Like almost all famines, the famine in Gaza is man-made. Very few famines come about because of natural food shortages. The assumption that they do is as much a myth as the belief that most victims of famine die of starvation. In fact, they die of diseases associated with starvation. Famines tend to happen because it’s impossible to bring the food and the people together, for either political, economic or logistical reasons. Most commonly there’s food around, but people lack the means to buy or access it.
There’s plenty of food just beyond Gaza’s borders, just as in the Irish famine of the 1840s there was plenty of food in Great Britain. Almost 50 years before, Britain and Ireland had entered into a political union, so one might think that a famine in County Cork would have been treated in much the same way as one in Kent or Sussex. The British state, however, wouldn’t have allowed a million people to die of starvation in the Home Counties, but seemed rather more relaxed about the prospect of children in Galway or Donegal stumbling around with permanently green mouths because of the grass they stuffed into them.
When the British finally got their act together and provided soup kitchens in Ireland, it was far too late. Before then, ideological dogma prevented them from giving anything free to the poor. So famished men and women had to take up picks and shovels they scarcely had the energy to hold in order to build pointless roads, futile towers and other edifices for a nominal wage. You can still see these famine works in Ireland today: roads to nowhere, pathways laid down and then dug up again and rebuilt, all to preserve the principle that giving charity to the dying undermines their moral independence. A good many morally independent men and women lie buried throughout the country. Those who couldn’t stand on their own two feet with empty bellies were sent to the dreaded workhouse.
It’s clear that starvation in Gaza is being used as a political weapon, and this was also the case in Ireland. There was indeed a disaster — the failure of the potato crop across almost the whole country for several successive years; but it wasn’t natural at all, since one has to ask why at least a third of the Irish population was forced to rely on potatoes alone for their daily nourishment. The fact is, there was food in Ireland — it’s just that much of it took the form of crops, which the small tenant farmers had to sell in order to pay the landlord’s rent, while they themselves subsisted, for the most part, on potatoes. No Anglo-Irish landowners were stripped to skeletons.
“It’s clear that starvation in Gaza is being used as a political weapon.”
Like some in the Israeli Cabinet, many in Westminster saw hunger as a political instrument. Some politicians saw in the famine a God-given chance to shake up this pathologically indolent nation and reorganise its ramshackle agriculture along the lines of the thriving British farm. Providentially, the potato blight killed off or drove into emigration a great many cottiers, rural labourers and small tenant farmers, whose pathetic patches of land could then be consolidated into more economically viable units.
Some Irish nationalists at the time denounced the whole project as genocidal, a view which modern Irish historians, anxious not to give comfort to the IRA, have generally derided. A number of them, however, have now come round to exactly that claim, just as the most unlikely people are beginning to believe that genocide may not be an excessively lurid term for the situation in Gaza. Some bien-pensant middle-class liberals are having to adjust their views in this respect. They might even come to admit that their past support for Israel has helped to embolden its predatory activities.
Hunger can be used by the people against their rulers as well as the other way round. Margaret Thatcher’s government was confronted with a hunger strike by Irish Republican convicts demanding the status of political prisoners, and responded to it without the faintest understanding of the history and significance of hunger-striking in Ireland. In fact, almost the entire treatment of the country by the British state during the Troubles overlooked that sagacious maxim, “Know Your Enemy”. In medieval times, a “mere Irishman” who felt that his lord had denied him justice might starve himself to death on his doorstep. The point of hunger striking isn’t to refuse food, but to refuse food from a certain source, and thus to deny that source any power over you. It may drive you to death, but it can’t rob you of your autonomy, an autonomy achieved by doing precisely nothing. By discarding your body, you also discard those who would seek to use it for their own ends. You can turn your utter powerlessness into a kind of victory. (Though whether killing yourself in the name of a united nation is a morally permissible act is another question. There’s a thin line between the genuine martyr, one who dies so that others may live, and the suicidal.)
It’s ironic that the Irish Republican prisoners’ demand was so moderate. Whatever atrocities they may have perpetrated, and there were certainly a number of truly vicious types among them, it was obvious that they were political prisoners, and should therefore have been granted the rights usually associated with that status. Refusing to do so was simply vindictive. Would they have gone around torturing and murdering for any reason other than to secure a united Ireland? Not even the apartheid government of South Africa pretended that Nelson Mandela was in the same category as a serial rapist. If you insist on viewing your political adversaries, however violent, as nothing but common thugs, it becomes harder to beat them. You have to try and see the world as they see it, if only to challenge their power.
The opposite of the hunger striker today is the people of Gaza, whose shrunken bodies reveal their political impotence. In his book Homo Sacer, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes of the inmates of the Nazi concentration camps as exhibiting what he calls “bare life”, existing in some liminal state between life and death. Such men and women are images of Nazi power at its extreme; but they are also in a sense independent of that power, since they are no longer responsive to it and appear not to care whether they live or die. You can’t conquer an enemy who doesn’t even acknowledge you. The bodies of these inmates are dehumanised, but it’s in this way that they are also most human, since to be deprived of one’s humanity is a fundamental possibility of being human. Being human is more than a biological affair, since it involves that surplus or excess over bare humanity which we call culture or civilisation. Excess — having more than we strictly need — is part of our nature, so that having only what is strictly necessary, like having less than it, disfigures what we are.
Some on the Israeli far-Right deny that there’s any hunger in Gaza, which casts some interesting light on the nature of ideology. What I mean by ideology is not doctrines or systems of ideas, but those values and beliefs which are so close to us that they are hard to objectify. It is the invisible colour of everyday life — a matter of what Donald Rumsfeld might have called “unknown knowns” (though he missed that one out of his classifications). Certain convictions are vital to our identity, and those who hold them will sometimes swear that black is white if the alternative is to abandon their whole sense of selfhood.
There’s no end to the rationalisations by which men and women might evade a truth which involves having to transform their identities. You start by insisting that Hamas is hijacking all the food in Gaza, or that TV images of starving children have been lifted from elsewhere, and end up claiming that Palestinians tend to be rather scrawny in build and are allergic to flour, while those who aren’t are on hunger strike. Whenever there’s a sudden drop in the intellectual temperature, one can usually be sure that one is in the presence of ideology, which means that there are certain things that must, at all costs, not be said.
