During the height of a famine in British-ruled India that killed nearly ten million people, Lord Lytton, the viceroy of India at the time, decided to have a feast. He spared no cost–it was the most expensive meal in world history at that point, and it is estimated that 100,000 Indians died of starvation during the meal alone.
Far from an isolated incident, the Great Famine of 1876-78 was emblematic of British colonial policy–from its causes to its results in episodes of mass death the world over. In India, economic and environmental restructuring under the British brought an emphasis on “cash crops,” which ultimately helped set the stage for famine. So too did the British obsession with racist Malthusianism, an ideology that regarded mass death events as a “natural” mechanism, even when actively fostered by government policies.
Indeed, only a few decades before this sociopathic feast, over one million people–an estimated one fifth of the population–died of famine in Ireland, a period referred to as the Great Hunger. Far from a natural disaster, the Great Hunger was orchestrated by the British at all levels–from policies which dispossessed Irish peasants from their lands and restructured the Irish economy to serve British needs, to a callous and calculated refusal to provide aid. As the Irish endured a brutal process of starvation, the British government threw up their hands, citing economic concerns. Private enterprise, they said, was the only answer. What aid was available would be available only to those who gave up their land, which would conveniently serve their economic restructuring goals. As in India, the British government openly ascribed to Malthus’s fascistic credo that “to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a greater part of the people should be swept from the soil.”
Famine has arrived by the steady hands of a colonizing power.
In Gaza today, according to the World Food Programme, 2.2 million people are under siege and facing food insecurity. Over 500,000 of them are facing not insecurity but starvation. Four out of five of the world’s hungriest people are now in Gaza. This catastrophic situation exists on top of shortages of water, health care and medicines, reproductive care, anesthesia, and other essentials. And all of this is to say nothing of the continued bombardment Palestinians face from land, sea, and sky, as the zionist army drops 2000 lb. “dumb” bombs on homes, schools, hospitals, stores, universities, mosques, churches, and historical sites, or of the reports of mass executions by occupation forces. Together, the siege and bombardment form a horrific feedback loop of genocide.
Like in Ireland in 1845, India in 1876, and countless other horrific instances in the history of colonial rule, the cause of the current famine in Gaza is not a lack of food, nor is it a lack of potential life-saving aid. Rather, as in centuries past, famine has arrived by the steady hands of a colonizing power (in this case two such powers). These states have nurtured the conditions for its rise, blocked international organizations from any and all prevention efforts, and, in the moment the warnings were loudest, acted to block the meager aid that could’ve lessened it.
The aforementioned states are, of course, “Israel” and the “United States”, in scare quotes for good reason. Both violent nationalist projects forged in genocide and ethnic cleansing, they share not only a relationship to British colonialism, but a history of splitting with the British over a desire to steal more Indigenous land faster. A special relationship indeed.
The Zionist War Against UNRWA
On January 26th, the International Court of Justice–a judicial organ of the United Nations established in the post World War II era–announced that it would be investigating Israel for the crime of genocide. In doing so, the international panel of judges decided that the claims made by South Africa–in a harrowing and painstakingly compiled eighty-four page document–were plausible, despite the case being described by many Western, former colonizing countries as “baseless” and “meritless”. While the decision lacked a call for a ceasefire or any specific metrics that the zionist state had to meet in accordance with provisional measures, it was a damning announcement, the first real crack in the wall of impunity that the zionist entity has enjoyed since even before the 1948 Nakba.
The Western media machine was quick to begin spinning the verdict, having decades of practice in contorting language and events beyond recognition to excuse zionism and invalidate its critics. Headlines emphasized that the ICJ didn’t call for a ceasefire, saying nothing of the fact that the ICJ called for the zionists to “take all measures in its power to prevent . . . killing members of the group” (i.e. Palestinians), a demand which cannot be met without stopping the bombs.
Yet less than a day after the ICJ’s decision, something else began to dominate Western news outlets. The zionist state, the media began reporting, was accusing UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency), the United Nations organization responsible for aid and relief efforts in Palestine, among many other functions, of having played a role in the October 7th attack by the Palestinian resistance. This accusation is not surprising, both given that the leaders of the zionist state have taken to accusing every single person or organization that critiques them of being part of Hamas, and that these thinly-veiled lies continue to be reported without evidence by sycophantic US media like the New York Times that have given up on even gesturing toward investigative rigor.
UNRWA’s very existence upsets the forced amnesia policy of the zionist colonial regime.
In truth, something else was happening here. As soon as the accusation was made, UNRWA took the immediate step of firing the majority of those accused and launching an investigation. But the barrage kept coming. As of this writing, the US, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Austria, Switzerland, Romania, Estonia, and Finland have all pulled their funding for UNRWA. The momentum for defunding UNRWA continues, despite the organization immediately taking the specious and highly politicized claims of the zionist state with urgency and seriousness.
Why? The zionist state has long been looking for opportunities to go after UNRWA, for reasons deeply entwined in the settler-colonial project. Established in the aftermath of the 1948 Nakba, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee their homes due to the terrorism of zionist militias, the organization’s very existence upsets the forced amnesia policy of the colonial regime. Similar to white settlers on Turtle Island, the zionist movement sought to colonize land while also erasing the memory that such violence had ever taken place, thus normalizing the existence of the new state.
The quest to scrub the inconvenient story of the zionist state’s founding from memory isn’t even hidden–indeed, it is repeated without reflection in places like the Times, which admitted in a Jan 28 article that, “For Israel . . . [UNRWA] and its advocacy are an obstacle to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” The article goes on to explain that “Many Palestinians want the refugees to return to their former homes in what is now Israel,” but “Israel fears such a migration would undermine Israel’s Jewish character. Israelis say that UNRWA’s existence separate from the wider U.N. refugee protection system prevents them from properly setting down roots elsewhere in the Middle East.” In other words, supporting Palestinian refugees as such is an obstacle to them “moving on” from ethnic cleansing, and a roadblock in the way of Palestinians giving up on returning to their lands.
Endorsement of Famine
The monstrousness of defunding UNRWA, especially at this moment, cannot be overstated. The ICJ had just ruled that aid needed to reach Palestinians, and that the failure to do so could well be interpreted by the court as genocide. And less than a day later, the primary organ responsible for getting aid to an already starving population was the target of a massive onslaught of political attacks.
UNRWA is the primary humanitarian agency in Gaza, with over 2 million people depending on it for their sheer survival.
The leadership of UNRWA and other UN agencies, rightfully, seemed as shocked by this move as the public. In a statement, Philippe Lazzarini, the UNRWA commissioner general, wrote:
It is shocking to see a suspension of funds to the Agency in reaction to allegations against a small group of staff, especially given the immediate action that UNRWA took by terminating their contracts and asking for a transparent independent investigation. The United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), the highest investigative authority in the UN system, has already been seized of this very serious matter.
UNRWA is the primary humanitarian agency in Gaza, with over 2 million people depending on it for their sheer survival. Many are hungry as the clock is ticking towards a looming famine. The Agency runs shelters for over 1 million people and provides food and primary healthcare even at the height of the hostilities.
Indeed, given the conditions in Gaza at present, the West seemed to be staking out a position that boils down to an endorsement of famine. In a profound and cruel historical irony, the very Western countries responsible for founding the UN and the international laws it exists to uphold, revealed explicitly what many in the formerly colonized world had always known: such rules and laws only matter when they align with the interests of the West. The crimes against humanity unfolding in Gaza serve the zionist state and its imperial backer, so they mustn’t be interrupted by the UN. In moving to defund UNRWA, all of the Biden administration’s vacuous rhetoric about concern for civilians, disingenuous as it always was, just fell away. There is no “international law.” There is no mask.
The Fallen Mask
Those in the United States hoping to make some kind of moral case for Biden in 2024 have, unfortunately for them, been served an unimaginably futile task. The “moral” and “decent” man that they wish to advertise to voters is not only committed to a genocidal military operation, but now a manufactured famine as well. The Democratic Party will certainly try, and they have plenty of experience with fear-mongering during elections. Yet the mask of so-called Western values lies tattered on the ground. Or rather: the clarity with which the West has reasserted its true values over the past four months, threatens far more than an election cycle.
Where colonialism begins, life ends. Colonialism must end so we can live.
Like the Irish, Indians, and other colonized peoples in the 1840’s, the ‘1870s, the 1500’s or the 1600’s, we live in a brutal age in which a few wealth-hoarding states have laid siege to the whole Earth and everyone living on it for their own benefit. Centuries of history live and continue to play out not as analogy, but as the fully embodied present. We are witnessing that which they have never allowed to become past: genocide, famine, ethnic cleansing. Shrapnel in a child’s skin. The burning down of olive trees. The masses of hungry Palestinians swarming aid trucks for food. In each moment of brutality, we replay the last five centuries again and again and again.
The falling of the mask leaves a barbaric face newly visible for many. This is an important step. If we don’t look the death machine in its face, if we don’t recognize its sociopathy, its genocidal rage and its true ambitions, we will never out-organize it. The US is not a democracy, nor has it ever acted out of anything other than the self-interest of its ruling class. As Audre Lorde put it,
We are citizens of the most powerful country on earth—we are also citizens of a country upon the wrong side of every liberation struggle on earth. Feel what that means. It is a reality that haunts each of our lives and that can help inform our dreams. It’s not about altruism, it’s about self-preservation. Survival.
As we look terror in the face, we would do well to think of the people of Yemen, marching in their millions in Sana’a after the latest round of US bombs fell on their city. “We don’t care, we don’t care, we don’t care, make it a world war,” they chanted. Not afraid, not “deterred.” Full of solidarity, clarity, and fire.
Whether we understand it through manufactured famines in Ireland, in India, or Algeria, genocides in North and South America, Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, and New Zealand, or today in Gaza and larger Palestine, the message is the same: Where colonialism begins, life ends. Colonialism must end so we can live.
We must build movements that rise up to stop such callous feasts and famines and the systems which create them.
These are dark times, times of mass death, despair, and festering cowardice. We in the West have immense privilege, yet we must also grapple with our unique isolation, lack of resistance infrastructure, and the muscle memory of setting aside atrocities during an election cycle in the hopes that substantive change will come at the ballot box. No such saviors are coming.
We must learn to nourish ourselves on built solidarity rather than on the promises of liars. We must build movements that understand that we live in the imperial core, where the Lord Lyttons are planning their feasts. We must build movements that rise up to stop such callous feasts and famines and the systems which create them. This is no easy task, but we may find that doing it undermines our isolation, deepens our bonds with each other and other living beings, and enriches our lives in innumerable and unexpected ways. We may find that doing this is the only way to learn how to build worlds by means other than brutality and destruction.
