For many months, it has been beyond reasonable doubt that the Israeli government, the Israeli military, sections of Israeli politics and society as well as their aiders and abetters abroad, have been deliberately starving the population of Gaza with a view to forcing the population either to flee or to face intensifying misery and ultimately an agonizing death.
According to Hitler, Poland was persecuting Germans and that justified their invasion (and by consequence, the ghetto.)
"Germans in Poland are persecuted with a bloody terror and are driven from their homes. The series of border violations, which are unbearable to a great power, prove that the Poles no longer are willing to respect the German frontier"
Thank you for writing this, Adam. It needed to be said, though the tragedy of it all is beyond reckoning. We are witnessing in real time the moral collapse of so many societies around the world, not just Israel. I don't know what is going to happen but nothing good.
How much cognitive dissonance or hypocrisy or both can Western politicians bear? A lot! It’s so mind boggling…and disgusting.
I live in Germany and I just cannot believe politicians here continue to back up Israel with such an unshakeable conviction. Never thought something like this would be possible in this otherwise very civil society.
First I should say that much of my understanding of Settler Colonialism was through reading othersources in conjunction with Adam's excellent The Wages of Destruction.
But I want to discuss the very slow uptake of the "genocide" accusation, since the Jan 2024 ICJ conclusions.
The pro-Israeli grip on media was astonishing for 18 months. When Israel was killing some 500 people a day with bombs almost nothing was said. By contrast almost every BBC news story recently reported how 45 Gazans had been shot in queues.
Every single major western country was complicit in the worst crime - the effective shutting down of UNWRA, first by accepting the Israeli lies (largely based on torture admissions) of UNWRA worker involvement in October 7th. Then by immediately cutting funding to UNWRA (traditionally the western aid guilt trip to apologise for Israel's many bad actions). Then allowing Israel to ban UNWRA without protest. And most of all complicit in the cover up of the ICJ decision by timing the whole fake story real punishment for the day of the decision. All western media were complicit in this coverup - there was almost no reporting of the Genocide ruling and no mention of the coincidence of the fake UNWRA story timing.
If football fans, Jurgen Klopp or Liverpool want to know why someone leaked his departure from the club 5 months early on the morning of that particular day when neither had a press statement ready, now they know.
So what took the world so long to come around (or rather to come a tiny part of the way to reality)? Why is Adam writing this now and not in January 2024 or October 2023? (And yes he is still way ahead of most commentators, but he is smarter than most too).
And I do mean this as a question not a criticism.
I suppose it took 30+ years for a proper understanding of the holocaust to come about, pushed by an elite set of western jewish academics and writers. The holocaust of the Roma (who have never had that kind of publicity) and other victims is still largely unknown.
And why should we care about Gazans, and not Ukrainians dragged off the streets to die at the front line (about 1.3m so far) or Syrians slaughtered by the Takfiri that have been backed by western powers (+Israel +Turkey) for decades? Because anyone reading past the headlines of any Western media has known what goes on in Palestine. Anyone wandering through a University town on a saturday has seen the pro-Palestine demonstrations for 50 years. Its on instagram FFS. Whereas western responsibility in Ukraine, Syria, and I suspect much of Africa is a very very well kept secret.
Spot on. With the undeniable horror of images of skeletal children leaking into mainstream news sources, many erstwhile apologists for and abettors of this genocide are beginning to wring their hands and seek to salvage some moral credibility for themselves (and not least to dodge legal charges of complicity in some cases). Glenn Greenwald did an exemplary takedown of such late-in-the-day conversions to horror at the starvation of Gaza, focusing on erstwhile Israel cheerleader Amy Klobuchar: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fFRvEhFP-lA
“Putting the Palestinians on a diet” has been a well-documented policy of Israel since the siege of Gaza was intensified in 2007. What we have seen since 7 October 2023 is just the ratcheting-up of a long-standing tactic as Israel’s objective shifts from brutalization and suppression of the population to complete ethnic cleansing, with genocide playing a key role. Since at least the early 1990s Israel has engaged in destroying agriculture and livestock, as well as food production and water purification infrastructure, while barring Gazans from fishing their own territorial waters. This viciously manufactured and imposed famine has been long in the making.
Incidentally, I was wondering when (or if) Professor Tooze would address the genocide directly, and take a moral stance on it. He was rather mealy-mouthed about his own university’s harsh repression of student anti-genocide protesters last year, and I’ve not seen him comment on Columbia’s continuing abject servility to the ever more draconian demands the Israel lobby and the Trump administration are making on universities (apologies to him if I’ve missed an intervention on this matter). So it’s good to see a clear stance being taken here. Yet it arrives just as it’s become reasonably safe for (some) mainstream commentators and political figures to publicly deplore the deliberate starvation of Gaza’s population. As Omar El Akkad said: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.
Tooze has been very clear about his feelings on Columbia on twitter since the whole situation began, though I don’t think he’s written about it in chart book.
Thanks again for calling this out and making the very plain and obvious parallels to the Warsaw Ghetto. I can imagine how difficult it must be living under the egregious threat from McCarthyite intimidation, persecution and Zionist libels whirling around Columbia, which was recently forced to adopt the draconian IHRA definition of antisemitism that attempts to lump legitimate criticism of Israel, Zionism and comparisons to Nazism as "antisemitic."
We should also not forget the shameful record of German academia in the face of the Gleichschaltung - the forcible alignment of cultural and educational institutions with Nazi ideology and the expulsion of thousands of Jewish academics. Very few among German academics took a stand against the Nazis and jeopardised their careers, the economist Röpke a rare exception. I imagine many US academics are already half packed waiting for the knock on the door from ICE or letter from the DHS declaring them a threat to national security.
There was no such thing as McCarthy without Roy Cohn. There was no Feminism without Steinem and Friedan. There was no "weather underground" without bernardine dohrn.
There was no chesa boudin without chesa boudin if I may be or am so bold.
And then there's "multiculturalism" with the spectre woman as its head. Why, Europe will not survive without "multiculturalism." Funny how it's the transplanting of third-world Muslim populations into white European populations that make up most of "multiculturalism."
Yessir, both have wronged the Jewish. They have that in common.
I've known many Jews and I particularly liked them all. There are questions need to be asked.
The only question I have is, how many hamas are there left to be killt.
"If you have been in these conversations, you will have heard the retort: “Don’t criticize Israel, don’t even mention the criminal policy of its government, unless you are also willing to discuss horrors being inflicted elsewhere.”
Adam, why are you reasoning with the supporters of genocide? It's a bit like debating a Nazi about the Holocaust. Like it or not, Israel is this generation's Nazi Germany only more brazen and more universally supported by every Western government and therefore much more dangerous to humanity.
This isn't something we can stop by convincing the genociders they are wrong. They know very well what they are doing despite their constant protests. It can only be solved by forcefully stopping them. Engaging with their perverted sophistry almost lends them credibility.
Adam: Thank you so much for exposing the mendacity and bad faith of Israel's cheerleaders who, as usual, reach for "whataboutism" as their first line defence. By refusing to pull any punches, you have focused a powerful and irrefutable light on the war crimes Israel is deliberately committing against the civilian population of Gaza.
A powerful piece which illustrates the hypocrisy of many politicians preach morality and the teaching of their respective religion only for them to back the inhumane suffering of the people of Gaza. This isn’t a newly created crisis; it has been going on for years. The BBC documentary about Gaza, bring a cage is available to stream, but ignorance is easier for some.
In a comment on this essay, a reader complains about Professor Tooze's "utter lack of context". He then goes on to inform us that "Israel wants safety from Gazans not to acquire their territory."
In aid of supplying context, here is an excerpt from an article in The Guardian on 24 July 2025.
"A group of far-right Israeli politicians and settlers met in parliament this week to discuss a plan to displace Palestinians from Gaza, annex the territory and turn it into a hi-tech, luxury resort city for Israelis.
The scheme, titled “The master plan for settlement in the Gaza Strip”, envisions the construction of 850,000 housing units, construction of hi-tech “smart cities” that trade cryptocurrency, and a metro system that runs across the territory. ... The text of the plan, which boasts of the economic benefits to Israel, said: “The right of the people of Israel to settle, develop and preserve this land is not just a historical right – it is a national and security obligation.”
The plan, seen by the Guardian, would require Gaza’s existing population of about 2 million to be emptied out. Legal experts warn that forcible displacement on such a scale would be tantamount to ethnic cleansing.
Michael Sfard, one of Israel’s leading human rights lawyers, said: “This is a plan for ethnic cleansing. Under international law, this would amount to a crime against humanity because deportation is a war crime when committed on a small scale and a crime against humanity when it is committed on a massive scale.”
The plan was discussed on Tuesday [July 22] in the Knesset during a conference called “The riviera in Gaza: from vision to reality”. Among the speakers was the minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich,... and the settler activist Daniella Weiss.
Weiss told the Guardian over the phone: “Gazans will not remain there. They will go to other countries. Supporters of Hamas we will fight. But those who want to live a normal life, they will have to leave Gaza because of the 7 October attack.” Palestinians would be relocated to Egypt and other unspecified “African countries”, she added.
What Tooze is reluctant to say that the war in Gaza would be over in a minute if Hamas surrendered and returned the hostages. This may be the first “genocide” that the victim can end the conflict on its own.
Blood libel. Israel gleefully slaughters children that have nothing to do with the "Hamas" bogeyman.
I am also struck by the desperation of this hasbara operation. This "howard shawn" account only subscribes to one substack. Is the hasbara apparatus spread so thin that they can't pepper in a few more subscriptions to make it seem authentic? Utterly pathetic.
The writer is lying repeatedly. The food delivered to Gaza wa kidnapped by Gamas and used as currency to recruit terrorists to Hamas.
The starvation could stop in 5 minutes we're the very well fed Hamas to Kay down their arms and release the kidnapped civilians and murdered children and women they keep as bargaining chips
Whoever condemns israel is a terrorists supporter. Especially you mr Tooz a very active meme of the antisemitic forces in Colombia uni.
A keyword search shows that your comment is the only one, and no mention in the article, of "Hamas". For Tooze to completely ignore their role in the food crisis makes it difficult to view the rest of this story as intellectually honest. The fact is - the humanitarian aid would be vastly more effective if Hamas stopped sabotaging the delivery.
You’ve swallowed the Hasbara lock, stock and barrel, and are regurgitating it unmasticated. All the investigations into aid distribution show that it is Israel that is blocking and sabotaging it, including backing and protecting ISIS-linked gangs as they ransack aid trucks. But I suppose you’d reflexively claim that all such reports (by the UN, Amnesty, HRW, Red Cross, etc.) are written by Hamas. So I don’t know why I waste my breath. Enjoy your genocide.
Mr. Heffernan's reply to your comment is correct. Before telling us about the purported "sabotage of humanitarian aid" by Hamas, you might want to have a look at this NYT article published yesterday: "No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say." (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/world/middleeast/hamas-un-aid-theft.html).
Yes, of course I saw that. If only the NYT had not squandered it's reputation in recent years, maybe more people would be able to read something like that as useful.
Wow- the NYT - if there ever was a reliable source, it'is this one. Seriously? There is also no proof that aliens do not exist or for that matter, that god does. There are lots of proofs that Hamas is taking over the aid and reselling it at a huge profit but who cares if you can blame jews.
This goes back to my original point- if you ignore Hamas deeds, you are complicit of terrorism. It's very simple. You are complicit of the murderous, rapists creatures who happily sacrifice their brethren and sisters. very very simple.
Thank you for your comment. But I think you may have overlooked the SOURCE of the Times' rapportage that you dismiss. Or do you think the judgement of "Israeli military officials" is unreliable as well?
As for "complicity", I think all of us should find clarity in the final sentence in Professor Tooze's essay : "Anyone deflecting from the clear responsibility of the Israeli state for this mass starvation of two million people, anyone resorting to euphemisms about “crises” makes themselves complicit in this historic crime."
The WSJ was a lot closer to the truth. All of the parties, including the UN, the Israelis, and Hamas share the blame. The problem I have with Tooze is framing as the (ever evil) Jews purposely want to starve, to murder. Jew hatred.
Quite the contrary. Anyone ignoring the fact that Hamas is elected and supported by 70% of the Gaza population and that terror is enmeshed in the population is indeed complicit with murder. But it's only Jews so why bother.
Would you allow me to add three more percentages to the one in your comment?
In March 2025 an Israeli firm, Geocartography Knowledge Group, polled a large sample (1,005 individuals) of Jewish Israelis on questions related to the treatment of Palestinians.
82% of respondents favoured the forcible removal of Palestinians from Gaza (aka ethnic cleansing).
56% of respondants favoured the expulsion from Israel of Israeli citizens of Arab descent.
47% of respondents said the IDF should follow the biblical "Amalek" injunction to kill all inhabitants of conquered territory (aka Gaza).
You can readily find details of this poll, along with the representative character of the sample of Jewish Israelis polled, in a report in Haaretz, 3 June 2025: "A Grim Poll Showed Most Jewish Israelis Support Expelling Gazans. It's Brutal – and It's True."
The house of the niece of a friend of mine was entered on 2023 October 7 by Hamas fighters. First they cut of the fingers of the father (the niece’s husband) one by one and then killed him. The wife and children were forced to watch. Then they raped the mother, then they doused her in gasoline and set her on fire. The children were killed only after this.
The stated goal of Hamas is to wipe Israel off the map. The stated goal of Israel is secure its continued existence.
It is heart-rending to see the starvation in Gaza, but it is intellectually dishonest not to mention that the culprit for it is Hamas. Bringing in the statistics about starvation over the world brings this article to the convenient space of putting Israel into the company of Northern Nigeria, but it remains propaganda without also telling that Hamas is here playing the role of Rome annihilating Carthage, Cortez annihilating Montezuma, Hitler annihilating Poland. Hamas may not have the strength, but the intent is clear.
And while on the topic of Hitler and Poland, also dragged into the article, the statement about the Nazis’ killing of Jewish vs non-Jewish Poles, namely that “[b]oth projects of mass murder were intense, but the Nazi extermination of Jews in Poland clearly aimed, from the outset, at total extermination” has an incorrect and self-serving insinuation: that the Nazis did not intend to exterminate the Poles. They did. From the outset. Only the timeline was different.
I do not think you really know what is happening on the ground in Gaza. Look not just at the photos of hungry looking children shown on world media - also look at the many more healthy looking children picking up aid packages. Your analysis is disappointingly one sided and lacks nuance.
Here's a suggestion: I'm sure you'd agree that it would help all of us to "really know what is happening on the ground in Gaza" if international journalists were allowed to report from there. I wonder why that is not happening? Is someone preventing independent journalists from entering Gaza? Who might that be?
FROM PETER BEINART: Just a couple of quotations from an essay in Haaretz by Nir Hasson. He talks about a doctor in Gaza who says that tens of thousands of people, mostly children, are what he calls moving skeletons, whose organs are collapsing, and have already entered the final stage of hunger. He quotes from a video of a man, a starving man, his pants held up by a rope, who is kneeling in the sand, trying to gather flour that was spilled in the sand. And the man is saying in the video, ‘I have 10 children, and they haven’t eaten anything for a week. I’m trying to sift the flour from the sand.’
So, I think the question for our rabbis to ask in the face of this is whether they believe in God. If the rabbis genuinely want to claim that this is Hamas’s fault, then they’re simply lying. They’re lying.
How it's been carried out is the fault of israel. There's only so much military retaliation can be justified by the 100% suprise attack on israel. And then there's the question of hamas achieving a 100% surprise attack on israel.
The israelis, it is known, have something called "intelligence agencies." They were caught unawares somehow. Totally, completely unawares.
No "journalism" has pursued that total surprise. It's been forgotten. No one ever asks about it.
I haven't paid much attention to the Gaza situation, but I was under the impression that Israel's war aim was to eliminate hamas. So how many hamas are there still need to be killt.
It is interesting to see footage of the ruins of Gaza. They look exactly like the ruins of World War II Europe.
A very tough message for supporters of Israel but this needed saying. The Warsaw ghetto is being recreated before our very eyes. So tragic.
Was the Warsaw ghetto holding German hostages and did it commit a massacre of the German people?
According to Hitler, Poland was persecuting Germans and that justified their invasion (and by consequence, the ghetto.)
"Germans in Poland are persecuted with a bloody terror and are driven from their homes. The series of border violations, which are unbearable to a great power, prove that the Poles no longer are willing to respect the German frontier"
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0901.html
How many dead Germans would equal one dead Pole in your analogy? Is it the same ratio as dead Palestinians to Israelis?
It doesn’t and you know damn well why your analogy breaks down
Thank you for writing this, Adam. It needed to be said, though the tragedy of it all is beyond reckoning. We are witnessing in real time the moral collapse of so many societies around the world, not just Israel. I don't know what is going to happen but nothing good.
How much cognitive dissonance or hypocrisy or both can Western politicians bear? A lot! It’s so mind boggling…and disgusting.
I live in Germany and I just cannot believe politicians here continue to back up Israel with such an unshakeable conviction. Never thought something like this would be possible in this otherwise very civil society.
Thank you for this great piece.
Tooze anaylsed Germany's schizophrenia and moral hypocrisy on Gaza/Israel in a previous chartbook: https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-271-reasons-of-state-memory?
Thank you!
Because german politicians have no priority other than pleasing their American Master and getting the Americans to fight europe's fights for them.
Yeah, it's all America's fault, eh? Here's Germany's chance to break free.
Remember the face of chancellor Scholz standing beside Biden when he declared that the US will blow up Nord Stream?
They won't, any more than a dog will.
The dog may fear a cruel master, but even more than that, a dog fears no Master.
😩
Civilized you say? This is not what Goethe believed, apparently:
https://adeyinkamakinde.blogspot.com/2025/07/a-warning-from-history-goethe-and-folly.html
First I should say that much of my understanding of Settler Colonialism was through reading othersources in conjunction with Adam's excellent The Wages of Destruction.
But I want to discuss the very slow uptake of the "genocide" accusation, since the Jan 2024 ICJ conclusions.
The pro-Israeli grip on media was astonishing for 18 months. When Israel was killing some 500 people a day with bombs almost nothing was said. By contrast almost every BBC news story recently reported how 45 Gazans had been shot in queues.
Every single major western country was complicit in the worst crime - the effective shutting down of UNWRA, first by accepting the Israeli lies (largely based on torture admissions) of UNWRA worker involvement in October 7th. Then by immediately cutting funding to UNWRA (traditionally the western aid guilt trip to apologise for Israel's many bad actions). Then allowing Israel to ban UNWRA without protest. And most of all complicit in the cover up of the ICJ decision by timing the whole fake story real punishment for the day of the decision. All western media were complicit in this coverup - there was almost no reporting of the Genocide ruling and no mention of the coincidence of the fake UNWRA story timing.
If football fans, Jurgen Klopp or Liverpool want to know why someone leaked his departure from the club 5 months early on the morning of that particular day when neither had a press statement ready, now they know.
So what took the world so long to come around (or rather to come a tiny part of the way to reality)? Why is Adam writing this now and not in January 2024 or October 2023? (And yes he is still way ahead of most commentators, but he is smarter than most too).
And I do mean this as a question not a criticism.
I suppose it took 30+ years for a proper understanding of the holocaust to come about, pushed by an elite set of western jewish academics and writers. The holocaust of the Roma (who have never had that kind of publicity) and other victims is still largely unknown.
And why should we care about Gazans, and not Ukrainians dragged off the streets to die at the front line (about 1.3m so far) or Syrians slaughtered by the Takfiri that have been backed by western powers (+Israel +Turkey) for decades? Because anyone reading past the headlines of any Western media has known what goes on in Palestine. Anyone wandering through a University town on a saturday has seen the pro-Palestine demonstrations for 50 years. Its on instagram FFS. Whereas western responsibility in Ukraine, Syria, and I suspect much of Africa is a very very well kept secret.
Spot on. With the undeniable horror of images of skeletal children leaking into mainstream news sources, many erstwhile apologists for and abettors of this genocide are beginning to wring their hands and seek to salvage some moral credibility for themselves (and not least to dodge legal charges of complicity in some cases). Glenn Greenwald did an exemplary takedown of such late-in-the-day conversions to horror at the starvation of Gaza, focusing on erstwhile Israel cheerleader Amy Klobuchar: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fFRvEhFP-lA
It has taken 19 months to make it more embarrassing to defend Israel than chide them with careful words (Macron, Starmer etc).
I am happy to remind the wider public that Professor Tooze was one of the authors of
"The principle of human dignity must apply to all people", The Guardian, 23 Nov 2023
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/22/the-principle-of-human-dignity-must-apply-to-all-people
This caused kind of a storm and some of the dregs of mankind despicably called him an "antisemite".
“Putting the Palestinians on a diet” has been a well-documented policy of Israel since the siege of Gaza was intensified in 2007. What we have seen since 7 October 2023 is just the ratcheting-up of a long-standing tactic as Israel’s objective shifts from brutalization and suppression of the population to complete ethnic cleansing, with genocide playing a key role. Since at least the early 1990s Israel has engaged in destroying agriculture and livestock, as well as food production and water purification infrastructure, while barring Gazans from fishing their own territorial waters. This viciously manufactured and imposed famine has been long in the making.
Incidentally, I was wondering when (or if) Professor Tooze would address the genocide directly, and take a moral stance on it. He was rather mealy-mouthed about his own university’s harsh repression of student anti-genocide protesters last year, and I’ve not seen him comment on Columbia’s continuing abject servility to the ever more draconian demands the Israel lobby and the Trump administration are making on universities (apologies to him if I’ve missed an intervention on this matter). So it’s good to see a clear stance being taken here. Yet it arrives just as it’s become reasonably safe for (some) mainstream commentators and political figures to publicly deplore the deliberate starvation of Gaza’s population. As Omar El Akkad said: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.
I am happy to remind the wider public that Professor Tooze was one of the authors of
"The principle of human dignity must apply to all people", The Guardian, 23 Nov 2023
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/22/the-principle-of-human-dignity-must-apply-to-all-people
This caused kind of a storm and some of the dregs of mankind despicably called him an "antisemite".
He addressed the long history of Gaza's de-development in an earlier chartbook: https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-245-gaza-beyond-de-development
Tooze has been very clear about his feelings on Columbia on twitter since the whole situation began, though I don’t think he’s written about it in chart book.
He has also set out the thinking from which a genocide conclusion is obvious without actually saying something direct.
To be fair anyone with a public life has to be cautious and avoid direct statements - free speech does not exist.
Watching Adam Tooze's footwork is interesting.
They make films about this.
This is the Matrix after all. Or 1984 if you prefer.
Adam, thank you for your clear message and your continued straight talk on Gaza throughout the last 2 years!
Thanks again for calling this out and making the very plain and obvious parallels to the Warsaw Ghetto. I can imagine how difficult it must be living under the egregious threat from McCarthyite intimidation, persecution and Zionist libels whirling around Columbia, which was recently forced to adopt the draconian IHRA definition of antisemitism that attempts to lump legitimate criticism of Israel, Zionism and comparisons to Nazism as "antisemitic."
We should also not forget the shameful record of German academia in the face of the Gleichschaltung - the forcible alignment of cultural and educational institutions with Nazi ideology and the expulsion of thousands of Jewish academics. Very few among German academics took a stand against the Nazis and jeopardised their careers, the economist Röpke a rare exception. I imagine many US academics are already half packed waiting for the knock on the door from ICE or letter from the DHS declaring them a threat to national security.
There was no such thing as McCarthy without Roy Cohn. There was no Feminism without Steinem and Friedan. There was no "weather underground" without bernardine dohrn.
There was no chesa boudin without chesa boudin if I may be or am so bold.
And then there's "multiculturalism" with the spectre woman as its head. Why, Europe will not survive without "multiculturalism." Funny how it's the transplanting of third-world Muslim populations into white European populations that make up most of "multiculturalism."
Yessir, both have wronged the Jewish. They have that in common.
I've known many Jews and I particularly liked them all. There are questions need to be asked.
The only question I have is, how many hamas are there left to be killt.
"If you have been in these conversations, you will have heard the retort: “Don’t criticize Israel, don’t even mention the criminal policy of its government, unless you are also willing to discuss horrors being inflicted elsewhere.”
Adam, why are you reasoning with the supporters of genocide? It's a bit like debating a Nazi about the Holocaust. Like it or not, Israel is this generation's Nazi Germany only more brazen and more universally supported by every Western government and therefore much more dangerous to humanity.
This isn't something we can stop by convincing the genociders they are wrong. They know very well what they are doing despite their constant protests. It can only be solved by forcefully stopping them. Engaging with their perverted sophistry almost lends them credibility.
Adam: Thank you so much for exposing the mendacity and bad faith of Israel's cheerleaders who, as usual, reach for "whataboutism" as their first line defence. By refusing to pull any punches, you have focused a powerful and irrefutable light on the war crimes Israel is deliberately committing against the civilian population of Gaza.
A powerful piece which illustrates the hypocrisy of many politicians preach morality and the teaching of their respective religion only for them to back the inhumane suffering of the people of Gaza. This isn’t a newly created crisis; it has been going on for years. The BBC documentary about Gaza, bring a cage is available to stream, but ignorance is easier for some.
In a comment on this essay, a reader complains about Professor Tooze's "utter lack of context". He then goes on to inform us that "Israel wants safety from Gazans not to acquire their territory."
In aid of supplying context, here is an excerpt from an article in The Guardian on 24 July 2025.
"A group of far-right Israeli politicians and settlers met in parliament this week to discuss a plan to displace Palestinians from Gaza, annex the territory and turn it into a hi-tech, luxury resort city for Israelis.
The scheme, titled “The master plan for settlement in the Gaza Strip”, envisions the construction of 850,000 housing units, construction of hi-tech “smart cities” that trade cryptocurrency, and a metro system that runs across the territory. ... The text of the plan, which boasts of the economic benefits to Israel, said: “The right of the people of Israel to settle, develop and preserve this land is not just a historical right – it is a national and security obligation.”
The plan, seen by the Guardian, would require Gaza’s existing population of about 2 million to be emptied out. Legal experts warn that forcible displacement on such a scale would be tantamount to ethnic cleansing.
Michael Sfard, one of Israel’s leading human rights lawyers, said: “This is a plan for ethnic cleansing. Under international law, this would amount to a crime against humanity because deportation is a war crime when committed on a small scale and a crime against humanity when it is committed on a massive scale.”
The plan was discussed on Tuesday [July 22] in the Knesset during a conference called “The riviera in Gaza: from vision to reality”. Among the speakers was the minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich,... and the settler activist Daniella Weiss.
Weiss told the Guardian over the phone: “Gazans will not remain there. They will go to other countries. Supporters of Hamas we will fight. But those who want to live a normal life, they will have to leave Gaza because of the 7 October attack.” Palestinians would be relocated to Egypt and other unspecified “African countries”, she added.
What Tooze is reluctant to say that the war in Gaza would be over in a minute if Hamas surrendered and returned the hostages. This may be the first “genocide” that the victim can end the conflict on its own.
Blood libel. Israel gleefully slaughters children that have nothing to do with the "Hamas" bogeyman.
I am also struck by the desperation of this hasbara operation. This "howard shawn" account only subscribes to one substack. Is the hasbara apparatus spread so thin that they can't pepper in a few more subscriptions to make it seem authentic? Utterly pathetic.
The libel is what you are saying, the libel against IDF
The writer is lying repeatedly. The food delivered to Gaza wa kidnapped by Gamas and used as currency to recruit terrorists to Hamas.
The starvation could stop in 5 minutes we're the very well fed Hamas to Kay down their arms and release the kidnapped civilians and murdered children and women they keep as bargaining chips
Whoever condemns israel is a terrorists supporter. Especially you mr Tooz a very active meme of the antisemitic forces in Colombia uni.
A keyword search shows that your comment is the only one, and no mention in the article, of "Hamas". For Tooze to completely ignore their role in the food crisis makes it difficult to view the rest of this story as intellectually honest. The fact is - the humanitarian aid would be vastly more effective if Hamas stopped sabotaging the delivery.
You’ve swallowed the Hasbara lock, stock and barrel, and are regurgitating it unmasticated. All the investigations into aid distribution show that it is Israel that is blocking and sabotaging it, including backing and protecting ISIS-linked gangs as they ransack aid trucks. But I suppose you’d reflexively claim that all such reports (by the UN, Amnesty, HRW, Red Cross, etc.) are written by Hamas. So I don’t know why I waste my breath. Enjoy your genocide.
Don't waste your breath, because I do not believe you are being honest. No mention of Hamas role at all is not honest.
"Hamas" is the eternal bogeyman of the current genocidaires, as "Bolsheviks" were of the Nazis.
Invoking "Hamas" is your invitation to turn your feeble brain off and distrust your own eyes.
Please leave the hasbara to the professionals and stop this pathetic trolling. You are actively harming Israel.
Mr. Heffernan's reply to your comment is correct. Before telling us about the purported "sabotage of humanitarian aid" by Hamas, you might want to have a look at this NYT article published yesterday: "No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say." (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/world/middleeast/hamas-un-aid-theft.html).
Yes, of course I saw that. If only the NYT had not squandered it's reputation in recent years, maybe more people would be able to read something like that as useful.
Wow- the NYT - if there ever was a reliable source, it'is this one. Seriously? There is also no proof that aliens do not exist or for that matter, that god does. There are lots of proofs that Hamas is taking over the aid and reselling it at a huge profit but who cares if you can blame jews.
This goes back to my original point- if you ignore Hamas deeds, you are complicit of terrorism. It's very simple. You are complicit of the murderous, rapists creatures who happily sacrifice their brethren and sisters. very very simple.
Thank you for your comment. But I think you may have overlooked the SOURCE of the Times' rapportage that you dismiss. Or do you think the judgement of "Israeli military officials" is unreliable as well?
As for "complicity", I think all of us should find clarity in the final sentence in Professor Tooze's essay : "Anyone deflecting from the clear responsibility of the Israeli state for this mass starvation of two million people, anyone resorting to euphemisms about “crises” makes themselves complicit in this historic crime."
The WSJ was a lot closer to the truth. All of the parties, including the UN, the Israelis, and Hamas share the blame. The problem I have with Tooze is framing as the (ever evil) Jews purposely want to starve, to murder. Jew hatred.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/gaza-aid-crisis-food-israel-hamas-gaza-humanitarian-foundation-united-nations-d79096c9?st=jLUung&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
The problem is when you apply the duck test. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and sounds like a duck. Guess what?
Israel has a problem that no amount of name calling by it's supporters can cure.
Quite the contrary. Anyone ignoring the fact that Hamas is elected and supported by 70% of the Gaza population and that terror is enmeshed in the population is indeed complicit with murder. But it's only Jews so why bother.
Would you allow me to add three more percentages to the one in your comment?
In March 2025 an Israeli firm, Geocartography Knowledge Group, polled a large sample (1,005 individuals) of Jewish Israelis on questions related to the treatment of Palestinians.
82% of respondents favoured the forcible removal of Palestinians from Gaza (aka ethnic cleansing).
56% of respondants favoured the expulsion from Israel of Israeli citizens of Arab descent.
47% of respondents said the IDF should follow the biblical "Amalek" injunction to kill all inhabitants of conquered territory (aka Gaza).
You can readily find details of this poll, along with the representative character of the sample of Jewish Israelis polled, in a report in Haaretz, 3 June 2025: "A Grim Poll Showed Most Jewish Israelis Support Expelling Gazans. It's Brutal – and It's True."
Obviously there is ample proof duly ignored by the NYT.
The antisemitism card.
Much more valuable than the american race card.
The house of the niece of a friend of mine was entered on 2023 October 7 by Hamas fighters. First they cut of the fingers of the father (the niece’s husband) one by one and then killed him. The wife and children were forced to watch. Then they raped the mother, then they doused her in gasoline and set her on fire. The children were killed only after this.
The stated goal of Hamas is to wipe Israel off the map. The stated goal of Israel is secure its continued existence.
It is heart-rending to see the starvation in Gaza, but it is intellectually dishonest not to mention that the culprit for it is Hamas. Bringing in the statistics about starvation over the world brings this article to the convenient space of putting Israel into the company of Northern Nigeria, but it remains propaganda without also telling that Hamas is here playing the role of Rome annihilating Carthage, Cortez annihilating Montezuma, Hitler annihilating Poland. Hamas may not have the strength, but the intent is clear.
And while on the topic of Hitler and Poland, also dragged into the article, the statement about the Nazis’ killing of Jewish vs non-Jewish Poles, namely that “[b]oth projects of mass murder were intense, but the Nazi extermination of Jews in Poland clearly aimed, from the outset, at total extermination” has an incorrect and self-serving insinuation: that the Nazis did not intend to exterminate the Poles. They did. From the outset. Only the timeline was different.
Confirmed: This guy is sitting in the basement of IDF headquarters.
I do not think you really know what is happening on the ground in Gaza. Look not just at the photos of hungry looking children shown on world media - also look at the many more healthy looking children picking up aid packages. Your analysis is disappointingly one sided and lacks nuance.
Here's a suggestion: I'm sure you'd agree that it would help all of us to "really know what is happening on the ground in Gaza" if international journalists were allowed to report from there. I wonder why that is not happening? Is someone preventing independent journalists from entering Gaza? Who might that be?
Has somebody told you already today?
What are you even supposed to be insinuating?
FROM PETER BEINART: Just a couple of quotations from an essay in Haaretz by Nir Hasson. He talks about a doctor in Gaza who says that tens of thousands of people, mostly children, are what he calls moving skeletons, whose organs are collapsing, and have already entered the final stage of hunger. He quotes from a video of a man, a starving man, his pants held up by a rope, who is kneeling in the sand, trying to gather flour that was spilled in the sand. And the man is saying in the video, ‘I have 10 children, and they haven’t eaten anything for a week. I’m trying to sift the flour from the sand.’
So, I think the question for our rabbis to ask in the face of this is whether they believe in God. If the rabbis genuinely want to claim that this is Hamas’s fault, then they’re simply lying. They’re lying.
The war was the fault of hamas.
How it's been carried out is the fault of israel. There's only so much military retaliation can be justified by the 100% suprise attack on israel. And then there's the question of hamas achieving a 100% surprise attack on israel.
The israelis, it is known, have something called "intelligence agencies." They were caught unawares somehow. Totally, completely unawares.
No "journalism" has pursued that total surprise. It's been forgotten. No one ever asks about it.
I haven't paid much attention to the Gaza situation, but I was under the impression that Israel's war aim was to eliminate hamas. So how many hamas are there still need to be killt.
It is interesting to see footage of the ruins of Gaza. They look exactly like the ruins of World War II Europe.