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The blueprint for Gaza’s starvation was laid in the 1993 Oslo Accords and operationalized in 2007, when Israel calculated the minimum number of calories needed to keep Palestinians in Gaza alive. That slow violence has now reached its lethal apex.
In 2012, Gisha, an Israeli human rights organization, won a legal battle forcing the Israeli government to release documents revealing that it had calculated calorie intake for Gaza’s population. The goal was to engineer a crisis just short of famine. And it worked. By 2021, the World Health Organization found that nearly 90% of Gaza’s preschoolers were consuming less than 75% of their daily caloric requirements.
Back in 2005, Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) signed an agreement intended to ensure the flow of goods and people between Gaza and the West Bank. But instead of improving access, the policy became a tool of restriction. Before 2006, 400 trucks entered Gaza daily. Israel then imposed a limit of 107 trucks, and by 2007, only 67 trucks per day were actually allowed in.
The manufactured scarcity forced Palestinians to dig tunnels underground to smuggle in food and essential supplies. In 2012, The Guardian reported on a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable quoting Israeli officials who described their objective: to “keep Gaza’s economy on the brink of collapse.” Gisha called the policy what it was: economic warfare.
What’s unfolding in Gaza today is the result of a strategy decades in the making. The Oslo Accords appeared to offer Palestinian self-rule but, in reality, denied any true sovereignty. Israel maintained full control over borders, security, and the movement of people and goods, while delegating limited responsibilities—like health and education—to the PA. What seemed like a step toward statehood instead institutionalized forced dependency. As the late Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said put it, Oslo was “an instrument of Palestinian surrender—a Palestinian Versailles.”
Starvation is the final phase of Oslo.
For years, Gaza’s starvation was engineered quietly—camouflaged behind border policy, calorie math, and diplomatic doublespeak. But hunger at its peak is harder to justify than bombs. Even the institutions once trusted to manage the narrative are starting to shift.
Ross Douthat, a columnist for The New York Times, published a piece on July 26, 2025, titled “How Israel’s War Became Unjust.” This admission is particularly notable given the Times’ long-standing role in amplifying Israeli military narratives—a pattern thoroughly documented by the activist collective Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG).
Even so, on July 30, 2025, the Times updated an earlier front-page story under pressure from pro-Israel groups. The piece had shown a haunting image of Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a starving child in Gaza. The correction read: “Had the Times known the information before publication, it would have been included in the article and the picture caption.”
At face value, it’s a standard correction. But in practice, it functions as narrative damage control to cast doubt on the visual evidence of starvation. By adding ambiguity the correction served to blunt the emotional and political impact of the Times’ own reporting.
This fits a long-standing pattern. For decades, the Times has repeatedly framed Israeli violence as security, while treating Palestinian suffering as either self-inflicted or incidental. It amplifies the Israeli military’s talking points, dilutes Palestinian testimony with qualifiers, and routinely fails to name the occupation as a root cause.
So why, after months of justification and denial, has the Western press—especially the Times—begun to acknowledge the scale of atrocity in Gaza?
Because starvation resists spin in ways bombs do not.
Mass casualties can be reframed as “collateral damage.” But starvation speaks a deeper, more primal language. It exposes horror that cannot be softened by euphemism or hidden behind military jargon. It leaves behind emaciated bodies and hollow eyes—images that no narrative of necessity can justify. At some point, the brutality becomes so undeniable, so unspinnable, that even the monster flinches at its own reflection.
But not always.
While the American Jewish Committee feigned condemnation of Rep. Randy Fine’s (R-Fla.) genocidal incitements, the New York Post dug in. Meanwhile, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) became the first Republican to explicitly call Israel’s assault on Gaza a genocide. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) has also broken ranks, consistently opposing U.S. military funding to Israel.
The images that finally forced even reluctant Western media and political elites to confront Gaza’s reality were never ambiguous to legal scholars. For years, they’ve argued that starvation is not collateral damage but a deliberate weapon of war that demands its own category of prosecution.
Tom Dannenbaum, a legal scholar, in his 2021 article “Siege Starvation: A War Crime of Societal Torture,” argues that siege starvation must be treated as a distinct war crime—not merely a form of inhumane treatment, but a method of torture at the societal level.
To bomb people—to sever limbs, level large swaths of infrastructure, or extinguish entire bloodlines—is one kind of horror. But to starve a mother until her breasts run dry, and then shoot her as she walks toward aid, is another. It is an assault not only on her body, but on her capacity to mother, to love, to decide, to hope.
Dannenbaum warns that starvation is uniquely insidious because it does not only destroy the individual—it unravels the social bonds that hold a people together. It targets not just “political commitments, but also at the human capacity for friendship and love.” Writing for Just Security, Dannenbaum, and Alex de Waal who is the foremost expert on famine, deepen this point: “Human existence is based upon sharing food. The etymology of the word ‘companion’—someone with whom one shares bread—is just one indicator of how deep this goes. When people can no longer share bread but must instead fight one another for scraps, human society is severely impacted in its ability to function. This is what we see unfolding in Gaza today.”
This is what Israel’s starvation of Palestinians aims to break: the human capacity to hope, to care, to endure.
This is why he calls siege starvation “a crime of societal torture”: because it is designed to dismantle human agency and break political will.
Starvation is already illegal, prosecutable as a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and—when used with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group”—prosecutable as genocide under the Genocide Convention. The law is clear; what’s missing is prosecuting siege starvation.
At Nuremberg, prosecutors presented compelling evidence of how the Nazis used starvation as a weapon of war. Defendants were convicted under charges like “crimes against humanity” or “extermination.” However, the courts didn’t call the starvation of civilians during the siege of Leningrad illegal, only abhorrent. Why? Because the Allied powers had also used siege starvation during the war. Prosecuting it would have meant putting themselves on trial too. Prosecutors cited Lieber Code (Art. 17), drafted for the Union Army during the American Civil War, as permitting the use of starvation to hasten military victory.
In other words, the legal precedent for ignoring siege starvation came from the United States.
As de Waal notes, in his article “Nazis used it, We use it,” the Allies’ own tactics included Britain’s blockade of Germany in World War I, which killed an estimated 750,000 civilians, and the U.S. Air Force’s 1945 “Operation Starvation,” which mined Japanese harbors, killing civilians as well as soldiers.
So why does it matter if siege starvation has its own category of prosecution? As Dannenbaum explains, when it’s folded into other charges, the most devastating part of the harm—the dismantling of a community’s ability to live and function together—vanishes from view. It slips into the background of “military strategy” or “counterterrorism,” protected by the political power of those who use it. This silence masks the crime, allowing siege starvation to persist not only as a weapon of war, but as a long-term strategy of domination.
History, tragically, has seen starvation as a tactic of domination before.
To fully grasp the gravity of siege starvation, we have to place it within the broader historical and legal arc. Legal scholars like Dannenbaum aren’t alone in urging us to recognize starvation as a distinct crime and prosecute it as such. De Waal also echoes this view. He also notes that modern starvation is almost never due to weather—it’s political.
Yet, as de Waal notes, modern genocide scholars have largely neglected starvation in their analyses—although Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide,” studied such tactics in great detail. Lemkin focused specifically on what he called “racial discrimination in feeding,” citing Nazi policies that rationed food based on ethnicity: 100% of carbohydrates for Germans and only 27% for Jews. He also documented how the Nazis intensified suffering through overcrowding, denial of medicine, and calculated neglect. Starvation was not a byproduct of war—it was policy.
These mechanisms are chillingly mirrored in Gaza today. Israel has imposed the longest siege in modern history, enclosing over 2 million Palestinians within a narrow strip of land, restricting access to food, water, fuel, and medical supplies. Palestinians have been herded into ever-tighter spaces as bombs fall around them. The conditions are not dissimilar from those Lemkin once described.
What’s different with Gaza is not the tactic—it’s the visibility. This time, the evidence isn’t buried in archives. It is live-streamed. And yet, even in the face of such clarity, much of the West continues to equivocate.
What happens when a tactic left unprosecuted becomes a tactic perfected? The absence of legal accountability has allowed the practice of siege starvation to evolve—methodically, devastatingly—into a centerpiece of modern warfare. And nowhere is that clearer than Gaza.
In an interview with DemocracyNow! on July 21, 2025, de Waal offered a chilling assessment: “I’ve been working on this field of famine, food crisis, and humanitarian action for more than 40 years, and there is no case, over those four decades, of such minutely engineered, closely monitored, precisely designed mass starvation of a population as is happening in Gaza today.”
He elaborated further in a separate conversation with Michael Young, senior editor of Diwan, emphasizing that what sets Gaza apart is not only the precision of its deprivation but its reversibility: “The starvation of Gaza is unique, however, in that the situation can be remedied overnight if Israel chooses to do so.” He added, “If Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were to decide that every child in Gaza should have breakfast tomorrow, it could be done.”
Put plainly: Israel’s starvation of Gaza is strategic.
The punishment of Gaza is a message to the world: If you fight for freedom, you will be starved and erased.
However, the effects of starvation in Gaza—biological, psychological, and generational—began decades before the headlines reached Western front pages. In July 2025, NPR reported growing concern about how starvation may shape future Palestinian generations—not just through deprivation, but through genetic alteration. Professor Marko Kerac of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine warned: “It’s a lifelong thing. It’s even across generations.”
A February 2025 study on genetic changes in Syrians who endured siege violence offers insight into the intergenerational harms and lasting effects of such conditions. In 1982, the Syrian regime besieged the city of Hama, killing tens of thousands. Decades later, scientists studying descendants of women pregnant during the siege discovered lasting genetic imprints of that trauma—even in grandchildren who never experienced it directly. The Hama siege lasted less than a month. Gaza has been besieged for nearly two decades. If a siege lasting less than a month left genetic scars across generations, what then of Gaza?
In truth, Palestinian children and adults in Gaza have faced long-term nutritional deprivation for decades. Between 2000 and 2010, stunting rates—a clinical sign of chronic malnutrition starting in the womb—rose from 7.5% to over 10%. (By 2007, Israel had already implemented a policy of putting Palestinians “on a diet.”) By 2010, Gaza’s stunting rate had climbed to 13%, compared with just 8% in the West Bank. A 2018 public health study revealed that 1 in 5 children in Gaza were stunted by age two—double the national average just years earlier. By 2013, 85% of Gaza’s population was food insecure.
UNICEF and public health experts have consistently identified the political and economic blockade as the driving cause.
However, one doesn’t need charts or spreadsheets to recognize the toll of calorie restriction. As Dr. Ahmad Yousaf, an American physician volunteering in Gaza, put it at a press conference on July 31, 2025: “It doesn’t take a doctor to recognize the signs of starvation—and the starvation didn’t start this week. It takes months of deprivation for a body to show temporal wasting, for cachexia to set in, for every single rib to become visible. You don’t need a medical degree to understand what these people have been through. I stand in front of news crews, I stand on the streets, and every person I see looks malnourished. In the hospitals we work at in Arkansas, we would diagnose every single one of them with severe protein malnutrition.”
To fully grasp the cruelty of this strategy, we must zoom out. In 2004, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon—widely condemned for his role in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre—announced Israel’s “disengagement” from Gaza. His chief of staff, Dov Weisglass, described the real intent: “The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
After Hamas’ 2006 election victory, siege logic became more brutal. That March, amid growing food scarcity, Weisglass said: “It’s like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won’t die.”
Fast forward to 2025: up to 20% of Gaza’s population has been annihilated. And those who remain face not just airstrikes, but the slow violence of state-engineered starvation.
Palestinian reporter Anas al-Sharif, speaking from Gaza, warns of mass hunger he witnesses daily. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), roughly 470,000 people in Gaza are now in Phase 5—classified as “catastrophe”—the most critical and dangerous stage of food insecurity, often irreversible if food becomes available later.
Having reduced the body to hunger, siege warfare turns next to the spirit.
What’s at stake in Gaza is more than politics, sovereignty, or borders. To raise a family under siege while both parent and child are hungry; to remember your history, to share food with your neighbor when survival would suggest turning inward—this is love as resistance.
This is what Israel’s starvation of Palestinians aims to break: the human capacity to hope, to care, to endure. Israel seeks to reduce every person to a creature of need, unable to give or choose, to have aspirations for freedom.
This is the logic of what scholars call “social death”—the deliberate collapse of social fabric and human interdependence. Starvation, then, is not just biological warfare. It is the violent unraveling of community. As the late philosopher Claudia Card argued, “Groups themselves have a collective ‘life,’ and that ‘life’ can ‘die.’”
In Gaza, starvation is a strategy of erasure that has become a spectacle—watched by a world that rarely intervenes.
While Western governments and legacy media have downplayed—or deliberately obscured—the genocide and mass starvation unfolding in Gaza, much of Israeli society displays little ambiguity about its intent. Some religious figures have gone so far as to demand that every child in Gaza be denied food. For those with the stomach to confront this depravity, the human rights organization Al-Haq has catalogued a damning archive of genocidal statements by Israeli officials and public figures.
Meanwhile, according to a late July poll, 79% of Israeli Jews said they were “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by reports of famine and mass suffering among Palestinians in Gaza. Crowds gather on hilltops to watch the bombing of Gaza—“the best show in town.” As they barbecue, they gleefully watch with binoculars Gaza’s theater of suffering.
The image of brown, emaciated bodies has long been a familiar spectacle in the Western imagination: A conquest. The unspoken echo of a modern-day crusade.
To be clear, not all in the West share this worldview. Public opinion, especially among younger generations and marginalized communities in the U.S., has shifted. And yet, a deeper cultural conditioning remains—one that renders Palestinian suffering invisible. At best, it is seen as regrettable collateral. At worst, it is framed as punishment.
What sets this moment apart is the unapologetic display of horror. The Nazis, at the height of their crimes, still tried to hide the evidence. Israel does not bother. It carries out genocide in full view—as if daring the world to intervene. The world, instead, averts its gaze.
What we’re witnessing in Gaza today is the culmination of Oslo's final form. It’s now time to lay the corpse of the two-state solution beside the corpse of Oslo. Anyone still invoking that phrase is either deluding themselves or seeking to erase Palestine forever.
This is not only a political failure; it is a moral one. At its core, Israel is at war with the very idea of humanity—with the possibility of justice, dignity, and moral order in a world governed by power.
There are only two mechanisms capable of halting this genocide. If Washington told Israel to stop, it would. American financial, military, and diplomatic support is the lifeblood of this genocide. But the U.S. will not act until it’s too late—because this violence reflects its own imperial posture: Israel is the West’s avatar—a lonely democracy fighting barbarism. Zion becomes Christendom’s vanguard. Gaza becomes a proving ground for empire.
Short of a miracle, resistance from the Arab and Muslim world is no more promising. They are fractured, subdued, or complicit.They issue statements, but take no actions that carry real cost.
Which brings us to the truth. The punishment of Gaza is a message to the world: If you fight for freedom, you will be starved and erased. And no one will come for you, your children, or your city. Gaza shows us those who love too deeply, resist too firmly, and care too radically are most at risk of being erased.
Some of us have surrendered our claim to a moral existence. We cling to the illusion that if we are quiet enough and careful enough, we will be spared.
Yet, others stubbornly persist, the best they can, because the cries of the helpless leave no choice. As a blind 79-year-old Palestinian man implored: “All my children have died... and this Nakba is harder than the Nakba of 1948. First God... then you. We need someone to stand with us.”
This extended window of opportunity gives Palestinian civil society at home and in exile, along with their allies, necessary time to reassert and gain support for their demands.
At the United Nations 77th Commemoration of the Nakba convened May 15 and 16 in New York, nothing was said about the upcoming Two-State Solution Conference planned at the U.N. from June 17-20, until, at the very end of the event, Riyad Mansour, the beleaguered permanent representative of the Permanent Observer Mission of the State of Palestine lifted the shroud of avoidance by expressing support for the conference based on the framework laid out in France and Saudi Arabia's Two-State Solution Concept Note, intended to define the outcome of the conference. Nick Mottern, of the Weaponized Drone Ban Treaty Campaign, hearing his response, expressed apprehension that France and Saudi Arabia, the conveners of the conference, along with the Palestine Authority, were setting the Palestinian people up for "an ambush."
Also concerned that the Two-State Solution Conference would result in further concessions by the Fatah Party-led Palestinian leadership, 43 Palestinian civil society organizations issued a "Unified Call to Action" on June 13 demanding that the conference focus on 77 years of international law pertaining to the status and borders of Palestine, rather than a vague gathering at which the State of Palestine would not be even recognized.
Given the disastrous outcome of the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995, after which nearly half a million settlers flooded into the West Bank and East Jerusalem, there is trepidation that the Palestine Authority will walk away from the negotiations hoodwinked and empty-handed, with no resolution pertaining to the status of Jerusalem, right of return of refugees, or progress made in the payment of reparations as provided for by U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) Resolutions 181 (1947) and 194 (1948).
Moreover, what should be discerned is the viability of a Two-State Solution, given that Israel's settler colonial enterprise has rendered that possibility dead in the water.
On June 12, ahead of the conference planned for June 17-20—now postponed following Israel's unprovoked military attack on Iran—the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy in Ramallah issued the clarion call reaffirming demands for a just and lawful resolution grounded in the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people. French President Emmanuel Macron said that the conference was postponed due to the inability of the Palestinian Authority and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to travel given the military escalation in the region. This extended window of opportunity gives Palestinian civil society at home and in exile, along with their allies, necessary time to reassert and gain support for their demands.
According to the Unified Call to Action:
The upcoming conference could serve as a turning point—but only if it is re-centered on its legal foundation: U.N. General Assembly Resolution ES-10/24, built on decades of existing international law obligations. This resolution welcomed the July 2024 International Court of Justice (ICJ) Advisory Opinion, which called on Israel to comply with international law, including ending its unlawful occupation, realizing the Palestinian people's rights to self-determination and return, and requiring third states to adopt concrete sanctions and accountability measures to uphold international law.
The Unified Call to Action implores all states, institution, and actors engaging with the Two-State Solution Conference to ground all solutions in the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.
Within this context, the language of France and Saudi Arabia's Concept Note falls short in meeting Palestinian civil society demands. It refers to the conference as geared to implement "the" Two-State Solution, while actually framing negotiations as "a" Two-State Solution. This represents an unauthorized manipulation and flouting of international law pertaining to the established borders of the Occupied Palestinian Territories including East Jerusalem as enshrined in U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 (1967), 338 (1973), and 2334 (2016).
Moreover, what should be discerned is the viability of a Two-State Solution, given that Israel's settler colonial enterprise has rendered that possibility dead in the water. Israel has usurped more than 80% of the historic land of Palestine; 21% of Israel is Palestinian; and thorny issues and U.N. Resolutions pertaining to the status of Jerusalem, the right of return of refugees, and reparations remain flouted by Israel and unaddressed for 77 years. In accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whether a two-state, one-state, or other configuration, the government(s) of the land between the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea must provide for the full human rights and dignity of all.
Further, the Concept Note is flawed pertaining to implementation, putting the onus of the conference's success or failure equally on the Palestinian Authority and Israel, where it states: "It is clear that the primary responsibility for solving the conflict lies with the parties." It continues, "The events of the last few years prove that without strong international resolve and involvement in ensuring they move towards the internationally recognized endgame, the conflict will escalate further and peace will be more elusive than ever." (Note: the words "conflict" and "endgame" are inappropriate in this context.) To state that the primary responsibility for solving the conflict lies with the parties, is to equate a battered woman as having the same power and agency as her brutal husband and his gang of weaponized thugs. If there is no peace in the home, she cannot be held responsible for that.
What is needed now, according to the Palestinian civil society organizations, is to "demand that the UNGA suspend Israel's membership for violating its membership conditions, including non-compliance with Resolution 194" of 1948. Israel is in flagrant violation of hundreds of U.N. General Assembly, Security Council, and Human Rights Council Resolutions, and the time has come for the GA to "support the mandate of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel, including by pressuring Israel to grant access to Palestine for independent investigations."
As stated in the demands of the Unified Call to Action, the conference should be based on UNGA Res. ES-10/23 of May 2024 pertaining to International Court of Justice advisory rulings, and UNGA Res. ES-10/24 of September 2024 calling for Israel to, within 12 months, completely withdraw its occupying forces from the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Res. ES-10/24 also opens the door for the possible invocation of Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter against Israel, which could lead to sanctions, suspension from the U.N., the creation of a U.N. peacekeeping mission to protect the Palestinians and ensure the flow of humanitarian aid, etc.
Furthermore, France and Saudi Arabia's Concept Note does not reference the genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, crimes against humanity, starvation, etc. being suffered by the Palestinian people. It uses only generalized language such as, on Page 2: "Since the initial moments of the current wave of violence..." Also, on Page 2, Egypt and Qatar, along with the United States, are erroneously credited with having "a major role in negotiating a cease-fire in Gaza." Yet, on June 4, the U.S. used its veto power at the U.N. Security Council to block, for the fifth time, a resolution calling for a cease-fire.
At an emergency session of the U.N. General Assembly on June 12th, a resolution demanding an immediate, unconditional, and lasting cease-fire in Gaza was overwhelmingly adopted. Only 12 countries including the U.S. voted against it. Moreover, the few cease-fires that have occurred ended when the release of the designated number of hostages was secured. On June 11th, President Donald Trump slammed the Two-State Solution Conference warning of consequences for countries "that take anti-Israel actions."
Most concerning is that the conference does not set out to address the dire need to stop the imminent perishing by starvation of 2 million Gazans, nor the ongoing forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of the people of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In addition, it could potentially generate new U.N. resolutions that shrink Palestine's internationally recognized borders, effectively negating and overriding Security Council Res. 242 (1967) and 338 (1973) borders as well as General Assembly Res. 181 (1947) and 194 (1948) establishing Jerusalem as an international city and enshrining the Palestinian right of return and compensation.
In its press release of May 27, 2025, UNICEF addressed the elephant in the room:
Since the end of the cease-fire on 18 March, 1,309 children have reportedly been killed and 3,738 injured. In total, more than 50,000 children have reportedly been killed or injured since October 2023. How many more dead girls and boys will it take? What level of horror must be livestreamed before the international community fully steps up, uses its influence, and takes bold, decisive action to force the end of this ruthless killing of children?
In the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha on X, "Only an international military intervention should stop this mass killing of starved people."
According to Leo Gabriel of the World Social Forum and representative of the Global Solidarity for Peace in Palestine Coalition, "What is needed now is for the U.N. Security Council to invoke Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter to send an emergency Blue Helmets peacekeeping mission to Gaza, as it has done in other parts of the world 72 times since 1948. As the Security Council will be deadlocked by the U.S. veto, it is incumbent upon the General Assembly to invoke GA Resolution 377, also known as the 'Uniting for Peace' option, to establish peace in in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and stop the genocide in Gaza." (The Uniting for Peace option was used by the General Assembly with the deployment of peacekeeping forces to the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip to end the1956 Suez Canal crisis.) "Stopping the imminent starvation to death of 2 million besieged Gazans by operationalizing 'Uniting for Peace' is the last gasp of life and hope in the utility of the U.N. to fulfill its mission," he added.
In addition to foundational problems with the U.N. Two-State Solution Conference, now touted as the "International Conference on the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine," France and Saudi Arabia have been criticized as lacking the credentials to convene the high-level negotiations. Saudi Arabia is well-known for its abysmal human rights record, decimating Yemen militarily and bringing it to the brink of famine, and violent suppression of dissent such as the assassination and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. France, with its extensive legacy as a colonial and neocolonial power, is not an impartial arbiter. It has not recognized Palestine as a state, has implemented sweeping bans on pro-Palestinian protests, sells weapons to Israel, and continuously enables the delivery of military equipment to Israel by air and by sea.
Given the circumstances, postponement of the so-called U.N. Two-State Conference may be best, certainly in the eyes of Palestinian civil society.
Attempts to develop independent Palestinian economic growth through the Builders for Peace program 30 years ago were derailed by Israeli restrictions.
When I first heard President Donald Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” scheme, it brought back memories of the hopes Palestinians had three decades ago during the heyday of the Oslo Accords. Back then, I was serving as co-chair of “Builders for Peace,” a project launched by then-Vice President Al Gore to encourage American businesses to invest in the Palestinian economy to support the fledgling peace process.
We had prepared for our mission by reading the exhaustive World Bank study on the pre-Oslo Palestinian economy. The observations and conclusions were sobering, and yet hopeful. It noted obstacles that stifled the development of a Palestinian economy—problems like: Israel’s control of Palestinian land, resources, and power; its refusal to allow Palestinians to independently import and export; and the impediments Israel had created to Palestinian travel and even to conducting commerce within the occupied lands. The bank, however, concluded that if these Israeli restrictions on Palestinian entrepreneurs were removed, external investment would provide opportunities for rapid growth and prosperity.
We also read Sara Roy’s brilliant study of the cruel measures Israel had implemented to “de-develop” Gaza so as to stifle the development of an independent economy, thereby creating a cheap pool of day laborers for Israeli businesses or a network of small workshops that produced items for export by Israeli companies.
When Yasser Arafat spoke to us of the future of Gaza, he would say that with investment and freedom from occupation it could become Singapore; if denied both, it could become Somalia.
We also made a few exploratory visits to the Occupied Palestinian Territories to meet with business and political leaders to assess the possibilities before us and the challenges we would confront. In short order, both became quite clear.
When the project was ready to launch, my fellow co-chair, Mel Levine, and I led the first of a number of delegations of American business leaders (which included both Arab Americans and American Jews) to the Palestinian lands. Our first exposure to the problems we would encounter came as we attempted to enter via the Allenby Bridge from Jordan. American Jews and others passed easily, while Arab Americans were separated from the group and forced to undergo humiliating screening.
We convened a session in Jerusalem for Palestinians to meet with the Americans interested in investment opportunities, only to discover that in order to enter the city Palestinians had to secure a pass from the occupation authority. Since the passes only permitted them a few hours in the city, the time they were able to devote to our discussions proved limited.
Entry into and exit from Gaza was equally problematic. One scene on leaving Gaza has stayed with me. Hundreds of Palestinian men filled what I can only describe as cattle chutes, waiting in the sun for permission to enter into Israel. Straddling these chutes were young Israeli soldiers shouting at the Palestinians below, ordering them to look down and hold their passes above their heads. It was deeply disturbing.
In both Gaza and the West Bank, our meetings with Palestinian business leaders were hopeful. They were eager to discuss possibilities with their American counterparts, and the Americans were impressed. A number of partnerships were discussed.
Two projects were notable. One sought to manufacture leather products and another to assemble furniture. Both sought to take advantage of Gaza’s proximity to Eastern Europe so as to export there. As both projects required that the Israelis permit import of raw material and export of finished products, both projects failed. It appeared that the Israelis might have been willing to entertain such projects but only if the Americans and Palestinians operated through an Israeli middleman, thereby reducing the profitability of the ventures.
Even opportunities that the U.S. government tried to implement failed. One day I received a call from an official in the Department of Agriculture who told me that they had provided 50,000 bulbs for Gazans to develop a flower export industry. These bulbs he told me had been sitting in an Israeli port for months and were rotting. He said that the department was able to send another 25,000 bulbs but could only do so if the Israelis ensured their entry. This too proved fruitless as Israelis wanted no competition with their flower export industry, and therefore wouldn’t allow a competing Palestinian industry to develop.
After a few frustrating years, I saw then-President Bill Clinton who asked me how the project was developing. I told him about the frustrations we were encountering due to the Israeli impediments on investment in independent Palestinian economic growth. He appeared troubled and asked that I write him a detailed memo. The letter I sent to the president both outlined the specific problems we were facing and my complaint that his peace team was not taking these challenges seriously, as they insisted that any U.S. challenge to the Israelis would impede efforts to promote negotiations for peace. I told the president that since Oslo: Palestinian unemployment had doubled, poverty had risen, and Palestinians hope for peace was evaporating. To my dismay, the response I received from the White House appeared to have been drafted by his peace team, and was no response at all. At the end of Clinton’s first term, Builders for Peace (BfP) was disbanded and with it the hopes for Palestinian independent economic growth.
Over the next decade, absent any U.S. pressure on the Israelis to change their behavior, negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians continued to falter, Palestinians became poorer, Israeli became more emboldened and oppressive, and Palestinian attitudes hardened, leading to renewed violence.
There are two other memories from that period that need to be recalled.
One of the more optimistic projects BfP endorsed was a proposal by a Virginia-based Palestinian-American company to build a Marriott resort on the Gaza beachfront. Securing initial investment, they began construction, starting with the foundation and a massive parking garage. Because of the risks involved, they sought risk insurance from OPIC, the U.S. agency created to guarantee investment against risk. The project was endorsed by then-Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, a champion of our BfP, and supported by PLO head, Yasser Arafat—both of whom saw the resort hotel as laying the foundation for the future economic growth of a Palestinian state.
When Yasser Arafat spoke to us of the future of Gaza, he would say that with investment and freedom from occupation it could become Singapore; if denied both, it could become Somalia. Israel did everything it could to guarantee that Gaza would become Somalia—and they appear to have succeeded.
Against this backdrop, it was painful to hear of Trump’s insulting plan to build an American-owned Gaza Riviera. It reminded me of what might have been, but, three decades later, is being discussed without benefiting any Palestinians from its development.