Stone and Seed

Mira Mattar on starvation as a tool of genocide in Gaza.

Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Each Monday we publish a different piece of writing related to food, whether it’s an essay, a dispatch, a polemic, a review, or even poetry. This week, Mira Mattar outlines the intentional withholding of food in Gaza.

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Stone and Seed

Mira Mattar on starvation as a tool of genocide in Gaza.

Manaeesh wrapped in an IOF evacuation leaflet. Credit: @Yasser_Gaza, Nov 2023.

Editors’ note: this essay was conceived and written in April–July 2024, and its content reflects the situation in Gaza as of that time. The Gazan genocide – and the intentional withholding of food and destruction of food/water infrastructures as a tool of genocide – is ongoing.

In April 2024, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported that thirty-two people, twenty-eight of them children, had died of malnutrition since October last year. According to a report from an independent group of UN experts in July, the moment one child dies from hunger and thirst, ‘it becomes irrefutable that famine has taken hold’.

To describe the famine in Gaza as a ‘humanitarian disaster’ is to position it as a crisis outside history. Discussing the current starvation in Gaza through this lens suggests it is an accident, a pitiful consequence of some natural calamity, or of some conflict (the spuriously neutral companion of ‘humanitarian disaster’). Deaths by starvation in Gaza are no accident. The people who have died from malnutrition were killed by the same logic that has overseen more than a century of dispossession and eradication of Palestinians from their land.

Earlier this year, I saw a picture of a sheep shot dead in a street in Khan Younis, Gaza – all the unfathomable specificity of its humble life bleeding out into its lovely coat. ‘Even the sheep?’ my mother cried to me on the phone. ‘Especially the sheep,’ I replied.

In the early days of Zionist incursion into Palestine, newly planted pine trees dropped their acidic needles into the soil. The plants in the undergrowth withered and died. Palestinian shepherds could no longer graze their sheep and goats. The animals went hungry and the shepherds’ livelihoods fell to ruin. These pines were planted by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), a Zionist organisation established in 1901 and described by Fayez Sayegh as ‘one of the central instruments of systematic colonization’. The JNF, which directly owns or has jurisdiction over more than 90% of the land of the settler colony known as Israel, planted the trees to conjure a ‘European wilderness, creating a familiar “natural” environment for the mostly European Jewish settlers’.

Since its foundation (and particularly since the Nakba), the JNF has, under a specious cloak of environmentalism, displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families, destroyed agricultural land, bulldozed homes, and uprooted indigenous vegetation to clear land for forests, parks, and nature reserves on the ruins of Palestinian villages. It didn’t matter that the pines did not adapt to the local soil, needed repeated replanting, required more water with age, and were vulnerable to pests and fire. The trees deleted history. In October 2022, when I finally made it to Palestine – the place my family fled from in 1948 – I was shown a map studded with little red dots. Each dot marked a Palestinian locality that Zionist organisations destroyed before and during the Nakba, many of which have since been planted over. The map pulsed so brightly it practically bled. 

I have come to understand ‘land’ as indistinguishable from that which it sustains: animals, insects, agriculture, industry, housing, infrastructure. Land, in short, is life, and life is, in the words of Palestinian scholar Steven Salaita, ‘beingness’. Zionism is the violence that stops at nothing to ensure the beingness of Palestine is erased. In doing so, it positions itself as the saviour of a supposedly barren place from its supposedly inept natives when, in reality, Palestine’s lands fall within the ‘Fertile Crescent’ – known for its rich soil, high rainfall, varied habitats, and proliferating biodiversity – which was cultivated for centuries before the Nakba. This stolen Palestinian land now forms ‘the agricultural core of the Israeli state’.

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An essential component of Zionist eradication efforts particular to Gaza is the forced reliance of Palestinians there on ‘aid’ as a result of the annexation of agricultural lands and of the total blockade of Gaza since 2007, which strictly enforces controls on everything and everyone entering and exiting. Even before the current genocide, roughly 80% of Gaza’s 2 million inhabitants depended on aid, which, already scant, has been so tightly controlled since 7 October 2023 that not even stone fruit can enter – not only because the stones might (supposedly) become weapons, but also because the stones might be planted back into beingness. At root, it is Palestinian beingness that the Zionist entity needs to constantly deny to constantly create itself. It is extractive, it is cannibal. It eats. Gaza starves.

The use of starvation as a technology of genocide in Gaza is not a recent aberration but a continuation of long-standing Zionist efforts to erase Palestinian life – settler colonialism, after all, is an ongoing structure, not an event. As Neve Gordon and Muna Haddad have described, after the Second Intifada in September 2000, the Zionist state destroyed more than 10% of Gaza’s agricultural land, razed farms to the ground, uprooted more than 226,000 trees, bombed the airport, destroyed the seaport, minimised the areas in which fishermen could fish (and shot fishermen who transgressed these boundaries), and restricted movement and goods, all of which produced food insecurity so severe that in just two years child malnutrition doubled.

In 2005, after settlements in Gaza were dismantled, the Zionist state created a buffer zone between itself and Gaza, upon which only ‘short leafy crops like spinach, radish, and lettuce’ were allowed to be planted, so as not to obscure the views of soldiers surveilling from the surrounding watchtowers. In 2006, Dov Weisglass, an adviser to then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, explained that the strategy was to ‘put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger’. The Gaza diet, as it is chillingly known, was created as a form of collective punishment, economic warfare, and social engineering intended to de-develop Gaza and force dependence on aid. The exact amount of food needed to keep a population on the edge of hunger was calculated.

The list of products banned from entering Gaza since the 2007 blockade extends from so-called luxuries – such as honey and olive oil – to supposedly ‘dual-use’ items like cement, fertilisers, and chemicals used to maintain clean water supplies, which became increasingly necessary as each successive Zionist military offensive (in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, 2021) destroyed more infrastructure.

Credit: Visualizing Palestine

It is against this backdrop – with a 2015 UN report predicting that Gaza would become uninhabitable by 2020 – that the Zionist state, and the powers invested in it, began the present onslaught. Within two months of 7 October 2023, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (a UN body that assesses food security) found acute food insecurity throughout Gaza and warned of famine – long before the first person died of starvation. Months later, the Zionist state continues to deny that mass starvation has begun, or that it is intentional, by manipulating the strategically manipulable language of international humanitarian law.

International humanitarian law – that is, the law that regulates the conduct of war – requires a slippery language, one that can dehistoricise and obfuscate in order to remain legitimate in its tilt towards the imperialist world order. As the historian Jessica Whyte has extensively documented, the prohibition on using starvation as a method of warfare was not codified until 1977, largely as a result of the efforts of legal activists from countries that had recently decolonised (including Egypt’s Georges Abi-Saab), who had not previously been included in discussions of international law. In other words, starvation remained an acceptable tactic until nations who had been historically subjected to it gained power within supposedly ‘international’ legal spheres. The Zionist entity was the only one to stand against the codification of the ban on starvation.

In the preceding decade, Whyte details, the US had used Agent Orange and other chemical defoliants in Vietnam, arguing that crops were shielding Vietnamese combatants and therefore that destroying them was a legitimate tactic, even if such destruction also meant the destruction of resources necessary for life. As a result, it was in their interest to ensure the prohibition on starvation could be interpreted in such a way as to allow ‘comprehensive starvation sieges’ to remain legal so long as they targeted combatants, not civilians.

This ostensible distinction between the active – and therefore punishable – ‘combatant’ and the passive – and therefore innocent – ‘civilian’ has been exploited time and time again by imperial powers to undermine anti-colonial resistance efforts. And the contemporary Zionist state continues to rely upon this logic. When every civilian can be repositioned as a potential combatant and so become a ‘human shield’, or when Hamas are allegedly hiding under hospitals, or within neonatal incubators – violence against the population as a whole is legitimised. The enemy is everyone, everything, everywhere, all the time. Starvation caused by the destruction of objects necessary to life (bakeries, agricultural lands, mills, sewage systems, electricity, schools, homes, roads) – and the subsequent withholding of aid – then becomes merely the tragic ‘humanitarian’ consequence of a legal and necessary military objective, instead of an intentionally genocidal endeavour.

The continuous ecocidal and genocidal violence justified in this manner has long been accompanied by a simultaneous denial of this continuous ecocidal and genocidal violence. Like in 1948, when Zionist forces injected typhoid into the aqueduct at Akka and then informed the British rulers of Mandatory Palestine that the resulting seventy or so deaths were caused by crowded, supposedly unhygienic conditions that refugees were living in. Or during that same spring, when Zionist militias attacked and Palestinian farmers who were preparing to thresh their wheat and harvest their corn were forced to flee or risk death to stay on their farms, while their agricultural technologies and all traces of their presence were destroyed to make room for the land’s supposed true caretakers.

Or like earlier this year, when Zionist forces opened fire on Palestinians in Gaza who were attempting to get flour from aid trucks – trucks that have been blocked, burned, and looted by settlers and soldiers – and then claimed that the rush of people trying to access food had endangered the Zionist forces and forced them to massacre over a hundred starving Palestinians. Or like when people are so exhausted by hunger that they do not even have the physical ability to walk to find food. Or have resorted to eating animal feed and grass to survive. Or cannot breastfeed due to malnutrition. Or cannot feed their babies formula because both formula and the water to make it are scarce. Or when children are reduced to squatting at dirty puddles and cupping their hands to drink. And Zionists and their allies deny it all while their soldiers gorge on free McDonald’s, or feast on food left in homes that Palestinians fled and call it heroism.

Everything that the Zionist state and its allies have done since 7 October 2023 has been done with full knowledge of existing conditions. When Israeli Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant declared on 9 October 2023 that there will be ‘No electricity, no food, no fuel’ in Gaza, it was the logical culmination of decades of severance and destruction of life and life-sustaining infrastructure. To call a manmade strategic famine a humanitarian disaster is to disguise it as a natural disaster. And to do this is to disguise nature as innocence. And to do this is to perpetuate the myth that the Zionist entity’s existence on the lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is divine destiny. And to do this is to erase who and what already existed there – a culturally heterogeneous coalescence of people with their industrial centres, ports, publishing houses and cultural hubs, their mountains vibrating with akub and thyme, their orange groves and olive trees – and who and what were cut out of that place: driven away, slaughtered, poisoned, terrorised, enclosed, exiled, starved to death.

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The continuum of Zionist violence is countered first by the continuous resisting presence of Palestinians in Palestine. It is alongside them, beyond spatial and temporal boundaries, that the rest of us – those of us who understand that the stakes are ourselves – resist continuously, casually, fiercely, and daily in any and every way we can. Settler states are built on fabricated networks of exemptions, exceptions, loopholes, myths, abstentions, negations, and interpretations layered onto realities and presences. They rely on absurdities like the fact that international law can justify the starvation of a population if it can be argued that that starvation is incidental, not intentional.

Credit: @AbubakerAbedW, April 2024.

Palestinian existence beyond, without, alongside, and in tension with the law has everything to do with intention. It is Um-Naseem planting mint in Rafah, it is Abubaker Abed’s yellow roses, it is Hamada Shaqoura feeding as many people as he can, it is every GoFundMe, it is every seed and animal saved, it is hunger-striking prisoners, it is people in Gaza using IOF evacuation leaflets to wrap manaeesh at the beginning of the genocide. It is not international law that will save Palestinians. We will all save ourselves together because like any people, like you, Palestinians want life, not only the right to it. Resistance to your own annihilation is a deep reflex; it grows effortlessly. We know that the stone is a weapon and we know that the stone is also a seed.

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Credits

Mira Mattar writes fiction and poetry. She is the author of Yes, I Am A Destroyer (Ma Bibliothèque, 2020), Affiliation (Sad Press, 2021), The Bow (2021), and most recently the chapbook And most of all I would miss the shadows of the tree’s own leaves cast upon its trunk by the orange streetlight in the sweet blue darks of spring (Veer2, 2024). Her work has been published in Granta, The Chicago Review, Berfrois, Mute, Salvage, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Mute and guest editor at Decolonial Hacker. Mira lives and works in London.

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