[Salon] Famine’s Long Shadow



https://jewishcurrents.org/famines-long-shadow-gaza-starvation

Famine’s Long Shadow

Even if food is surged into Gaza today, the history of weaponized mass starvation shows that the social aftershocks will reverberate for generations.

Alex de Waal
October 6, 2025

Palestinians struggle to access food in the northern Gaza Strip, June 16th, 2025.

Jehad Alshrafi/AP Photo

On August 22nd, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification mechanism, affiliated with the United Nations (UN), reported that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza had officially passed the “famine” threshold. The same day, the United States government’s own Famine Early Warning Systems Network quietly confirmed this finding, noting that there was good evidence to believe that in Gaza, “mortality from the interaction of hunger and disease” was at famine levels.

For months, Gaza’s descent into famine had been readily reversible. Shortly after October 7th, 2023, Israel imposed a total blockade on the enclave, and desperate hunger spread through the population. But the opening of aid crossings could rapidly relieve the situation, as became clear in April 2024, when warnings of imminent famine led US President Joe Biden to insist that Israel let more aid in, pulling Gaza back from the brink. In the subsequent months, a further tightening of the siege and continued displacement again brought Gaza close to famine. But the ceasefire this January was able to prevent the worst after the UN and its partner agencies were able to scale up their food distributions to almost 400 sites across Gaza. As a result, when Ramadan began at the end of February, Palestinians were able to break their daily fasts with communal meals at sundown.

Israel again put an end to this reprieve on March 3rd, when it violated the ceasefire and restarted its assault on Gaza, imposing nearly 80 days of total blockade. Afterward, it permitted only a limited aid effort. At that time, resuming the UN-led humanitarian system could still have stopped the onset of full-blown famine, but Israel did not allow this, instead putting a new organization, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), at the forefront of delivering rations. The GHF turned out to be an experiment in mass starvation, running just four ration stations in hard-to-reach locations in military zones. Palestinians trying to get food there must face the dangers of both Israeli military posts and the GHF’s own private security guards, who use live ammunition as a means of crowd control and have already killed more than 1,300 aid-seekers. By July, the worst-case scenario had unfolded, with “catastrophic food insecurity” turning into outright famine.

Even now, the means to end the hunger are readily at hand. The UN and experienced humanitarian agencies have the resources, expertise, and plans to provide food and medicine, and are standing ready just a few miles away. Should Israel give the signal, the basic survival needs of many Palestinians in Gaza could be met within days. But even if food is surged into Gaza today—as it must be—irreparable harms have already been done to those who have endured prolonged starvation. We know from history that a famine’s legacy is generations long, its traumas remaining imprinted on the bodies of the survivors even after sustenance is at hand. In the immediate term, severely acutely malnourished children cannot be saved by food alone—their starvation is so advanced that they need specialized hospital care. In the longer term, children who are malnourished in their first thousand days of life, or in utero, face “potentially irreparable physical and neurocognitive damage,” including increased susceptibility to a range of chronic diseases as adults. The collective harms of famine are no less grave. As humans starve, our bodies seek out and consume every reserve of fat, followed by muscle and essential organs. The drive for food then becomes all-consuming. Hunger overrides social norms as people are forced to scrabble and fight for food. The memoirs of those who have been through starvation—whether during the Great Hunger of Ireland, or the siege of Biafra, Nigeria, or the Khmer Rouge’s Year Zero—recount this experience of dehumanization in identical terms. In Survival in Auschwitz, for instance, Primo Levi describes a “way of eating on our feet, furiously, burning our mouths and throats, without time to breathe” as “‘fressen,’ the way of eating of animals” rather than “‘essen,’ the human way of eating, seated in front of a table, religiously.”

Indeed, because food is not just a source of nutrition but also what binds together families and communities, scholars of mass starvation have long found that wherever famine unfolds, it threatens not just individual lives but also a society’s way of life. The colonial-era anthropologist Audrey Richards describes an “accordion effect” whereby as food becomes scarce, the ambit of social reciprocity contracts. Survivors around the world have vividly catalogued this experience. The Russian sociologist Pitrim Sorokin, who lived through the famine of the 1920s, writes that extreme hunger “makes a norm of abnormality,” forcing people to break every social taboo to try to stay alive—eating animal food, stealing from neighbors, and making terrible choices over which child will get food or medicine and which will not. In Lydia Ginzburg’s fictionalized memoir of the siege of Leningrad during World War II, the narrator recounts how social norms disappeared from the city as food became all but impossible to find: “Every possible relationship—comradeship, discipleship, friendship, love—fell away like leaves.” In Hungry Bengal, historian Janam Mukherjee explores how the vast toll of the 1943 famine began to dull Bengalis to the suffering of their neighbors. As corpses in the street became a normal sight, Mukherjee writes, “indifference to the fate of the dead began to reign.” People would step over the dead and dying, and funeral rites were reduced to the barest minimum. In the 1970s, after living among the Ik people of Uganda during a famine, the anthropologist Colin Turnbull similarly described how cultural mores were abandoned under the pressures of starvation.

My own 1980s field research on starvation in Darfur, Sudan, echoed these findings. That famine was caused by drought, poverty, and the negligence of the government—sins of omission rather than crimes of commission. Still, about 1 in 20 residents of Darfur perished from hunger and disease. Initially, the social accordion expanded as people provided relief to strangers and called on the generosity of distant relatives, reviving networks of kinship. But as the famine tightened its grip, the accordion contracted. The destitute could find alms only among their immediate family; traders ruthlessly exploited the chance to buy up cheap cattle; wild foods, customarily free for all, were now jealously hoarded; and communities began turning against one another. At the time, I remember an elderly Arab sheikh named Hilal Mohamed telling me how the world he knew, in which camel herders and villagers lived together sharing the land and communities were bound by shared norms, was coming to an end. In his bones he knew what the hunger portended. More than anything else, he understood famine as a loss of dignity, kinship, and livelihoods—the end of a way of life.

Once famine shredded the social fabric, strife and violence followed. In Darfur, while people correctly blamed the government for their starvation—the calamity was popularly called “Nimeiri’s hunger” after the then-president Jaafar Nimeiri—they also nursed grievances against one another. The quotidian cruelties of survival turned farmers against nomads and locals against refugees. Even once the famine was over, those wounds festered, leading to fierce clashes over land. So it came to be that 20 years after the famine upended his clan’s way of life, Hilal Mohamed’s son Musa became the head of the Janjaweed militia, notorious for genocidal massacres in Darfur. This recalled older histories of post-famine violence: Four years after the Bengal famine, for instance, that region too was torn apart by intercommunal riots, a spark for the partition of the subcontinent. Mukherjee connects the two traumas, writing that “these are the signs of a society dehumanized by abounding violence, death, and impunity. These are the signs of an already tortured society.” Mukherjee put his stress on “already,” but it is his word “torture” that is particularly evocative here, helping us make sense of the intentions of the men who make famines.

As the legal scholar Tom Dannenbaum explains, this logic of torture is also at work in siege famines. Israel’s stated justification for starving Palestinians is to besiege Hamas. But it is well established—and a matter of common sense—that in famine it is the men with guns who suffer last. In this sense, siege starvation is a military tactic that selectively targets civilians, beginning with the frail, sick, and poor and expanding from there. This is precisely what we are now seeing in Gaza, where starvation is slowly creeping its way up through the social layers—laborers, artisans, nurses and doctors, middle class people, academics. As hunger spreads, Dannenbaum writes, it pits its “victims’ biological imperatives against their capacities to formulate and act on higher-order desires, political commitments, and even love.” In Gaza, this looks like people being reduced to the indignities of begging or scavenging for crumbs in piles of garbage, or selling their last treasured possessions for a meal, or risking their lives in the desperate rush to grab rations from the GHF’s centers, or facing inhuman situations like watching children starve or deciding which patients to apportion scarce medical resources to. When we hear starving Palestinians describe these experiences of profound humiliation, in stories painfully gathered by journalists (who are hungry themselves, and living in fear for their lives), we recognize the unmistakable beginnings of an engineered societal breakdown, whose aftershocks will reverberate long beyond the food shortages from which it springs.


Bread and medicine resolve the immediate harms of famine. Attending to the deeper damage requires a long-term project of societal repair. The imprints of child malnutrition and the traumas of starvation on family and community may never be fully healed, but the place to start is acknowledging the scope of the harms and shaping post-conflict reconstruction around an agenda of restorative justice. Such a program must include lifelong medical care, counseling, and other necessities to build a sense of security, and the rehabilitation of community institutions to revive spaces of mutual support. More broadly, redressing the visceral disempowerment of famine calls for ending the lethal politics that led to the famine in the first place, which—in nations from Ireland to Ukraine to India—has looked like winning independence from a colonial oppressor and attempting to build democracy as a safeguard against a government that could permit mass hunger.

Moreover, famine’s assault on dignity and agency demands that we call to account those who inflicted it. Our images of starvation are usually only of the victims; those who plan and implement it are off-screen, and we describe the outcome without naming the act. But “to starve” is a transitive verb: something people do to one another, like torture or murder. Colonial counterinsurgencies openly used hunger as a weapon; Britain’s campaign in 1950s Malaya was candidly called “Operation Starvation”; France used food denial in Algeria and Indochina; and all the major powers, including the United States, blockaded their enemies, regarding hungry civilians as acceptable in both World Wars and in countries such as Bangladesh during the Cold War. The great powers’ fondness for imposing hunger meant that the prohibition on starvation as an instrument of war was a latecomer to international humanitarian law, formulated only in the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions. Even afterward, the US regarded hungry Iraqi children as a price worth paying for weakening Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and starvation crimes remained unprosecuted in the tribunals for justice in former Yugoslavia as well as Cambodia. Providing justice to famine survivors will require moving past this unwillingness to enshrine a measure of legal accountability for the harms they have suffered.

Lastly, measures for restorative justice—apologies and reparation, guarantees of non-recurrence, and memorialization—are an obligation if we are to address famine’s generational impacts. This is largely unexplored territory, but there are a few examples to draw from. More than a century after its 1904 genocidal starvation of the Herero and Nama of Southwest Africa (now Namibia), Germany apologized and offered compensation to survivors. And in 1997, more than a hundred years after the Great Hunger in Ireland in the 1840s and after the great-grandchildren of survivors began the first public memorialization of the famine, the British government issued an apology for having “failed [the Irish] people” (although it offered no reparation for its wrongs). These are still the exceptions, however, and man-made famines remain history’s greatest unacknowledged crimes. Even today, a statue of one of the most notorious agents of mass starvation in India, Robert Clive, stands in central London; Russia refuses to admit its responsibility for the Holodomor and has destroyed memorials to its victims when it occupies Ukrainian towns; and Israel, with US backing, continues to starve Palestinians in Gaza, quibbling over details rather than admitting what is in front of all our eyes. The road to truly confronting the deep harms of mass starvation is still long, and the work has hardly begun.

image.jpg

Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation and research professor at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. He has worked on famine, conflict, and related issues since the 1980s as a researcher and practitioner. Books include The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa (2015), Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine (2017), and New Pandemics, Old Politics (2021).




This archive was generated by a fusion of Pipermail (Mailman edition) and MHonArc.