Let me start with a statement that should be obvious: deliberately starving 2 million people – half of whom are children – is indefensible. It is not complicated, it is not a nuanced situation that requires a PhD to parse. It is not an unfortunate and unavoidable part of war. It is quite simply indefensible. I would say that it is also very much prohibited by international human rights law, but that doesn’t seem to exist any more, does it?
As I write this,no food, water or medicinehas been allowed intoGazafor almost two months. It is impossible to know just how bad the situation really is because Israel has imposed a media blackout on the region. However, aid organizationshave said: “The Gaza Strip is now likely facing the worst humanitarian crisis in the 18 months” since the war began. Thousands of children are malnourished. Childhood malnutrition, I can’t stress enough, has long-term consequences. An entire generation’s future has been violently stolen from them.
“Starving kids to death is bad, actually” isn’t a statement that should require any debate. Over in the White House and the hallowed halls of Yale, however, they seem to think otherwise. OnWednesday night, an organization called Shabtai, which is based at Yale though not officially affiliated with it, hosted Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, for a talk.
Ben-Gvir has had the red carpet rolled out for him by the US. The extremist politician came to New Haven following an extravagant dinner, presumably paid for by US taxpayers, atDonald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort the night before. While he ate fancy food with Republican party officials they all reportedly discussed how they could starve kids in Gaza more efficiently. “[Lawmakers] expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely,” Ben-Gvir tweeted following the dinner.
I’ll give Ben-Gvir his due. He doesn’t even try to hide his hatred for Arabs. If Ben-Gvir were a Palestinian, every single politician and media outlet would be in an uproar that he was anywhere near Yale. The man lives on an illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank and has advocated for the deportation of all Arab citizens. He had a picture in his living room for years of Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron in 1994. He has previous convictions forinciting racism and supporting terrorism.
Again, Shabtai is not officially associated with Yale but it very much looks like a Yale organization, especially as it is based there. It was founded by the Democratic senator andYale alumnus Cory Bookerand the New Haven rabbi Shmully Hecht. Speaking to Shabtai, with all its elite associations, grants Ben-Gvir respectability. It gives his violent and racist ideas legitimacy. Particularly as Hecht – a man closely associated with Booker – has saidhe admires Ben-Gvir. At the time of writing, Booker hadn’t made a public statement about Ben-Gvir’s Shabtai invitation and had not responded to a request for comment.
Several Shabtai members, I should note, have objected to Hecht’s comments about Ben-Gvir and two have resigned from the society. But Yale has not issued a clear condemnation of the far-right politician. Again: Shabtai is not an official Yale organization but it has enough ties to the university that, by not speaking out, the Ivy League institute is in effect endorsing one of the most extremist politicians in Israel. Particularly since Yale has simultaneously been very busy doing what US colleges seem to enjoy doing most: demonizing anyone who speaks out about genocide. A pro-Palestinian student group was stripped of its official recognition by Yale after it was accused of involvement inprotests against Ben-Gvir.
But I don’t want to focus too much on Ben-Gvir because he’s not the real issue here. This isn’t about one man giving a speech – it’s about who is allowed to speak and who isn’t. What facts get reported and what don’t. What the media, politicians and thought leaders choose to get outraged about and what they ignore. It’s about the real-time manufacturing of consent for the US-enabled atrocities happening inGazaand the West Bank, and the systematic quashing of dissent.
Pro-Palestinian speech is beingsystematically eradicatedin the US on multiple fronts. Palestinian viewpoints are being erased, punished or ignored. Ice, of course, has been very busy for weeks nowdetainingand deporting pro-Palestinian activists. Meanwhile, on Wednesday the FBI violently raided the homes of pro-Palestinian activists linked to University of Michigan protests. And earlier this week a performance by the R&B star Kehlani at Cornell University in New York state was cancelled, with the university’s president saying the booking of the singer had “injected division and discord” at Cornell because ofher stance on Israel.
The message from the government and from elite institutions is very clear: speak up about Palestine and you will be punished for it. These raids and deportations, the cancelling of contracts and opportunities, aren’t just meant to punish individuals, but to have a chilling effect on the masses.
More insidious silencing is happening on social media, where it is getting harder to share pro-Palestinian content. According to leaked internal Meta data recently obtained byDrop Site News: “A sweeping crackdown on posts on Instagram and Facebook that are critical of Israel – or even vaguely supportive of Palestinians – was directly orchestrated by the government of Israel … The data show that Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel since October 7, 2023.”
On cable news, Palestinian perspectives are routinely ignored. (Networks that were preoccupied with issues of campus safety in the past certainly don’t seem to have run any segments about how Arab students at Yale might feel threatened by having Ben-Gvir celebrated on campus.) Last December, the Nation analyzed a year’s worth of Palestine-Israel coverage by four Sunday morning news shows – NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos, CBS’s Face the Nation and CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. It found that “withthe exception of one interview, the Sunday shows covered and debated the so-called ‘Israel-Hamas war’ for 12 months without speaking to a single Palestinian or Palestinian American.” The shows featured Israeli guests 20 times, along with multiple appearances from pro-Israel US guests. This is what “objectivity” on Palestine and Israel looks like in the media.
On cable news, Palestinian perspectives are routinely ignored. (Networks which were preoccupied with issues of campus safety in the past certainly don’t seem to have run any segments about how Arab students at Yale might feel threatened by having Ben-Gvir celebrated on campus.) Last December, the Nation analyzed a year’s worth of Palestine-Israel coverage by four Sunday morning news shows – NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos, CBS’s Face the Nation, and CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. It found that “withthe exception of one interview, the Sunday shows covered and debated the so-called “Israel-Hamas war” for 12 months without speaking to a single Palestinian or Palestinian American.” The shows featured Israeli guests 20 times, along with multiple appearances from pro-Israel US guests. This is what “objectivity” on Palestine/Israel looks like in the media.
Once again: kids are being actively starved to death in Gaza as I write this. This should prompt nonstop outrage in the media. And yet there seems to have been far more outrage in certain sections of the US media about the fact that the Irish rap group Kneecap recently ended their Coachella set by displaying the message: “Fuck Israel, Free Palestine.” Fox News went into acomplete tizzyabout it. Meanwhile, Sharon Osbourne denounced their “aggressive statements” and called for the group to have theirUS visas revoked. Kneecap responded to Osbourneby noting: “Statements aren’t aggressive, murdering 20,000 children is though.” If only that were more obvious to people.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist