as that speech supports Palestinian liberation or criticises US or Israeli policy.
All of this reinforces the false dichotomies of US institutional discourse – as if most, if not all, institutions were not aligned with the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy.
Like a deer in headlights, Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez of the City University of New York (CUNY) feigned ignorance under Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s relentless interrogation, repeatedly claiming he “wasn’t aware of” or “did not know about” this or that individual or event.
Yet even before the hearings, and in hopes of appeasing the insatiable bloodlust of genocide denial, Rodriguez had already offered up four contingent CUNY professors – the most precarious segment of academic labour – as sacrificial lambs, ensuring their dismissal without cause due to their involvement in Palestine-related activism.
How did we get here?
Fading empires
The famine in Yemen, a result of the US-supported Saudi intervention and blockade that began in 2016, was neither live-streamed nor regarded as a significant component of US foreign policy.
Thus, the steadfast support of Ansar Allah, Yemen’s armed Houthi movement, for Gaza and Palestine can be made to seem “irrational” – as though there were no link between past atrocities and present resistance.
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As global power shifts towards multipolarity, and new alliances form along emergent trade routes, the US and EU have entered a phase of panic familiar to fading empires.
The years leading up to the sudden outbreak of the coronavirus in 2020 were characterised by some of the most massive public displays of political protest across the globe since the 1960s.
From the Great March of Return in Gaza and the Algerian Hirak, to mass uprisings in Iraq, Lebanon’s 17 October popular uprising, the Yellow Vests in France, and demonstrations in Catalonia, Chile, Hong Kong and beyond, the world seemed on fire.
But those determined to maintain power were often more attuned to the global resonances between these movements than many of the participants themselves.
New feudal order
As with the post-9/11 moment, the policies enacted in response to the pandemic reshaped societies almost overnight: restricting basic human rituals, from funerals to visiting the sick and elderly, while enabling massive wealth transfers.
People were taught to fear one another – to fear contact, proximity and community. New digital powers and the complete relativising of the principles of free speech and unrestrained movement transformed societies almost overnight.
Changes in civil liberties, economies, supply chains, trade routes – and almost every aspect of life – seemed to bring the future, so to speak, back to the past.
There is no justification for starving and killing Palestinians in Gaza – and claiming it can’t be stopped is a lie of the highest magnitude
That past is also the Cold War past that liberal democracies and a fading US empire continue to cling to, propped up by the perpetual manufacture of existential enemies.
In 1944, anthropologist Gregory Bateson – then working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to the CIA – remarked: “It is very important to sponsor spectatorship among the superiors and exhibitionism among the inferiors.”
Historically denied the means to defend themselves by far more powerful states, the present anguish of unarmed Palestinians searching for food to survive yet another day – in a world that has betrayed them on every front – is a harbinger to all rational people with eyes to see, ears to hear, and minds to think, as we enter a new feudal order.
There is no justification whatsoever for the forced starvation and wanton killing of Palestinians in Gaza, now or ever. And the idea that mechanisms to stop it are unavailable or do not exist is a lie of the highest magnitude.
The day after Basal’s declaration, a young Egyptian activist at the Hague chained shut the Egyptian embassy gates, scattered flour across the pavement, and smashed eggs against the entrance in protest. In that moment of small, defiant spectacle, a whole edifice of lies appeared to fall apart.
The only conclusion we can draw is that we are witnessing a deliberate effort to showcase the impunity of power, an effort designed to annihilate the very possibility of political reciprocity, justice and law.
This monstrosity must be defeated, at any cost – and everything must be remembered, in fine detail, to hold those responsible to account.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
