Israel’s killing of millions of Gazans matches the brutality of Nazi concentration camps and colonial Britain’s starvation experiments in India
By Dan STEINBOCK
In 2006, when Hamas won the Palestinian elections, Israel and the Middle East Quartet – the US, Russia, the UN and the EU – launched economic sanctions against the Palestinians. The blockade was the result of Israel’s deliberate attempt to push the Palestinian economy in Gaza “to the brink of collapse,” according to a US diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks. Unofficially, Israeli officials repeatedly told US diplomats that, as part of their overall plan for the embargo on Gaza, “they aim to keep the Gaza economy on the brink of collapse without pushing it over the edge.” When the blockade began in 2007, the Israeli government estimated how many daily calories were needed to prevent or cause malnutrition in Gaza.
The average daily calorie intake, critical for survival, is estimated at 2.100 kilocalories (kcal) per day. The Israeli “Red Line” document used a higher estimate of 2.279 calories per person, taking into account the supposed domestic food production in Gaza. Such calculations have a long and dark history in colonial societies of settlement.
Following a severe drought and crop failure in the Deccan Plateau in 1876, the Great Famine of South India lasted for two terrible years, spreading northwards. At the time, the British Famine Commissioner, Sir Richard Temple, conducted human experiments, starving “brilliant boys” until they resembled “little more than animated skeletons… utterly unfit for any work”. To maximise British revenue, Temple sought to establish the minimum amount of food for survival, which he estimated at around 1.627 kcal in Madras in 1877. However, excess mortality from starvation has been estimated at up to 8 million.
In Gaza, Israel’s goal was to keep the economy “on the brink of collapse” while avoiding a humanitarian crisis. Netanyahu’s cabinet sought to put the Palestinians “on a diet, but not starve them to death.”
During the 2008–2009 Israeli War on Gaza, the enclave was subjected to a “Shoah” (Holocaust in Hebrew), as Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai acknowledged. The Israelis hoped this would turn the Palestinians in Gaza against Hamas. The idea was to “send Gaza decades into the past,” said then-commander General Yoav Gallant, who 15 years later was targeted by an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for alleged responsibility “for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and for deliberately directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts.”
In May 2018, the UN Security Council (UNSC) unanimously adopted Resolution 2417 condemning the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare and the unlawful denial of humanitarian access to civilian populations. However, during the Gaza War, most of the principles of UNSC Resolution 2417 have been violated, paving the way for Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza and for the US-led West’s complicity in these massacres.
FROM NAZI MASS Famine TO THE PLAN OF THE ISRAELI GENERALS
In historical terms, the total Israeli siege of densely populated Gaza and its 2,3 million Palestinian refugees was not unique. It bears similarities to the siege of Leningrad and its 3.1 million inhabitants. Part of the Nazi Famine Plan by SS ideologist Herbert Backe, the initial grand objective was to forcibly starve an estimated 31 to 45 million Soviet and Eastern Europeans by seizing food supplies and diverting them to German forces. Along with American eugenics and white racism, it was the American treatment of Native Americans that inspired the starvation policies of Hitler’s Germany.
The lethal power of using hunger as a weapon was taught to a generation of Germans in 1914-1919, when the British imposed a blockade on Germany. It aspired to hinder Germany’s ability to import goods and thus starve the German people and their army. In Gaza, the original Israeli “Generals Plan,” based on the blockade of food supplies and epidemics, could not be fully implemented due to international opposition. But even its partial execution brought the enclave to the risk of starvation as early as October 2024, with senior UN officials describing the situation in northern Gaza as “apocalyptic” because everyone there was “in imminent danger of dying from disease, hunger and violence.”
DARK PARALLELS
In a strongly worded letter, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave Israel a 30-day ultimatum to ensure that more aid trucks were arriving in Gaza every day. Israel missed the US deadline in early November, according to the UN. However, the (then) Biden administration did nothing, while Blinken turned a blind eye. A comprehensive study of food availability in Gaza shows that between October 2023 and April 2024, food trucks entering Gaza remained below pre-war levels. But how serious was the situation in Gaza compared to its precedents?
In his classic work “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe” (1944), Raphael Lemkin, the pioneering scholar of mass atrocities and father of the Genocide Convention, warned that “the Jewish population in the occupied countries is undergoing a process of liquidation (1) from exhaustion and starvation, because Jewish food rations are kept at a particularly low level; and (2) from massacres in the ghettos.” Lemkin supported his argument with data from a 1943 American report, which showed how Jews were receiving only one-tenth of their normal calorie intake—about the same amount as many Palestinians in Gaza eight decades later.
PRELUDE TO ETHNIC CLEANSING AND GENOCIDE
Placed in a comparative historical context, the exploitation of mass starvation as a weapon has long been associated with imperial and colonial activities, preparing the ground for genocidal atrocities. In this view, even the Nazi concentration camps can be traced back to genocidal atrocities in colonial concentration camps, such as the British camps during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), followed by the Herero and Namaqua genocide (1904–1908) under the German Empire.
From the British Empire in India to German South-West Africa (now Namibia), famine and starvation have served as a prelude to the ultimate genocide, as Lemkin pointed out: “The most direct and drastic technique of genocide is simply murder. It may be slow and scientific killing by mass starvation or rapid, but no less scientific, killing by mass extermination in gas chambers, mass executions, or exposure to disease and exhaustion.”
Historically, mass starvation and genocide entered a new phase in the Nazi era, thanks to industrial atrocities, greater efficiency in mass murder on assembly lines, and scientific innovation. In a surreal way, concentration camps and mass starvation went hand in hand with modernity in the West. One (very rough) way to compare such efforts across time and place is by calorie count.
RECOVERING HORSES FROM THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN GAZA
The Nazi siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) from the fall of 1941 to January 1944 was one of the longest and most devastating sieges in history. When German armies prevented food supplies from reaching the city, half of the city’s population of 2,4 million died, mostly from starvation. During the fatal “Hunger Winter,” the average daily ration was barely 300 calories. An even lower official calorie count was documented in the Warsaw Ghetto famine study of 1942. Determined to starve the ghetto within a few months, the Nazis allowed only 180 calories per day for each prisoner, withholding the vaccines and medicines needed to prevent the spread of disease in the densely populated ghetto.
Therefore, the black market flourished, supplying 80 percent of the ghetto’s food and a network of 250 soup kitchens for the poor. Whatever the total daily amount, it paved the way from starvation to death.
The use of hunger as a weapon is often associated with ethnic cleansing, as Lemkin noted, “after the population has been removed and the area has been colonized by the oppressor’s own citizens.” What about Gaza? Measured in terms of total food deliveries to the enclave as of October 2023, the calorie intake was about 860 kcal, a third less than in the Nazi camps more than eight decades earlier. As the German invasion of the Soviet Union failed and the tide of World War II turned, the Nazi camps deteriorated, with daily intakes shrinking to 700 kcal in 1944. That’s almost triple the intake of 245 kcal in northern Gaza in the first half of 2024, when the New York Post famously headlined that there was no famine in Gaza. (TRT Global)