Israel’s latest crime? Feeding the people of Gaza

Israel is behaving criminally again. It has once more turned its nose up at ‘humanitarian principles’. It is trampling even harder than usual all over international law. What inhuman act has the pariah state committed now? Brace yourselves: it is seeking to feed the people of Gaza.

This is the news that the Jewish State, in tandem with the US, has launched the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Its aim is to get foodstuffs and other essentials to the benighted people of the war-ravaged Gaza Strip. You would think the activist class would be pleased at this news. They’ve been renting their garments for months over an alleged tyranny of famine in Gaza, which they say is the worst case of ‘urban starvation’ since ‘the siege of Leningrad’. Alas, you would be wrong. They hate this initiative. Why? Because Israel is behind it, and in their twisted minds, so addled by Israelophobia, everything Israel does is evil.

The haughty cynicism of the West’s Israel-haters in response to this humanitarian drive has been extraordinary. The foundation started its work yesterday. Truckloads of food were dispatched on day one. Many more are due this week. It is reported that Israel’s aim is to set up four secure distribution sites in central and southern Gaza. Israeli forces, assisted by private military contractors from the US, will oversee the safe provision of food to the neediest Gazans who have fled the fierce fighting in the north of the strip. Israel’s hope is that armed guards will deter Hamas from looting the aid and hawking it on the black market to boost the coffers of its fascistic war against the Jewish nation, as has happened many times in the past 18 months.

Given how dire things are in Gaza, after a year-and-a-half of this infernal war Hamas started, this should be cause for celebration. Gaza’s innocents are as much the victims of Hamas’s fascistic writ as Israelis are. Their dignity, and in many cases their lives, have been sacrificed by Gaza’s autocratic religious regime at the altar of its racist crusade against the Jews’ homeland. These people did not ask for their land to be made into a theatre for Hamas’s demented apocalyptic showdown with the Jews. They need relief, they need food. And yet, far from breathing a sigh of relief that many of them will now receive precisely that, the West’s legion Israelophobes are raging over Israel’s life-saving aid.

Why does this aid initiative feel ‘so problematic’, asks one headline? I can answer that: it’s because the Jewish State is spearheading it. Everywhere you look there is conceited suspicion over the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. It will ‘militarise aid delivery’, says the UN – big talk from an outfit whose facilities in Gaza have been used by a neo-fascist militia to propagate Jew hatred and house kidnapped Jews. Aid agencies are refusing to work with the foundation on the grounds that ‘militarising’ aid delivery is an insult to ‘humanitarian principles’. The naivety is staggering. Gaza is an active warzone. The idea that Israel could just sit back as the strip was swamped by boxes of who knows what is infantile in the extreme. It’s war – everything is militarised in war.

What’s really bugging the anti-Israeli elites is that this uppity little state has the temerity to circumvent the UN. Israel outlawed UNRWA, the UN’s Palestinian-assisting wing, in Gaza and the West Bank following revelations that some UNRWA employees were involved in Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. Its new humanitarian foundation is designed precisely to get around UN mechanisms and put grub and drugs directly into the hands of Gazans who need them. To some of us, this makes sense – UNRWA is a profoundly morally compromised institution. But to the army of influencers who hate Israel, it is tantamount to blasphemy.

Behold the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen on the Today programme this morning. In tones of such world-weary vanity, he insisted Israel should be working with the UN, not the US. After all, there were only ‘a dozen or so cases’ of UNRWA being ‘infiltrated by Hamas’, he said, with the breeziness of someone ordering a caramel latte. Actually there have been more cases than that. But even if it were only a ‘dozen or so’ instances of a UN body being infiltrated by an army of anti-Semites devoted to the destruction of the Jewish nation, shouldn’t that be enough to put Israel off? In Bowen’s eyes, how many cases of UN complicity with 21st-century fascism are acceptable? Twelve? Twenty? A hundred? He should say.

The sheer delirium in the response to Israel’s humanitarian push was best summed up in an AP headline. ‘UN agencies warn that Israel’s plans for aid distribution will endanger lives’, it says. Drink in the Orwellianism of that. Providing aid is deathly now. Providing people with food ‘endangers lives’. Feeding the hungry kills. The doublethink of the Israelophobia pox has rarely been so beautifully illustrated. War is peace, freedom is slavery, giving people the essentials of life will end their lives. Imagine the arrogance and outright inhumanity it must require to wring your manicured hands over the delivery of life-saving aid just because you hate the state that’s delivering it.

In these people’s eyes, everything Israel does is a crime. If it bombs Gaza, in pursuit of the Jew-hating militants that attacked it, that’s a war crime. But if it pleads with civilians to flee before it drops its bombs, that’s a war crime, too – the war crime of ‘forced displacement’. If it enforces a siege on Gaza, to try to suffocate Hamas’s army of anti-Semites, that’s ‘genocide’. Yet when it lifts the siege and brings in truckloads of necessities, that goes against ‘humanitarian principles’, too. That also ‘endangers lives’. If Israel takes lives, it’s a crime. If it tries to save lives, it’s a crime. If it cuts off deliveries, it’s a crime. If it lets deliveries in, it’s a crime. No one should be in any doubt now: Israelophobia is a libellous monstrosity underpinned less by an opposition to war than by a frothing, post-truth hatred for the world’s only Jewish nation.

Hamas has instructed the people of Gaza not to cooperate with Israel’s delivery of aid. The UN has noisily rejected it too. And the commentariat is branding it ‘problematic’. They’re all on the same page. They’re all telling the suffering folk of the Gaza Strip not to accept the Jewish State’s help. This is a kind of psychosis. If you really believed that Gaza faces one of the worst famines of modern times, you would tell its people to take anything they can get. The hysterical reaction to the Gaza Humanitarian Fund suggests these people either don’t believe that, and they’ve been lying, or they do believe it but they hate Israel so much that they would rather see Gazans starve than eat Israel’s evil food. And honestly, I don’t know which is worse.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy