Using Old Tools of War
I’ve taught military history “from Plato to Nato,” as we used to joke, but my expertise focused on technology and warfare. Along with “revolutions” and “transformations” in weaponry, I probably spent too much time focusing on “decisive battles” and “great captains” in history. When you look at the course of military history, most deaths from war didn’t come in battle. They came from hunger and disease, from famine and pestilence. Sometimes, mass starvation and pandemics were unintentional byproducts of chaos and societal disruption caused by war, and sometimes starvation and disease were intentional weapons and products of war.
You might call this apocalyptic war, from the Bible and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which included famine and pestilence among the death riders.
An apocalyptic fate seemingly awaits Palestinians in Gaza. I’ve written about Gaza as a genocide, the mass bombing by Israel, the mass killing, with the apparent goal of forcing Palestinians out of Gaza, but I haven’t given enough thought to the use of mass starvation and diseases as weapons in this genocide.
A reader, Dan White, brought this lesson home to me, and I’d like to quote his message to me at length:
I can’t think of a better word than the etiology of starvation. It hasn’t been adequately addressed by the snoozemedia. Starvation death rates have a funny shaped curve. During the first stages of starvation–can’t give any figures on a time period for this or any other part of the process/curve, due to there being varying levels of food deprivation–there are few deaths, generally (but not always) those persons with compromised health/preexisting health problems that make them more susceptible to death than others in the population. After some (varying length) period of starvation, people start to die in larger numbers, and then all of a sudden, everyone is dying, and then everyone is dead. This period of death is fairly short compared to the period of starvation. Again, due to varying levels of starvation and varying levels of preexisting health and varying levels of surplus consumable body tissue in the starved group, this period has no fixed length, but it happens all of a sudden, and it doesn’t take long for everyone to die once it starts–couple of weeks seems common.
The starving residents of Gaza haven’t reached the mass-death stage of starvation, but it could well start happening tomorrow. I can’t say because I don’t know the food reserves preexisting, the food delivery figures since the ‘war’ started, and nobody in the news biz has bothered to look for them, either. There really should have been some government or multistate agency who has looked for them and published them, but nobody has.
When the mass-death stage hits, people in Gaza will be dying by the tens of thousands a week. Stopping the mass-death by all of a sudden providing food isn’t going to work very well, on account of logistical delivery problems and the medical problems of alleviating starvation at this advanced stage–folks’ digestive tracts may well not work well enough even if they get food. That will be the real genocide, and I’d bet money it happens, and bet more money that this is the real objective of Israel’s ‘war’ in Gaza. The notion of Israel’s war objective is displacement of Gazans is an absurdity–you want someone to leave, well they have to be able to walk, right? And they have to have a place to go. Israel is counting on the rest of the world to all of a sudden do a mass-evacuation of Gazans combined with a mass feeding and mass medical intervention all at the same time in order to prevent this mass death of Gazans from occurring? NFW–Israel’s leaders have accepted mass killing as an official state policy, and have commenced doing it, and do it as we speak. And Israeli hasbara [propaganda] will blame us for it, and a whole lot of whored-out American and European politicians, as well as Israel-worshipping American Jews, will go along with it.
What Dan White posits here is horrifying—and increasingly likely. Of course, as people are weakened through starvation, they become more susceptible to various diseases associated with famine and unsanitary conditions.
These “old” weapons of war—starvation and disease—will serve as the grimmest of reapers among the Palestinians in Gaza.
The “mass-death stage” of starvation is nearing, unless the U.S. and other countries intervene to force Israel to allow adequate food and medical supplies into Gaza. A failure to act will only spur the pale horse on whose back Death sits.
Bracing Views 
[From my entry on the Substack version]
“Sometimes, mass starvation and pandemics were unintentional byproducts of chaos and societal disruption caused by war, and sometimes starvation and disease were intentional weapons and products of war.”
Coupla points… 1) I wouldn’t say so much “unintentional byproducts” as “inevitable byproducts of chaos and societal disruption.”
2) If I’m recalling correctly, this country’s military has engaged in deliberate acts to produce chaos, societal disruption, and dire hardship on civilian populations as far back as the Korean War when, lacking sufficient industrial targets to hit after pummeling what there was, the USAF and particularly the USN went after dams, dikes, and irrigation systems vital to North Korean agriculture, hence prelude to starvation, a war crime. North Korea hasn’t forgotten this.
Similarly, in both invasions of Iraq, and particularly with Dumbya’s excellent adventure therein, the power, water distribution, sanitation, and other infrastructure systems vital to civilian life were targeted. again by the USAF and USN. (“Top Gun” came out in 1986, before these fireworks displays, but it kinda set the precedent for them.)
There is a third point that needs to be made with regard to the starvation tactic employed by the Israelis/Zionists. This actually began with the UN Partition Plan of 1947, which grossly unjustly allocated 56% of the land – and the better land at that – to the smaller one-third Jewish population, the remaining 44% to the larger two-thirds Arab. Needless to say the Arabs wouldn’t assent to such an outrage, yet they were, have been blamed ever since for refusing to agree to a “reasonable” peace.
So the starvation essentially began with the Nakba, and the subsequent pushing of the Palestinians off their land and the theft of it, which included agricultural land. Hence less capacity to be self-sufficient in food. And it continued in 1967, and thereafter, and thereafter, and thereafter, not only with the illegal settlements, but where the Palestinians still retained grazing and farmland, the deliberate practice of letting sewage and effluence from the settlements flow onto Palestinian land.
Then there were the retributions for the free, fair, and democratic elections of Hamas, over which Israel and the United States went apeshit, who rewarded the Gazans with blockades and strict control over imports and exports, as well as the institution of “subsistence plus” diets, i.e. just above starvation level. All this wantonly imposed on a once self-sufficient people by an arrogant, hostile, illegal force.
And as has been seen, the deliberate targeting of international humanitarian aid workers, the luring of Palestinians to food distribution sites-cum-shooting galleries, the banning of UNWRA from Palestine by Israel, the displacement of UN and other interational agency food programs by the sham Gaza Humanitarian Foundation all point to the long-term deliberate effort to empty Palestine and Gaza of the rightful owners of the land, either by forced expulsion, or dropping dead. The Israelis, and this country, don’t care one way or the other.
LikeLike
I don’t blog or comment on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in part because so many others are better equipped to do so with extensive historical knowledge and perhaps a bit of insider information. However, it has been obvious and openly stated for many decades already what the larger objective is, and the Oct. 7 attacks are merely the latest event to used by Israel to accelerate and complete its objective. No amount of violence, murder, or genocide seems to deter the objective so long as it is shared by U.S. leadership, which I find irrational only if one ignores our own criminal history of war. Lastly, although no one can fully peer into the minds of those who decided to fight back (again) on Oct. 7 in response to decades of criminal violence, I daresay they had determined that conditions up to that point were absolutely no way to live and so were ultimately prepared to die. In doing so, they may succeed posthumously in making Israel as pariah. Too little, too late.
LikeLike