Israeli Denials of Gaza's Starvation Echo Holocaust Denial Tactics
The starvation in Gaza isn't equivalent to the Holocaust. But those defending both share a few traits.
I’ve been going to the gym a lot lately, and sometimes it takes a bit of willpower to get there and work myself out.
But as the late Aaron Swartz once said, you have to lean into the pain.
That’s something one Reddit user on the Gym Help forum learned over the past ten years. As he explained in a recent post, he spent those years becoming a bodybuilder and trainer, eventually developing an impressive physique any man would envy.
But today that young man looks like a twig. The reason why is because he lives in Gaza, which has been under varying levels of blockade over the past two years, with the supplies of food, medicine, and other essential goods slowed down to a trickle.
Thankfully, he is able to survive. Because he spent so much time building up his muscle mass and keeping his body healthy, he is hungry but not dying.
Many Gazans, sadly, are not so lucky. Hundreds have perished from malnutrition over the past few weeks, the consequence of, among other things, the government of Israel deciding this past spring to issue a total blockade on food and medicine.
Once that blockade became politically unsustainable, the Israelis introduced the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which set up a handful of checkpoints in the southern part of the region where residents could line up to receive aid. But those checkpoints both provided far too little aid to reach most Gazans and became a killing field where thousands of civilians were shot while lining up to ask for food by trigger-happy Israeli soldiers and American contractors.
As a consequence, parts of Gaza are now under a famine that is entirely avoidable. Thousands are at risk of imminent death. A rich country sits just miles from the border and is preventing most international aid from entering. It’s not clear whether it’s the worst humanitarian crisis in the world or the second-worst — the conflict in the Sudan continues — but it’s probably the most unnecessary.
Nothing I have stated until this point is particularly controversial among the world’s governments and the intelligence agencies that feed them data about the circumstances of the people of Gaza. There is unanimity about the crisis Gazans are experiencing and the cause of it. Even President Donald Trump, who has allied himself to Christian dispensationalists and right-wing Jewish donors who promote zero daylight between the United States and Israeli government, has ridiculed people who would deny the starvation of the Gaza Strip.
And yet Israeli leadership and its American allies have been engaged in a campaign to distort and mislead the world about what’s happening there, denying that there is widespread starvation in the Strip.
“There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in late July. This claim has been buttressed in a number of ways, including by inviting C-tier American social media influencers to stand in front of sacks of uneaten food at the Kerem Shalom crossing (inaccessible to most Gazans) in the south.
But maybe the most disturbing part of the denialism campaign is how it echoes another dark chapter in history.
How Holocaust denial tactics live on in Gaza
If you haven’t seen it, I can’t recommend the 2023 drama The Zone of Interest enough. The movie, which won the Oscar for best international film in 2024, is based on the life of Rudolf Höss, the German commandant at Auschwitz death camp.
Unlike virtually all other movies about the Holocaust, we see almost no Jews throughout the entire film. The camera instead lingers on Höss and his family — his wife and children and friends — as they go about their daily lives living right next to Auschwitz.
The film’s message is clear: we humans are more than capable of ignoring the horrors perpetrated by our fellow man. What is probably less known about the film is that the director was directly inspired by the 2012 documentary The Act of Killing.
Killing documents the aftermath of Indonesia’s mass killings of suspected communists in the latter half of the 20th century. Although exact numbers are unknown, it is widely estimated that hundreds of thousands of people were executed by the Indonesian dictatorship with the full knowledge and complicity of American intelligence. Because the victors write history, nobody significant involved in the dictatorship was ever held accountable for these atrocities.
In Killing, director Joshua Oppenheimer finds the men who committed some of the torture and murders and talks to them about how they feel about it decades later. Few of them express any regret for what they did. And it’s pretty obvious why: the society they were in never told them it was wrong and never threatened them with punishment. It’s like a bizarre version of post-Nazi Germany where the Nazis simply walked away free and in many cases richer and more powerful.
What is happening in Gaza today tests whether we live in a world that demands accountability for atrocities, as we saw after the Holocaust, or one that simply shrugs them off, as we saw during the mass murders in Indonesia.
In their attempt to deflect from responsibility, the Israeli leadership and their allies across the world are using arguments that have very dark roots — in fact, some of them sound so similar to apologia used before and after the Holocaust that they might make your skin crawl.
Take, for instance, the utterings of Laura Loomer, the far-right activist who has ingratiated herself into Trumpworld.
She recently successfully pressured the State Department to pause visas used for medical treatment of Gazan children — cutting a lifeline for children who are now living in a zone that includes endless shooting, bombing, and famine.
Loomer was unapologetic about her victory, asking all of Twitter:
There are 56 Muslim countries in the world. Why won’t any of them take the GAZANS? Answer that.
This argument is familiar among supporters of Israeli policy. They argue that of course Israel doesn’t want to live next to the Palestinians — dozens of Muslim-majority countries don’t want them, either. And for that matter, why should the United States, even for temporary medical treatment?
(As a factual matter, millions of Palestinians live abroad — there is an absolutely massive diaspora not only in the Middle East but elsewhere. Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele is Palestinian!)
But the argument is actually a lot older than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So old, in fact, that Adolf Hitler used it.
In 1939, Hitler had not yet put into motion the Final Solution, but he had already begun the mass persecution of Jews under his control, leading to an outcry from people abroad.
Hitler had no patience for these critics, he argued, because they could easily just take all the Jews for themselves. He would happily expel them into these other countries, but they were refusing to allow that.
“In connection with the Jewish question I have this to say: it is a shameful spectacle to see how the whole democratic world is oozing sympathy for the poor tormented Jewish people, but remains hard-hearted and obdurate when it comes to helping them which is surely, in view of its attitude, an obvious duty,” he said in a boisterous speech in January of 1939.
If the world felt like the Jews were being persecuted, why were they so reticent to take them, Hitler wondered:
For how thankful they must be that we are releasing these precious apostles of culture, and placing them at the disposal of the rest of the world. In accordance with their own declarations they cannot find a single reason to excuse themselves for refusing to receive this most valuable race in their own countries. Nor can I see a reason why the members of this race should be imposed upon the German nation, while in the States, which are so enthusiastic about these "splendid people," their settlement should suddenly be refused with every imaginable excuse. I think that the sooner this problem is solved the better; for Europe cannot settle down until the Jewish question is cleared up. It may very well be possible that sooner or later an agreement on this problem may be reached in Europe, even between those nations which otherwise do not so easily come together.
As the world largely refused to take part in Hitler’s scheme to expel the Jews, he and the Nazi Party eventually developed the Final Solution, where they sought to exterminate them altogether.
Although the world had not yet developed laws around the concept of genocide, many people of good will did not want to see civilians massacred en masse. So the Nazis took pains to dress up the concentration camps as something else altogether.
They developed a ghetto called Theresienstadt where Holocaust victims were concentrated before they were shipped off to death camps. In an act of deception that became infamous, they invited the Danish Red Cross to tour Theresienstadt to prove to the world that they were not mistreating the Jews. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum explains:
Elaborate measures were taken to disguise conditions in the ghetto and to portray an atmosphere of normalcy. The SS engaged the Council of Jewish Elders and the camp-ghetto "residents" in a "beautification" program. Prisoners planted gardens, painted housing complexes, renovated barracks, and developed and practiced cultural programs for the entertainment of the visiting dignitaries to convince them that the "Seniors' Settlement" was real.
Last year, a conversation between Netanyahu and the German foreign minister was leaked to the press. The Germans, who are Israel’s second-largest arms providers, were dissatisfied at Netanyahu’s constant denial of the deteriorating humanitarian situation in the Strip.
Angrily, Netanyahu raised his voice and thundered:
It’s real. It’s reality. It’s not like what the Nazis staged, we’re not like the Nazis who produced fake images of a manufactured reality.
Yet today, the Israeli Foreign Ministry and its allies abroad are, unfortunately, echoing this tactic. This past week, the Ministry posted a photo of a random Gazan who appeared overweight alongside the mocking caption: “The timeline of the ‘hunger’ in Gaza.”
The Israeli state’s social media accounts, meanwhile, have been posting videos claiming that “Gaza City’s culinary scene was thriving this July,” featuring what appears to be a video of an operating Gazan restaurant. One popular Hasbara (Israeli propaganda) account is called Gazawood (like Hollywood, get it?) — it is dedicated to posting videos making similar claims.
In a population of two million people, it is not particularly surprising that there is, somewhere among the rubble, still a restaurant with whatever it can find and there are still people who appear overweight. Hunger, like any social malady, is not evenly distributed, even in a famine.
Even the Warsaw Ghetto still had restaurants. That’s because even while living in the worst of situations, people have to make a living and try to live normal lives. In one description of a restaurant in the ghetto, the writer described how a lucky few were able to eat at the location while people were begging outside:
A swarm of beggars is lounging around at the gates of these Eldorados, licking their lips with their faces against the window display, waiting for the <<new lords>> to come out after dining, execrates and curses, begs and imposes itself. And they, gobbled, satisfied and amused, benefit fully from life, that is – goose meat, beefsteaks, omelettes, fish, wine, salads, cognac, cakes, and fruits.
The Nazis didn’t have access to social media, where both Israeli government officials and their comrades in arms are doing most of today’s starvation denial. But they did have cameras. They used these restaurants in the ghetto to portray an image of Jews getting fat off of plentiful food, ignoring the mass hunger and violence that gripped ordinary life in the ghetto. The following is the recollection from Samuel Puterman, who was there:
The guests were supposed to eat a lot, voraciously, and wash down the food with alcohol. They were filming waiters, bustling around the tables, laden with trays, on which gourmet delicacies were piled up. […] They photographed the general view of the crowded room, single ladies who were ordered to lift up their dresses high, […] Jews eating sardines from the can with their fingers, Jews playing under the table with the bare calves of the female companions of the libation, Jews throwing half-eaten goose quarters under the table. The film reel did not show fainting women and the black and blue faces of people hit with a whip.
There is a reason that Israeli cutouts are posting images of the rare weighty Gazan or blasting out videos of one of the few buildings left standing. It’s intended to sow doubt in the minds of observers. There is food in Gaza? People are even gaining weight? If the Palestinians are lying about this, what else are they lying about? The perfidious Jews, scheming to fool the world, have been replaced by the perfidious Palestinians, always ready to shoot a new Pallywood set.
The latest twist on starvation denial is to highlight the role of disease and pre-existing conditions. The Free Press, for instance, a reliable Likudite website run by Bari Weiss, used their best Googling skills to find examples of twelve Gazans who had been featured in the international press as examples of people suffering under the blockade.
They breathlessly noted that these twelve individuals had been suffering from other conditions, like rickets and cystic fibrosis. (In one completely un-self aware example, the authors note that an individual featured in a piece on starvation had had part of his head blown off by an Israeli shell, which they saw as oddly exonerating.)
The message seems to be that these people are not suffering thanks to a lack of food and medical care; they are simply the victims of disease and circumstance that is far outside of Israel’s control.
The article was ridiculed online. People who are suffering from crippling diseases need access to food and medicine even more. The fact that the Israeli government is denying them these things makes things worse, not better. In fact, it is not surprising that malnutrition is killing off the sick, elderly, and children before it kills off bodybuilders like the one this article began with. They are the most vulnerable. And they are dying.
(See this thread from a man who headed up U.S. government famine interventions for some citations here.)
But this cringeworthy Hasbara is not new. In addition to denying the starvation among Jews and others who were persecuted in the Holocaust, the Nazis and Holocaust deniers who appeared after WW2 frequently pointed the finger elsewhere.
For instance, Josef Kramer, who served as the commander at the Bergen-Belsen death camp, would in the days after the liberation of the camps point to disease and hunger that was out of his control as taking the lives of countless prisoners. Höss, introduced above, also cited these factors as having killed many people.
Whatever scintilla of truth is behind these explanations, the reality is that the Nazis bore ultimate responsibility for the welfare of the people who they had imprisoned. They would never have been there, packed into conditions that make the spread of disease easy and without access to proper food, if it was not for the edict of the Nazi government.
After the war, newly-minted international law codified these obligations to prevent starvation into the Geneva Conventions:
To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate.
The meaning of Never Again
I have no direct relationship to the Holocaust myself. I’m not Jewish, and my family is not from Europe, where almost all victims of the camps were located. My grandfather did fight in WW2 on behalf of the Allies, but he was in the Pacific (he was actually sent to Japan’s prison camps, which was a horrible experience, but he was not executed).
I did however have a friend in high school whose father was part of one of the American units that liberated a concentration camp (most were liberated by Russians).
He came to our class one day to speak in harrowing detail about what he saw there, and he came away with a moral lesson he imparted to all of us.
“No matter what someone has done to you, you cannot starve them,” he said.
I was not there. Nobody I know was there. But the convictions he imparted seem inarguable.
Starvation is one of humanity’s cruelest tools of conflict, and it has been deployed from Syria to Sudan. Israel is not the first government to behave like this and it probably won’t be the last.
But one unique feature of this depravity is that it is being underwritten by the United States taxpayer, who is forced to pay for all of this by a government that could use its leverage to stop it at any time.
And to add an ironic twist to all of it, the people defending this horrid status quo increasingly sound like the very Nazis who necessitated the slogan “Never Again.”
If we really believed those words applied to everyone — famed Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said it would mean “there would be no Cambodia, and no Rwanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia” — then we have to understand that aping the very rhetoric of those who committed the Holocaust is the ultimate disservice to its victims.
This article floored me. Much as we like to think of ourselves as better, in the end we're no different from the Nazis. Same urge to deceive ourselves, same need to deny the obvious when we feel threatened. All the pious talk about things that "should never happen again" exposed as empty words.
Israel is at war with Hamas which is the governing authority in Gaza. I can't think of any war where one combatant nation was obligated to provide food, medical, or other support for enemy nation civilians. The civilian suffering would end of Hamas surrendered and released the hostages.