Yet another case of corrupted international standards once again raises the question: Why is it so important to the world to falsely accuse Israel of causing famine? The genocide charge falls into this category as well: Why is legitimate criticism of warfighting not enough, and why are global agencies and other institutions driven to change their own standards just to convict Israel of a crime it didn’t commit?
The latest examples come from USAID and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the latter being a food-related coalitional enterprise under the auspices of the United Nations. The Washington Free Beacon reports that the IPC “quietly changed one of its key reporting metrics … making it easier to formally declare that there is a famine in the Hamas-controlled territory.”
For many in the media and activism spheres, this was the announcement they were long waiting for. The credentialism game was again afoot: Activists could point to “experts” who would appeal to their own authority. The IPC said let there be famine, and there it was.
As the Free Beacon pointed out, the IPC simply tailored its metrics to fit the accusation. Indeed, it is the extent of the changes that really tells you how big was the gap between what Israel was being accused of and what Israel was guilty of:
“Unlike previous IPC reports on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, the July report includes a metric—known as mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC)—the agency has not historically used to determine whether a famine is taking place. The report also includes a lowered threshold for the proportion of children who must be considered malnourished for the IPC to declare a famine, down to 15 percent from 30 percent.”
Those arm circumference measurements, by the way, replaced “detailed weight and height measurements to determine whether a child is suffering from acute malnutrition.”
In other words, the agency took rigorous standards and tore them to shreds. And for what? For the opportunity to accuse Israel of a crime the IPC knew it wasn’t committing.
This is an absolutely bizarre trend. Scientific agencies are blowing up their own credibility to score political points in one conflict. That credibility won’t return to them when they turn their attention to other conflicts and perhaps go back to using accurate data.
The situation is just as risible regarding USAID. At the Free Press, Jonas Du reported that the agency analyzed aid distribution in Gaza and found that its on-the-ground partners had stopped naming Hamas in their reports of waste, fraud, or abuse—and therefore when aid would be taken or misused by Hamas there was no immediate record of it. But, crucially, they did not stop reporting the waste, fraud or abuse. All they did was keep Hamas’s name out of the incident reports so that the terrorist group could not be blamed for stealing aid.
Employees inside USAID, however, saw an opportunity to massage the narrative against Israel. Before agency leaders had even seen the report, they leaked part of it to Reuters which framed it as proof that the agency could not find evidence that Hamas stole aid.
The agency’s partners in Gaza were running interference for Hamas. That way, the narrative around Israel’s apparent responsibility for hunger in Gaza would be solidified. If Hamas isn’t taking the aid, the narrative went, then Israel had no excuse for the food not reaching the people of Gaza.
The non-reporting by the agency’s partners in Gaza is corruption. The re-framing of the report to the media is arguably corrupt behavior as well.
What is the point of ruining the reputations of these organizations in order to win a news cycle? The answer is that, while Israel’s critics insist that they just want to treat the Jewish state like “a normal country” and subject it to normal scrutiny, the opposite is true. They see Israel as uniquely evil and defy their industries’ ethical obligations in order to convince the world that Israel is uniquely evil.
What happened at the IPC and USAID and other such agencies throughout the course of this war isn’t an attempt to hold Israel to the same standard as everyone else. It’s an attempt to literally create entirely new standards that will only be applied to Israel. And it is happening with appalling regularity.
