Billy Bragg just published a recording of a new protest song in support of the current flotilla project attempting to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza.
YouTube text:
In solidarity with the Global Sumud Flotilla which launches this week in a bid to break the Israeli naval blockade and deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza, Billy Bragg releases a new song for Palestine.
‘Hundred Year Hunger’ looks at the current famine that Israel has created in Gaza through the lens of a century of enforced food insecurity and malnutrition imposed on the Palestinian people, firstly by British imperialism, then as a weapon of mass displacement by the state of Israel.
It takes its title from the recent book of the same name by E Mark Windle.
Sumud is an Arabic word which translates into English as steadfastness or perseverance. It is used by Palestinians to describe their nonviolent everyday resistance against Israel's occupation. Sumud emphasizes the commitment of the Palestinian people to remain on their land despite hardship and oppression, elevating their everyday existence into a form of resistance.
Lan narhal translates as ‘we will not leave’. Together ‘Sumud! Sumud! Lan narhal’ conveys the determination of the Palestinian people to refuse to be displaced.
Two Haaretz columnists, Yarden Michaeli and Nir Hasson, give a memorable description of an important aspect of authoritarian rule that Benjamin Netanyahu has put on display with his absurd denials of the extremely well-documented starvation campaign he’s been conducting against Palestinians in Gaza. A campaign that Netanyahu’s and Israel’s hasbara (information operations) flat-out deny is occurring. They describe what one has to pretend is believable in order to swallow the official claims:
The claim that there is no starvation in the Strip does not stand on its own. It rests on additional assertions. For example: After 22 months of bombings, Hamas has managed to recruit actors willing to pretend that they are desperately chasing food trucks, some even agreeing to be shot to death by the IDF in service of the campaign; children are pretending to be waiting for exhausting amounts of time for food to be distributed; parents are staging footage of themselves scrounging for crumbs in the sand; doctors are giving false testimony while nurses enter fake data from clinical examinations; countless residents are using AI to produce images showing they have lost weight; and, finally, journalists from around the world are in on the deception. It's all a performance. The entire world is acting in the service of Hamas. [my emphsis] (1)
Michaeli and Hasson do their job as journalists and cite the actual evidence, including referring to:
[A] document produced by the UN coalition of experts known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, considered to be the leading authority on identifying mass hunger. Two weeks ago, it determined that "the worst-case scenario of famine" is unfolding in Gaza and noted that one in three people there goes entire days without eating. Additional documentation has been disseminated by the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme, UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam (which works to end hunger and poverty worldwide),Save the Children and many other reputable sources. Most of these organizations have field staff in Gaza who directly monitor and also treat starving children.
The main argument that Israel clings to is that the emaciated youngsters are suffering from preexisting conditions. First, this claim is accurate only with respect to a very small number of them. Indeed, starvation first strikes the most vulnerable, those who require special nutrition or depend on a properly functioning healthcare system. But even in the case of a young person with preexisting conditions – severe malnutrition is generally not inevitable. [my emphasis]
They ask their Israeli readers to imagine themselves in the place of the Palestinians as a way of seeing what an absurd claim the Israeli government and its leaders are making.
But this is an example of what we still call an Orwellian situation, referring to George Orwell’s famous book 1984. Authoritarian rulers expect their populations to believe or at least pretend to believe even obviously false and absurd claims. It’s something that cult leaders also do. Cults have specific social and psychological dynamics, but they make particular use of the dynamics of mass psychology that also function in political and mainstream religious institutions.
Still, it’s important to understand the specifics of individual efforts to justify particular political action. And when it comes to genocide, it’s a critical element of understand it, much less trying to put a stop to it.
Michaeli and Hasson make this suggestion for how Israelis can attempt to gain a more realistic perspective on the situation than the huge fiction painted by Israeli hasbara:
Here's a thought experiment for anyone who still believes that there is no mass starvation in the Strip. Take the entire population of Jerusalem – including children, the elderly, the sick and the disabled – and now add everyone living in Tel Aviv and Haifa. Move them all to live in tents on beaches, or in the streets or in abandoned buildings, with no electricity, no running water, no cooking gas, no refrigerators or cupboards –and only one toilet for every 100 to 200 people. They will live intents that are gradually falling apart, while rivers of sewage flow between them. Around them will be swarms of mosquitoes, rats and wild dogs.
Freud made a famous and, for him, uncharacteristically optimistic Enlightenment observation about people’s ability to work their way to reality, even when there are strong social and psychological impediments to doing so:
We may stress as often as we like that the human intellect is powerless in comparison to the human instinctual life, and be correct about this. But there is something special about this weakness; the voice of the intellect is mild, but it does not rest until it has made itself heard. In the end, after countless repeated rejections, it makes its point. This is one of the few points on which one can be optimistic about the future of humanity, but its significance in itself is not small. (2)
That hopeful note is small comfort at the moment for the children and adults being deliberately starved to death by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government right now.
But it’s important for journalists like Yarden and Hasson and for activists against the genocide to insist on the reality and to refute the cultish propaganda on the Israeli government is currently insisting.
Here is a current report from Kyle Kulinski on the situation. (Note: Kyle doesn’t always stick to safe-for-the-office language.
(2) Freud, Sigmund (1927): Die Zukunft einer Illusion. In: Sigm. Freud Gasammelte Werke, Band 14. Werke aus den Jahren 1925-1931 (1948), 377. My translation to English.
How many prominent leaders who are today dodging and ducking and weaving on the US – and German - support for Israel’s genocide in progress in Gaza will later say, “I was always opposed to what Netanyahu was doing …”?
MSNBC reports – excuse me, runs an opinion piece:
Even now, as Israel starves civilians and shoots many of those who try to obtain what little food is available, Democrats are either calling what Israel is doing a strategic mistake or using the passive voice to describe an “unfolding” famine. And always there’s the reiteration of Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas, even though that has nothing to do with Israel’s humanitarian obligations under international law. Former President Barack Obama, a gifted writer, released an evasive statement that starts with a throat-clearing caveat calling for “a return of all hostages” and refuses to name Israel as the agent behind the starvation of Gaza. No Democratic leader in Congress has called for the United States to cut ties with Israel, nor do they acknowledge that Israel unilaterally withdrew from the ceasefire with Hamas. [my emphasis] (1)
It may be an “opinion” piece. But that paragraph is reporting facts.
Michigan Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin was picked by Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer to deliver a response to Trump’s joint address to Congress in March. Her interview this week with Breaking Points shows what a dilemma mealy-mouthing about something like the current genocide is for Democrats, at least. (2) The Republicans, riding their own tidal wave of xenophobia and Christian Zionist zealotry, are mostly more than happy to support Israel’s current policy. The relevant portion begins at 11:00 in this video:
Israeli columnist Gideon Levy apparently sees no need to mealy-mouth about what is going on.
It is no longer possible to beat around the bush and avoid giving an answer. We can no longer hide, evade, mumble, mollify and obscure. Nor can we hang on to legal sophistry about the "question of intent" or to wait for the ruling of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which may only be handed down once it's too late.
It's already too late. That is why the time has come to call the horror by its name – and its full name is genocide, the extermination of a people. There is no other way to describe it. In front of our horrified eyes, Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip. It did not begin now; it began in 1948. Now, however, sufficient evidence has accumulated to call the monstrous child in the Gaza Strip by its full name. [my emphasis] (3)
Levy is commenting on recent reports by the Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI).
This marks the first time that Israeli human rights groups have officially determined that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The groups are now calling on the international community to take action against the Israeli government to stop these atrocities.
The B'Tselem report opens with a strong condemnation of Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel, noting that the group's assault included numerous war crimes and likely crimes against humanity.
The report also states that Israel's response was exceptionally brutal, resulting in widespread killing, destruction, displacement and starvation on a massive scale. …
"Statements by senior Israeli decision-makers about the nature of the assault on Gaza have expressed genocidal intent throughout," it added. [my emphasis]
Intent is a key element of the crime of genocide as defined by the UN Genocide Convention of 1948. This has been the hardest element to establish in considering whether events of mass killing or ethnic cleansing are part of a genocide. Both are war crimes but by themselves don’t fulfill the standard of genocide.
Numerous Israeli leaders have openly expressed genocidal intent. And actions can also speak for themselves. As Levy writes:
When you destroy 33 out of 35 hospitals – the intent is transparent, and the debate is over. When you systematically erase entire neighborhoods, villages and cities – the doubts as to your intentions have come to an end. When you kill dozens of people every day waiting in line for food – the method has been proven beyond any doubt. When you use starvation as a weapon – no question marks exist any longer.
Nothing is missing any longer to understand that what is happening in Gaza is not the collateral damage of an ugly war – it is the objective. The mass starvation, destruction and death are the goal, and from here the path to the conclusion is short: genocide. [my emphasis]
(4) B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel (2025): Our Genocide: B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel: Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip 07/28/2025. <https://www.btselem.org/press_releases/20250728_our_genocide> (Accessed: 2025-31-07).
The Gaza genocide and ethnic cleansing is continuing. And it’s being reported live on television for the world to see. Here’s a report from Owen Jones discussing that set of facts: (1)
Omer Bartov is an Israeli-American historian and one of the actual scholarly experts on the exceptionally grim subject of genocide. In retrospect, when we look back at the early statements of Israeli officials immediately after the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, those statements look like part of a genocidal plan.
Bartov here explains why he was initially reserved in describing this as a genocide until he saw a pattern of action by the Israel government and armed forces that confirmed the genocidal intent of those earlier statements. (2)
In this grim field, “ethnic cleansing” can be a feature of genocide and is a crime in itself. But the UN Genocide Convention does not make ethnic cleansing itself equivalent to genocide. It’s a comment on the sad state of humanity that it was only after the Second World War that ethnic cleansing came to be considered an illegitimate action. The peace treaties after the First World War, the Potsdam Agreement among the Allies during the Second World War, and the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (aka, the Hitler-Stalin Pact) of 1939 all endorsed large-scale ethnic cleansing. (3)
The United States has been supporting this genocide under both Joe Biden and Donald Trump. There is no excuse for either of them for doing so.
Germany is the second-largest military supplier of Israel. And it’s now in the 2025 version of the long process of “working through” the Holocaust. A large part of that effort has been to support the State of Israel with minimal criticism. That has the perverse result that now Germany finds itself supporting a very public genocide that has gone on for a year and a half and gets worse by the day.
Bartov comments in his interview about something which I had not heard addressed this way until now. He claims that various museums and historical groups that focus on Holocaust remembrance have declined to criticize the current genocide under way. He makes a comment that surprised me, which is that he thinks it’s very possible going forward that while Holocaust studies and genocide studies have been interconnected fields, that they may now become two separate fields that don’t actively cooperate and interact with each other as they have in the past.
It has long been a matter of discussion whether the Holocaust is a particularly Jewish issue or a more general one. The ecumenical theologian Hans Küng discussed the Jewish religious angle on that question in his 1995 book Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow, three decades ago. And the discussion continues to evolve. Yehuda Bauer, a leading Holocaust scholar who headed Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum’s International Institute for Holocaust Research from 1995-2000 and founded the Holocaust and Genocide Studies journal, insisted that the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust such as gays, Sinti and Roma, and the developmentally disabled be understood as victims of the Holocaust.
Bauer passed away in 2024. In December 2023, he wrote:
History does not repeat itself, and we would agree that the events of October 7, however horrific, are distinct from the Holocaust. Hamas, whatever its murderous ideology and the unimaginable atrocities it has committed, should not be seen as a modern-day reincarnation of the Nazis. In contrast to the popular tendency to view the Holocaust and that Black Shabbat [October 7 Hamas attack] as almost equivalent, comparative analysis in history entails the recognition of both similarities and differences. While the two terrible events share certain similarities, such as the chilling brutality of the killings, the underlying ideological hatred, and even the voices that deny these crimes, fundamental differences between the two events are immense. (4)
(2) "I'm a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It": Prof Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza. Democracy Now! YouTube channel 07/17/2025. <https://youtu.be/QfmW0AQWV5E?si=m5gkWCXfbG4yW2tx> (Accessed: 2025-25-07).
(3) Schwartz, Michael (2013): Ethnische „Säuberungen“ in der Moderne. Globale Wechselwirkungen nationalistischer und rassistischer Gewaltpolitik im 19. Und 20. Jahrhundert. München: Oldenbourg.
(4) Bauer, Yehuda (2023): Preserving historical integrity: a call to avoid politicising the Holocaust. Jewish Chronicle 12/08/2023. (Accessed: 2025-25-07).
