Why Starvation in Gaza Has Reached a Tipping Point

0:01David French:This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:17David French:I'm Michelle Cottle, and I write about national politics for New York Times opinion. And today I am joined by my fabulous colleagues, David French and Lydia Polgreen. Guys, welcome. Hi, Michelle. Thanks for having us. Hi, Michelle. So nice to be here with you. Lydia, it's been forever. Reunited. Reunited. I won't sing. I won't do that to people. So we're recording this on Thursday, and we're talking Gaza, where things have reached a new level of horror. Recently, a UN-affiliated group stated that the worst case for a famine scenario has been reached there. So this seems to have caused a tipping point both globally and here in the U.S.

1:01David French:And now politicians who had been mostly quiet when it came to criticizing Israel are starting to speak out. On Monday, MAGA stronghold Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene ramping up her criticism, becoming the first congressional Republican to call Israel's actions in Gaza a, quote, genocide.

1:17Michelle Cottle:We can save a lot of people. I mean, some of those kids are, that's real starvation stuff. I see it. and you can't fake that. U.S. taxpayers have spent many, many billions of dollars in support of the racist, extremist Netanyahu government. Enough is enough.

1:40David French:So let's just dive right in. Lydia, kick us off. You've been reporting on this issue for years and in particular since October of 2023. Seems like there has been a sea change now and the number of people calling what is going on genocide and denouncing it. What do you think shifted and why now? Yeah, you know, obviously in the immediate aftermath of the horrific attacks by Hamas on Israel, everyone expected a response and a strong response. And that is indeed what we got. But I think that there were many people, myself included, who were listening closely to the kind of rhetoric that was coming out of elements of the Israeli government and worried that this was going to, you know, quite quickly tip into war crimes and possibly genocide.

2:27And we've reached a point now with the freezing of aid to Gaza where we're seeing what is just a kind of undeniable level of human suffering involving hunger. And, you know, hunger, I think, is particularly resonant because it's such a universal human experience, right? And historically, as I've covered, you know, famine and hunger across the world, it does have this ability to activate a response in people. You know, it's interesting because hunger is very intimately linked with the birth of the idea of, in the coining of the word genocide. Raphael Lemkin, the man who invented the term in the Holocaust, really identified hunger and starvation as a critical weapon in this type of war.

3:12And I think people know it when they see it, when you see these pictures of emaciated children, you know, women who are unable to nurse their newborns. It just reaches a level of horror, I think, that becomes hard for really anyone to, including President Donald Trump, to countenance. And so I think that's a big part of why we're seeing this shift. There are a lot of longer term issues that are at play here, but I really think that the emotional resonance of that is a big part of it.

3:37Michelle Cottle:Yeah. And I'm seeing a shift even amongst people who've long supported Israel in this war like me. And why would you see that now? I think one of the reasons why you would see it is it's beginning to dawn on people. It's a very different scenario than October 8th, 9th, 10th. It's a very different scenario than even the months immediately following. Because what happened in the months immediately following, if you were supporting Israel, you were sort of presuming three things were going to occur. Number one, there was going to be a very strong Israeli response, just as there would be from any country attacked the way Israel was on October 7th.

4:13Michelle Cottle:Number two, you knew immediately it was going to be very, very tragic, bloody, messy, horrible, because Hamas had wormed its way into the Gazan infrastructure to such an extent that taking on Hamas was going to mean something like what happened when we took ISIS out of Mosul, for for example, or out of Raqqa in Syria. This was going to be brutal, brutal urban combat. And the third thing that a lot of supporters of Israel knew is that immediately big parts of the international community were going to turn on Israel. And that happened as well. Even in the first few days after the attack, you began to see harsh criticisms of Israel based on its early response.

4:59Michelle Cottle:But so that number three thing did something, that immediate harsh criticism of Israel, really began to almost inoculate friends of Israel against criticisms of Israel. Because what you saw was, wait a minute, right after civilians have been massacred in their homes, you're already after us for a military response that is exactly the one your own nation would do? And what that did is it hardened people against critique. And now, why would they start to soften now. There's been fighting for a long time. Hamas has been utterly decimated as a fighting force. Hamas is not what it was before. Now, it's not completely dismantled.

5:39Michelle Cottle:It's not completely gone. And so I think there's a very logical question that people ask, which is, wait a minute, after Hamas has been utterly decimated, it has a fraction of its fighting power. It has a fraction of the ability to govern and control Gazans. Why are we having possible famine conditions now? Why now? Isn't this when Hamas is on its back? Isn't this when Hamas is the weakest it's been in decades? Why now? And I think that that is what has penetrated through. And now this sort of the consequences of that Israeli approach are fully coming home to roost now. And unfortunately, it does not appear that the Israeli government is reacting with alacrity to the crisis that it absolutely contributed to causing.

6:25Michelle Cottle:Now, we have to talk about Hamas here. Hamas not laying down its harms, Hamas not surrendering the hostages is a grave, grave issue, and that needs to be discussed more. However, Hamas' failures to comply with the law of war, Hamas' failures to release hostages do not relieve Israel of its own obligations.

6:44David French:So taking a piece of what you're talking about and what Lydia is talking about, it does seem like we've reached a point where nobody in good conscience or who's being honest about this can look at the situation and think this is a situation that's a regular war, so to speak, where you have hostility on both sides once you reach the famine point. I mean, whatever Hamas is still doing, there's something about starving a people to death that feels different in kind than just bombing, which everybody assumes is a part of war. And, you know, no matter how horrific it is. So it does seem like nearly two years down the road, we've come to this.

7:25David French:And I do think it's just got a lot of people thinking about, well, what is the endgame on some level? Well, I think that's a great point, Michelle, because, you know, there's also been some really excellent reporting on this. There was a fantastic New York Times magazine piece earlier in July that really laid out in kind of forensic detail, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu decided to essentially prolong the war in order to hold his coalition together. And, you know, there's also been other reporting that has discounted the idea and sort of shown that there's really no concrete evidence that there's been widespread aid diversion by Hamas.

8:04Now, aid diversion happens in every conflict situation. David knows this. I know this, having reported, you know, and been on the ground in these places. But there have been these kind of fig leaf explanations. And I think that really tough-minded, fair reporting, I think, has really raised questions about those justifications, and rightly so.

8:25David French:So now Europe is upping the pressure, as David has pointed out. Britain has said they will recognize Palestine as a state if Israel doesn't end the humanitarian crisis. France has said they will recognize statehood in September, period. So given the escalation of international pressure, what about Prime Minister Netanyahu and his coalition? What impact is this having?

8:47Michelle Cottle:It's very uncertain because there's – you have to look at this also in a larger context because in a larger context, Israel is riding very high right now. October 7th was arguably even worse than the surprise before the Yom Kippur War because so many Israeli civilians were killed. So from that low ebb, arguably the worst day in the IDF's military history as far as allowing harm to Israeli citizens, the Israeli military has recovered and has won on every front in a way that I think very few people expected. And I think that that has created a sense of impunity in some ways that Israel has pressed forward, shed off a lot of restraints that people in the international community wanted to put upon it, and won a series of very decisive and very important military victories.

9:39Michelle Cottle:And that has led, I think, Israel to this position where it might be feeling a lot stronger and a lot less dependent on foreign approval and authority than it has in generations. But that is extraordinarily short-sighted thinking, just extraordinarily short-sighted. And I think what you see is the European powers using whatever levers they have. And we saw Canada come into this as well recently. So the European powers are using what leverage they have, which is not a lot, to be honest, to try to ease this crisis. And so in one sense, you would say, well, is Europe rewarding Hamas by sort of saying, hey, you get recognition even when Hamas is not dismantled?

10:24Michelle Cottle:And I think I see that argument. However, however, I keep circling back to the point that I made before. Hamas is decimated. It's not destroyed. It's utterly decimated. And I know why this all occurred because of the initial Israeli approach that it stuck to, which is they did not want to occupy parts of Gaza and take responsibility for the safety and the security and the sustenance of its citizens. We did that in Iraq. In the surge, we took responsibility for the safety, security, and sustenance of the people in my area of operations. And that way we were able to secure it and hold it against al-Qaeda when al-Qaeda tried to come back.

11:05Michelle Cottle:They didn't do that. They played sort of this game of whack-a-mole with a giant mallet where they're just pounding every place where they saw terrorists and then did not move in to the decimated and destroyed areas and provide safety and security and make sure that Hamas didn't come back. And so you just have this endless round of whack-a-mole. What it is doing is it is annihilating Gaza and it's creating exactly the conditions that you have now. Well, and I think it's also in thinking about the European response and, frankly, the American, you know, shifting, somewhat shifting Trump administration position on all of this.

11:45It's helpful to look at the broader regional context because David is absolutely right that Israel has had this string of quite spectacular victories. You know, they've knocked out the leadership of Hezbollah in Lebanon. You know, the spectacular strike on the leadership in Iran, obviously not including the Supreme Leader, but other major figures there. The things that they're doing in Syria, for example, you know, that threaten to be incredibly destabilizing. I think that when European leaders and frankly, when the Trump administration looks at this broader picture and looks at the way that Israel is seeking to, you know, essentially export its mow the lawn strategy from Gaza, which is essentially to kind of, you know, do these occasional decapitations and keep the situation under control beyond its own borders and acting almost like a kind of, you know, emerging imperial hegemon in the region, that starts to conflict with other core interests of these countries, right?

12:50You know, the Syrian civil war was a powder keg, tremendous suffering for Syrians, but it completely reordered the politics of Europe, right? The last thing Europe wants is a destabilized Syria that's going to send huge numbers of Syrians, you know, that they're desperately trying to get back into Syria, back towards Europe or even to Turkey. And so I think that there are a variety of complex interests, even beyond the humanitarian horror, that are creating a significant amount of daylight between Israel. And I think you're starting to see countries like Germany, for example, which literally claims as its reason, its reason of state is the protection of the state of Israel and the Jewish people for very understandable reasons given the history.

13:39I think there's been a real sense of discomfort and having to reassess, like, what are actually our interests as Germany in this region of the world? And what should our commitment to this particular government and its prosecution of this particular war be?

13:55David French:So where do either of you think this is going and how it's going to end? I know that's a really open-ended evil question for something this big and complicated. But, I mean, for instance, a senior Hamas official has told news outlets that the group would hold out for a deal that ends the war with a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Can Israel fight Hamas indefinitely in this way?

14:20Michelle Cottle:It cannot fight Hamas indefinitely with this degree of intensity. But what you're hearing about Hamas saying they want a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, that's a big part of the problem. What nation, what nation after what Hamas did would not create buffer zones, would not expand its ability to interdict if Hamas stays in power, okay, if Hamas is still a governing authority. This is the consequence of the fundamental mistake Israel made with its approach, which was it did not want to occupy Gaza, but it wanted to defeat Hamas. Pick one. Pick one. Okay? And so that's the problem. They set a goal that was not attainable with the tactics that they chose.

15:09Michelle Cottle:Now, I'm not saying that if Israel had chosen the path, the more conventional path in response to an armed attack like that, which is an occupation, a temporary governance, and a handing over to civilian authorities following the cessation of hostilities and their storing of peace, that that would have been extremely difficult. It would not have been neat and easy and clean. It would have been infinitely better than this. And yes, the international community would have been yelling at Israel over an occupation. There's no question about that. And here's my concern. Has the ship sailed on that?

15:44Michelle Cottle:Is this something now where when I talk about it, it's just like a bunch of academics and a panel discussion, right? Yeah. And are we now at a point where Israel just has to say, okay, we're going to negotiate a hostage release, we're going to negotiate a ceasefire, and then have what kind of influence on the ground in Gaza? Allow aid in, but what happens next? It feels a lot more like ceasefire, although incredibly valuable, is a prelude to almost like a Mad Max type situation. As people sort out Gaza, who's going to run Gaza? And one other thing, there's been a lot of defense of Israel on the grounds that like when America has fought, particularly in World War II, we were very violent.

16:31Michelle Cottle:No doubt, no question. But I will tell you this, when we attained control of an area, we took care of the people in it. And what happened is that people then in Europe voted with their feet. They could have gone over to the Soviet side or they could have gone to the American-British side. And by the millions, they moved to the American-British side. Why? because we took care of people as best we could. And that is not just humane. It's not just legal. It's smart to do that. It helps you over the long term to do that. And it's just so sad, tragic, and infuriating to see the total disregard of these lessons from history.

17:15David French:Lydia, do you have any sense of what could happen, what should happen that would make this? I think the great difficulty in seeing a positive future comes from the cynical and tragic choices that were made in the past, you know, and that and that I think is it definitely aligns with a lot of what David just said. But, you know, I will say that, you know, the fact that Hamas was in power in Gaza and was able to sustain itself for so long in Gaza was the result of a deliberate strategy by Benjamin Netanyahu to sow division between the Palestinian Authority, which he wanted to be weak, and allowing Qatar to funnel billions of dollars to the horrific Hamas administration in Gaza, right?

18:03So there's just there's so much history here and there's so much so many terrible and cynical decisions that have been made that make it very hard to sort of like clear away the cobwebs and see a future. And I think Israel is riding high in one sense, having had all of these military successes beyond the kind of envelope of its own territory and the occupied territories. But I think it's also showing tremendous strain. You know, one story that I've been tracking for some time is just the extraordinary amount of mental health strain on IDF soldiers. We're seeing a spike in suicides. You know, I would not be surprised if, you know, just as during the Vietnam War in the United States, we're going to just see more and more young people in Israel saying, look, I don't want to be a part of this.

18:54There was an American former Green Beret who was hired as a contractor to work for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation doing whatever this supposed aid distribution was. And he's come back and just given, you know, absolutely chilling accounts. And I think that takes a toll. And so I do think that there's just a deep, deep rot that Israel is going to need to contend with, both in its policy postures, but also just in its populace and its own psyche.

19:27David French:Well, let's dig in on a bit on President Trump and the situation. So he has said that he wants to make sure that humanitarian aid is reaching Gaza. This is breaking from Netanyahu's claim that there is no starvation. That's not, you know, however incredible that seems. But I want to hear from both of you on how you think Trump's shift potentially changes the entire equation, at least in terms of America's relationship with Israel and the support. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the striking things about Donald Trump, because he's such a, you know, kind of brutish and crude person who seems to enjoy cruelty, I think one of the repeatedly surprising things about him is that he's really, he really does have this, it's almost an ick response to seeing suffering children.

20:22But I don't know that that actually has like real longevity in terms of policy. Right. And I think it's quite possible that we could see a quasi, you know, return to just enough aid to, you know, certainly not stem off a wave of death because I think we're a little bit too far gone for that. But I think we could sort of turn the page enough to satisfy that impulse of Trump's to be able to just kind of say, OK, this is fine. But, you know, Trump has said so many different things about, you know, what the end state looks like here from his perspective. We all remember the crazy AI video of, you know, the Gaza Riviera.

21:00He wants America to take it over. There are going to be, you know, bearded belly dancers and, you know, glitzy resorts and a gold statue of Donald Trump. You know, I think my big fear is that, you know, that the Trump administration will essentially enable an ethnic cleansing of the area. I have complicated feelings about that because I think that if there are people who are in Gaza who want to leave Gaza in order to be safe, who am I to say they shouldn't go? I mean, obviously, you know, people have a right to live. At the same time, you know, this is one of the most explosive questions of modern times.

21:40You know, what happens to the Palestinian people who are currently experiencing incredible violence, not just in Gaza, but also in the West Bank? Like, there is just an incredibly complex set of questions that need to be answered here. And so do I have a lot of faith in, you know, Donald Trump and his administration can somehow finally magically find a way to solve this problem that has bedeviled American presidents for generations? Absolutely not.

22:07Michelle Cottle:You know, I think right now Trump is riding high a little bit because of the Iran strikes. And he's also very much riding high with a specific part of his base. And that would be sort of the evangelical conservative base, very, very, very happy with the way he has backed Israel. But at the same time, there are other parts of MAGA. The right is beginning to split on Israel. It used to be quite united on Israel. But now you have, you know, outright anti-Semites like Tucker Carlson, like Candace Owens and others who have an audience, sadly, millions and millions strong. and they are relentlessly attacking Israel, just relentlessly attacking Israel.

22:50Michelle Cottle:So one of the things that could end up out of this conflict for Israel is it could end up with a big military victory, but an American public, both on the right and the left, that is substantially less likely to support Israel in the future. And my question would be, what did they then gain? What did they gain by continuing and pressing and pressing and pressing, if it's fracturing, relationships that Netanyahu may not need. Who knows how much longer he's going to be leading the Israeli government, but Israel will need.

23:24David French:I have been completely fascinated by the growing objections from certain parts of MAGA, like, say, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has come out and called the situation genocide. And they are pressuring for Congress and the administration to do something about this crisis. Do you—

23:47Michelle Cottle:But I'm not necessarily surprised that Miss Space—Jewish Space Lasers is doing—I mean, like, that's—she's—

23:55David French:I know, but she had been pretty supportive of Israel ahead of time. Yeah, but I think even, you know, quite significant also, though, is you're seeing the Joe Rogans, the Theo Vons, right? You know, people in this kind of podcast universe. And I think they represent not necessarily the MAGA base. They speak to the MAGA base, but I don't think either of them represent like a kind of core MAGA, right? But they definitely represent the kind of soft fringe that drifted towards Donald Trump in the 2024 election, Right. And there are a number of forces that are pulling that fringe away from Trump. You know, maybe they go to the Democrats, maybe they become just disengaged.