Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.
August 2nd to 3rd 2025 marked the “holiday” of Tisha B’av. Jews observe it with readings of Lamentations, a part of the extended Torah, chronicling the history of one of many catastrophic destructions of the nation of Israel. Observant Jews fast on Tisha B’av, and the text of Lamentations includes detailed passages describing famine in Jerusalem, immortalizing the memory of Jews eating their own children to survive starvation during war.
In a bizarre synchronicity of timing, horrifying images of masses of Palestinians, children in particular, dying of starvation and thirst, have topped media feeds in recent weeks, and been featured as well in mainstream media reports.
Hundreds of heart-rending images, particularly of children in misery, have flooded our news, and the outcry against the starvation in Gaza is worldwide.
Now the timing is made more excruciating by the release of photos of one Israeli hostage, Evyatar David, starving and emaciated, in the custody of Hamas militants.
To the Israeli and Jewish imagination, this would summon a knee-jerk response to the misery of their fellow Jew. In fact, it constitutes, perhaps, a coded message to strictly religious Jews. A message to their hearts and minds to feel for the suffering of starving Jews. And Jews only.
Another starving Israeli hostage, released in February by Hamas, spoke recently at a youth gathering in a Long Island synagogue in the USA.
Or Levy, whose wife Einav was killed in the October 7 2023 Hamas raid, told Young Israel of Woodmere, “You can’t really understand what it is to starve — day after day after day.”
With no transcript of Levy’s speech to Young Israel, I have to assume that Levy went on to describe the hundreds of thousands of starving Palestinians less than 50 miles from Israel, and the mass misery they have been facing for years now. Did he advocate, out of compassion for the children of Palestine, for Israel to allow the 6,000 UN supply trucks waiting in Jordan for 5 months to bring aid to starving Palestinians?
Forgive me, I didn’t ask him, but somehow I doubt it. Why do I doubt it?
One reason is that recently, a Palestinian activist, Awda al Hathaleen, was scheduled to speak at a synagogue in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the USA. Awda, a longtime peace activist from Massafer Yatta in the West Bank, was a principal advisor to the 2025 Academy Award-winning movie, “No Other Land”, profiling a deep friendship between journalist Yuval Abraham and Palestinian activist Basel Adra.
Awda al Hathaleen was intercepted at the airport and sent back to the West Bank. On July 28, he was shot and killed by notorious Israeli settler Yinon Levy, who was previously sanctioned by the US government for his violence.
The US wasn’t willing to allow Awda to speak, even when he was invited by Jews. But Or Levy, also invited by Jews, was welcome. That in and of itself, leads me to surmise that Or Levy would not be willing to urge Young Israel to stand against starvation, as a weapon of war.
Meanwhile, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu and his settler henchmen are crying out, even today, that the photos of Israeli hostages “prove that Hamas has no interest in reaching a ceasefire deal”. This after investigative reporters have exposed that time after time, month after month, the Netanyahu government has blown off all ceasefire, “pause” and other agreements, proving that it is the principal actor not interested in reaching any sort of deal.
It would appear, from today’s reports, that the families and advocates of Israeli hostages are not responding the way that the Israeli government wants them to respond. Their knees are not jerking. They are departing the blame game.
In the past two years of hell in Israel-Palestine, the Israeli government and US governments have done much to enlist their citizens into the blame game. Hamas equals bad, Israel equals good. This, after it has become common knowledge that the Netanyahu government financed Hamas for decades. Why is it assumed that Hamas equals bad, Israel equals good?
And Israel continues to convince its settlers, in any case, that somehow, only Hamas is being killed, not women, not children, not innocents. Only Israelis who starve matter, not hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
As I noted in a previous article for CounterPunch, Netanyahu’s Defense Minister Betzalel Smotrich, previously arrested for inciting racist violence in Israel, stated on October 8, 2023, “We must be cruel now and not think too much about the hostages (in Gaza). It’s time to act.”
I guess now is the time to “think too much about the hostages in Gaza”? Now we are enlisted in an outcry against the cruelty and brutality of starvation as a weapon of war?
Crafty timing indeed. But from a long-range (past and future) perspective, stupid. And from the perspective of ethics, morality, empathy, and compassion? It is the most cynical effort to recruit agonized Jews, and an agonized world, into the blame game.
Meanwhile, the spurious (at best) “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” continues to pretend it offers any care whatsoever for the people of Palestine, as it surveils Palestinians and moves them around, then instructs its military where to shoot them, like ducks in a barrel.
For me, the desecration of the photo of Evyatar David by the Netanyahu government, in its attempt to use his misery to continue its depraved, aimless violence, is the final straw. My opposition has turned to loathing.
United Nations, nations of the world, you must become much more demanding in your reining in of Israel and its enablers. There is no one else but you. You have faced many “High Noons” in your history. Force real, massive aid into Gaza. And into the West Bank. Now.
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