World Finally Horrified by Israel's Atrocities in Gaza; Mass Starvation Expert Warns of Spiraling Crisis in Gaza; AOC Votes to Fund Israel's Iron Dome
As Israel weaponizes food against Gaza, mass starvation expert Alex de Waal warns of the spiraling humanitarian crisis. Plus: AOC votes to fund Israel's Iron Dome despite calling Israel's destruction of Gaza a genocide. ------------------------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
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Tonight, the atrocities and crimes against humanity committed by Israel in Gaza have become continuously more horrifying and more inhumane over the last 21 months.
Even when one thinks that Israel could do nothing worse, they always seem to manage to do exactly that.
That there is now mass starvation and even mass famine in Gaza is beyond any reasonable dispute.
When the Israeli destruction of Gaza began after the October 7th attack, almost two years ago now, key Israeli officials were explicit.
They said they intended to use starvation as a weapon of war to block all food, water, and medicine from entering Gaza.
And they have indeed been blockading almost all food from entering Gaza for months now.
And this new U.S. finance, Israel-approved group of contractors supposedly distributing aid are actually creating death traps where desperate family members who are full of starvation, as are their families, are massacred with great regularity as they go and wait in huge lines for a tiny portion of food.
The scenes from Gaza are really the stuff of horror films, of the greatest historical evils, of classic genocide.
And it's all paid for and armed by the U.S. and the West generally, in case you're wondering why you should care about this more than something else.
We'll review all of the latest atrocities.
And then we will speak with the person who is arguably the greatest expert and scholar of famines.
He is Alex DeWal, the British Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
Long before he began looking at the situation in Gaza, he has studied and engaged in activism with respect to multiple famines around the globe.
Some due to natural disasters or societal collapse and civil war, others due to the use of starvation as a weapon of war.
And he has a lot to say about where the Israeli-imposed famine in Gaza ranks among all the other famines he's had to witness.
And then finally, not everyone is being passive or silent about these horrors in Gaza.
Late last week, the Republican congresswoman from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the very few people who actually takes the banner under which she's been marching America for seriously, introduced a bill to cut off all American funding for Israel's Iron Dome, simply arguing that what she called a nuclear-armed Israel, something everyone knows is true, but you're not allowed to say, and yet she said it on the House floor, she said that a nuclear-armed Israel is more than capable of paying for its own defense.
So why should American workers struggling often to keep up with their own bills and support their own family and community be forced to subsidize Israeli's defense?
Her bill was supported by her fellow genuine America First Republican Thomas Massey of Kentucky, as well as four Democrats, Rashida Talib, Ilyan Omar, Al Green, and Summer Lee.
But one very conspicuous no vote against Marjorie Taylor Green's bill, in other words, a yes vote on having American workers continue to fund a key part of Israel's military arsenal was a New York congresswoman named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Despite calling what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide, something she was forced to call it after months of being pressured, she still somehow offered a rationale, an unbelievably nonsensical and twisted rationale, for why this working class champion AOC would still want the American worker to pay for Israel's air defense system, even though Israelis enjoy a higher standard of living than many, if not most, of the people in her district.
After even her most stalwart fans, ones extremely reluctant to criticize her ever, erupted with anger over not just her vote here to fund Israel's air defense system, but also the explanation she provided, which made it much worse, she came back again to re-explain the vote, knowing how angry she had made her base and only made it far worse.
All of this says a great deal, not just about AOC, who everyone should understand by now exactly what she is.
It wouldn't really be worth doing if we were just going to talk about AOC, but it really says a lot about the emerging political dynamic around Israel and the United States, and that's the part that I think merits the greatest attention.
Before we get to all of that, a couple of programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
One of the struggles of covering what the Israelis are doing to Gaza and have been doing for the last 21 months is that so many times you get to this Point of despair, where you feel like no words are sufficient any longer to explain and describe and express the level of utter sadism and sociopathic cruelty and war criminality that you're watching every day unfold and not just unfold but get worse and worse the more it goes.
It's been a gradual, inexorable, but horrific destruction of all civilian life in Gaza, constant, indiscriminate slaughter of innocent Palestinians, including untold numbers, but certainly tens of thousands of children who have been shot in the head by snipers, blown up into little bits and pieces.
It's a population, at least it was a population of 2.2 million people at the time that all of this began.
No one knows what the actual population is now, but 50% of that population, when it all began, were under the age of 18, or in other words, a million children in this area that has been the subject of the cruelest and most enduring and most inhumane bombardment and destruction, certainly that I've seen in this century.
And I've talked to a lot of people who have covered a lot of wars, a lot of horrors, and most people, even if they weren't saying it at the start because they thought it was a little bit too much, are now certainly saying that what they're seeing in Gaza is, by this point, significantly worse than any other conflict they've covered before.
And the fact that it's all paid for by the United States government and other Western governments to a lesser extent, not just paid for by the U.S. government, but armed by the U.S. government, diplomatically protected by the U.S. government, justified by the U.S. government, on an absolutely bipartisan basis.
There's been almost no opposition in either party, very scant opposition.
Two successive administrations, one Democratic, one Republican, have stood vehemently behind Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government in essentially everything they wanted to do, even though the U.S. has massive leverage over them, given that they rely on our large ass and our money and our arms in order to do all the things that they do.
And it's not just that they're destroying Gaza.
They're also in the process of turning the West Bank solely into Gaza because the fanatics, many of whom are Jewish religious fanatics who control the government, believe that God gave them all of this land as Greater Israel, well, well, well beyond anything what the international community or international law or the UN recognizes belongs to them.
At the same time, they've been bombing Syria.
And Netanyahu took credit for the downfall of the Assad government, which ushered in what had long been a group of what the United States and the West considered al-Qaeda terrorists and radical religious extremists.
And predictably, Syria is now falling apart with the help of Israel, which is bombing various parts of Syria, including Damascus, turning it into yet another failed state, which is what Israel had wanted.
Bombing and taking land not just from Syria, but also from Lebanon.
Of course, bombing Iran.
And they're acting like a country that can do what it wants because the West stands by and doesn't just stand by passively and allows them, but stands by and hands them the weapons and the money and the diplomatic support.
And at the same time, and arguably this is the worst part in terms of if you're a citizen of the West, are imposing radical censorship schemes to prevent critics of the Israeli destruction of Gaza, of the Western support for it, from speaking.
The British are now arresting people who express any kind of support for the main group, Palestine Action, in the UK, because they declared that a terrorist organization.
They withdrew the terrorist organization designation for the al-Qaeda leaders who now run Syria, even though they're massacring religious minorities as was very predictable.
But they imposed this terrorism organization designation on a group that is protesting the British support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza to the point where now even if you express support for that group, even if you're not a part of it, you will immediately get arrested just for even holding a sign saying free Palestine action or we support Palestine action.
You have 80-year-olds whose family have lived in Great Britain for generations, centuries, being dragged away by the police for the crime of criticizing Israel.
In the U.S., obviously you have all that on college campuses and attempts to integrate that into law.
We covered that at length last week.
And so it's not just some war on the other side of the world.
It's integral to everything that's happening in our own country throughout the West.
And the extent of the war criminality is so severe that there's no ignoring it even if you want to.
The problem is that you have to cover it, but at some point you feel like there's no words left to describe it even as it gets worse and worse.
I think we have finally reached a tipping point where even these soulless, frightened Western governments that have just drummed into their DNA that supporting Israel is something you have to do if you want to have a political career in the West, which has always been true.
Even they are now starting to at least express some symbolic, even if meaningless, objection and opposition.
I think they just part of it, they just don't want it on their conscience, on their legacy, like when they die, having it be said that they were instrumental in supporting what history is going to judge is one of the worst atrocities we've seen.
And now you have more than a dozen European countries, most of the major ones, notably absent, Germany, which has a history of obviously being okay with genocide and ethnic cleansing and the atrocities that they're supporting Israel commit in Gaza.
But other than Germany, all these countries are now starting to at least want to show some form of genuine, not just concern, but opposition in a way that previously had been unthinkable.
Just when you start seeing mass famine And emaciated children dying from malnourishment in the 21st century, and doctors and journalists talking about how they can't even stand in front of a camera or in an operating room because they're too hungry, they're suffering from famine, and they get dizzy and their blood sugar is too low to even stand.
That's something that nobody really wants to be associated with.
Here's David Lammy, one of the most soulless, feckless politicians that exist on the planet.
He's an MP for the Labour Party in the UK.
He's also the Foreign Commonwealth Development Minister, basically the Foreign Minister of the UK.
And he posted this, which is a statement on the, what they call occupied Palestinian territories.
And it's a joint statement of the UK and 28 international partners.
And it says this, quote, the UK and 28 international partners gave a joint statement on the occupied Palestinian territories.
This is a joint statement by the foreign ministers of Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK.
That's quite a sweeping list of countries that have long been adamantly pro-Israel.
They're run by radically different governments with completely different ideologies.
It's essentially not just all of Europe except for Germany, but much of the other part of the democratic world.
Basically, it's just the United States and Germany of any significance missing from this list.
And the title here is it's the EU Commissioner for Equality, Preparedness, and Crisis Management.
And this is what it says, quote, the suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths.
The Israeli government's aid delivery model is dangerous.
It fuels instability and it deprives Gazans of human dignity.
We condemn the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.
It is horrifying that over 800 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid.
So let me just put that into context.
The Israelis and the Americans decided they weren't going to allow any of the normal experienced aid groups, food distribution groups, that have vast experience in distributing food in war zones in general, but also in Gaza specifically, including the World Hunger Program that's run by Cindy McCain, who comes from one of the most pro-Israel families in existence, the McCains.
And yet she's been cautious but vehement in her grievance that Israel has been blockading huge amounts of food from entering Gaza.
It's not like the food isn't there.
It's not like the world's not providing it.
No one's asking Israel to provide it.
The issue is that they bring it to the border and the IDF blocks it, does not allow it to come in.
And they've said this, that that's their policy, that they're not going to allow it to come in.
And they created this brand new group that had no experience in distributing aid before, that was funded by the United States, filled with contractors, American contractors protected by the IDF.
And not only have they delivered almost no aid, and when I say no food, no aid, I mean in the context of what's needed, they've created death traps.
They have no idea what they're doing.
They don't know how to distribute food.
They're only in four different places in all of Gaza.
They force Gazans to line up in these cages.
And you're talking about desperate starving people.
I don't mean they're hungry.
I mean, like, they haven't eaten since 9 o'clock in the morning and it's 4 in the afternoon.
They're kind of hungry.
I mean, they're starving.
Not just they, but their children at home, their wives, their parents.
You're extremely, I mean, when you are starving to death, this is essentially the worst way to die.
Maybe there's like cancers or general diseases that are worse, maybe, but starvation is an absolute, I mean, your body just slowly breaks down.
You go into organ failure.
It's incredibly painful.
You can imagine.
And if you're on the verge of that, and if your kids are on the verge of that, obviously you're going to be desperate.
They get there really early.
As soon as there's food available, they start kind of panicking.
They want to make sure they get something.
A lot of times they go there and they don't get any of it.
And worse still is that since this group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, is what they call it, has been created just in the last couple months, over 800 Palestinians have been massacred by the IDF while seeking aid.
That is more, just that number alone, the number of Palestinians massacred in the last two months, desperate, starving Palestinians who have been purposely denied food by the Israeli government.
That is more Palestinians who have been killed just trying to get food, lured into these death traps, than the number of Israeli civilians who were killed on October 7th.
The total number of Israelis killed on October 7, this might be 1,100 people.
500 or 600 of them were active duty military, active duty police, whose police stations and military bases were attacked.
And the number of civilians was about 600, 650.
So just in this one type of death, horrific death and massacre alone, there have been more Palestinians killed just trying to get food.
The letter goes on, quote, the Israeli government's denial of essential humanitarian assistance to their civilian population is unacceptable.
Israel must comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law.
We call on the Israeli government to immediately lift restrictions on the flow of aid and to urgently enable the UN and humanitarian NGOs to do their life-saving work safely and effectively.
We urge the parties and the international community to unite in a common effort to bring this terrible conflict to an end through an immediate, unconditional, and permanent ceasefire.
Further bloodshed Serves no purpose.
We reaffirm our complete support to the efforts of the U.S., Qatar, and Egypt to achieve this.
Now, these countries, many of them, are actively supporting Israel.
They're sending arms.
The UK engages in all sorts of reconnaissance missions where they fly over Gaza, surveil the population, pass on intelligence to the Israelis for who and what to target.
They provide the munitions and weapons.
Not just the UK, but also the UK.
It was posted by the foreign minister of the UK, and it's a nice statement.
It's unusually one-sided.
They're not pretending to spread the blame.
They're not talking about how October 7th justifies this.
Like I said, they want to disassociate themselves politically, probably psychologically, in terms of their legacy, from what they themselves are actually have been enabling.
And you know what?
You could see from the very beginning, from the first week, this is so obviously what Israel was going to do.
None of this is a surprise.
None of it.
The one thing I will give the Israelis credit for is they were very candid and honest and upfront about what they intended to do.
And you just look at the competition of their government, what they were saying, all of this was as clear as day.
And unfortunately, sometimes it just takes enough bodies piled up, enough emaciated children being transmitted all over the globe for these kind of countries, these kind of politicians, to even issue a statement like this as toothless as it is.
You'll notice there's no threats in there.
There's no declarations they're going to cut off weapons or cut off money.
It's just more like, we want to go on record as saying we are vehemently against this.
And I point it out only because even that is a significant change when it comes to world opinion against Israel.
As I said, Cindy McCain, it's hard to, I mean, if this were anybody else at the head of this UN World Food Program, they would immediately be called an anti-Semite.
We had Francesca Albanesion last week, who was the UN rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories.
Her job is to document human rights abuses against Palestinians.
And of course, she's been globally branded an anti-Semite, even though she's been doing this work for decades on countless other conflicts.
Cindy McCain's husband, John McCain, was a fanatical supporter of Israel.
I mean, unyielding, unstinting, never questioning.
And the only, one of the very few people in the United States who's an even more vocal supporter of Israel, who runs around accusing everybody of being an anti-sembite who criticizes Israel, is John McCain and Cindy McCain's heiress daughter, Megan McCain.
And yet Cindy McCain, despite who her husband was, who her daughter is, what her family represents, she became the head of this organization having nothing to do with Israel.
Just one, you know, she's a very, very wealthy woman, comes from an extremely wealthy family, a big family fortune.
And she wanted to work on some good cause, like a lot of extremely rich people do who never had to work for their wealth.
And she decided to work on an obviously noble cause, which is combating famine and hunger.
And it just so happened to be that the worst famine on the planet for the last 18 months has been one not just in Gaza, but imposed by Israel.
And she took her job seriously.
And when she speaks on this, she has no ideological fervor.
There's no anger that is against Israel other than what they're doing in terms of the dial of food.
She just wants to get food into Gaza.
I've never been a fan of Cindy McCain.
So when I'm describing her this way, it's just my honest observation of how she's conducted herself, how she speaks.
She could so easily couch so much of what she's saying in a way that avoids blaming Israel the way she does.
Last month when there was a claim that, oh, the reason food's not getting to people of Gaza is because Hamas is stealing it, she went on television and said, that's an absolute fabrication.
That's not the reason Hamas is not stealing the food.
The Israelis won't let the food in.
Here she is today on CNN, and she's describing what she says is the worst thing she's seen yet, at least as far as her organization's efforts to get food to the starving people of Gaza.
And this is what she said.
This is one of the worst tragedies we've seen so far in this particular war.
What happened was, is we had clearance to go through the Zakim gate.
We were through the gate.
The Israelis had, as you know, they clear everything and they decide when and if you go in.
And we began our trek down the road and what we saw were thousands of people running towards us.
And they were hungry.
They're starving.
And all of a sudden, the Israeli tanks, Israeli guns, Israeli weapons from all kinds started firing on the crowd.
And it's something that I hope never happens again.
But more importantly, our group, WFP, our people at Workforce were there too, and they were put in grave danger as a result of that.
No humanitarian aid worker should ever be a target of anything.
Well, this follows a trend over the last two months where over 800 Palestinians have been killed around aid distribution sites.
The majority of those are at the controversial US-backed and Israel-supported Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Can you be very specific?
Are you coordinating in any way or supporting in any way that operational model?
And what is your view on the GHF?
Well, we are not coordinating and we do not work with GHF.
As you know, we're a UN agency and so we have our UN, the way the UN operates is different from what GHF is doing.
I don't really have any information about them at all because we don't even talk.
So that was a pretty clear statement that this group that the United States and Israel concocted as a pretext for pretending they were distributing aid, when in reality it has basically turned into a way to lure people, desperate people, to a place and then massacre them, is just something she's saying, I have nothing to do with them at all.
And I think the meaning of that is very clear, but you see what the issue is.
They finally got a couple of trucks in.
As she said, you need Israel's permission for everything.
They rarely give it.
They finally got it in.
When desperate civilians saw that they had food, they obviously run over to the trucks in desperation.
And when the IDF saw that, they began shooting at people, killing them for the crime of wanting food, getting food.
Now, it might seem like, especially for people who have been taught what Israel is, have been indoctrinated with how we're supposed to like it, how it's an ally of ours, how it's the civilized country in the Middle East, the only democracy in the region, all of that, you might be wondering, it doesn't make sense.
Like, why would Israel be so cruel, so over every line of war criminality and atrocity that even its longtime allies feel a need to disassociate themselves from it?
What's the motive?
And you don't have to guess.
The Israeli officials have been very clear.
They want Gaza for themselves.
And that means cleaning out all of Gaza of Palestinians.
And the idea is to make life so unbearable, to make Gaza so uninhabitable that either they will be forced to leave because there's nothing there but a pile of rubble and disease and starvation.
And they'll be forced to leave, they'll be expelled.
Or the ones who stay, Israel has said they intend to put into concentration camps.
And they all but call it that.
They're going to be security regions, little tiny areas barked off by the IDF with barbed wire around it.
And the Palestinians are going to be kept there.
And they're going to be fed.
You can imagine how they're going to be fed, how they're going to be treated, what kind of medical care they're going to get.
It's a concentration camp for the ones who stay.
And then Israel and the United States will proceed to clear it all out and rebuild it for the Jews, for Israel.
And probably if Trump has his way with some sort of American investment from Jared Kushner and the Trump organization or whatever billionaire friends want to invest.
That's the plan.
And so that means you have to completely dehumanize and devalue all Palestinian life in Gaza.
And not just Muslim and Arab life, but over the weekend, the Israelis targeted a Catholic church, the only Catholic church in Gaza.
They shelled it with a tank.
And they severely damaged it, severely injured people, killed an 82-year-old who was there as kind of someone who seeks care, a 60-year-old maintenance person.
And Pope Leo, under a lot of pressure, had to vehemently condemn the Israelis for doing that.
They've bombed Palestinian churches.
They've killed Palestinian Christians.
Justin Amash is a member of Congress who was a member of Congress with the Republican Party, became an independent.
He's Palestinian, half-Palestinian.
His family are Palestinian Christians.
Members of his family have been killed in the air raids and the air bombing.
They don't care who's in Gaza.
If they're not Jews, there's no value to their lives.
That's what a lot of Israelis believe.
Not all, but a lot.
And that is the extremist religious vision that is being carried out that is driving this.
How else could you justify this?
You take polls of Israelis and the majority say they support the expulsion of all Arabs and Palestinians from Gaza.
There's very little opposition to what's going on here inside Israel.
There's some, but not much.
This is the Association of Reporters, the main French press association, the AFP, that put out this statement today.
And you can see mainstream organizations that aren't used to criticizing Israel, certainly not in harsh terms, are starting to feel like they have no choice.
The title, Without Immediate Intervention, the Last Reporters in Gaza Will Die.
There have been a ton of journalists killed in Gaza.
And they're the only ones to tell the world what's going on because the Israelis have banned all international journalists from entering other than hand-chosen ones like Douglas Murray who go in for six hours and get to see what the IDF shows them.
But there's no actual reporting going on other than by Gazan journalists.
And they've been targeted and killed in large numbers.
And now the last ones are at risk of dying as well, but from starvation.
AFP has been working with one freelance text journalist, three photographers, and six freelance video journalists in the Gaza Strip since the departure of its staff journalists in early 2024.
Along with a few others, they are now the only ones left reporting on what is happening in Gaza.
International press has been banned from entering this territory for nearly two years.
We refuse to watch them die.
One of them, Bashar, has worked with AFP since 2010, first as a fixer, then as a freelance photographer, and since 2024 as the main photographer.
On Saturday, July 19th, he managed to post a message on Facebook, quote, I no longer have the strength to work for the media.
My body is thin and I can no longer work.
Bashar, 30 years old, works and lives in the same conditions as all Gazans, moving from one refugee camp to another under Israeli bombardment.
For over a year, he has lived in extreme poverty and continues to work at great personal risk.
Hygiene is a major issue for him with bouts of severe intestinal illness.
Since February, Bashar has been living in the ruins of his home in Gaza City with his mother, four brothers And sisters, and the family of one of his brothers.
Their house is devoid of all furnishings and comfort except for a few cushions.
On Saturday morning, he reported that one of his brothers had, quote, fallen due to hunger.
Even though these journalists receive a monthly salary from AFP, there is nothing left to buy, or prices are outrageously high.
The banking system has collapsed, and those who convert money between online bank accounts and local currency lose nearly 40% of their funds in the process.
Ahram, located in the south of the enclave, is still holding on.
She insists on, quote, testifying for as long as she can, quote, every time I leave the tent to cover an event, conduct an interview, or document something, I don't know if I'll return alive.
She confirms that the most pressing issue is the lack of food and water.
We fear learning of their deaths at any moment, and this thought is unbearable.
On Sunday, Bashar wrote, quote, for the first time I feel defeated.
Later that day, he told one of us that he would be grateful if we could, quote, explain that we are starving to death.
Since its founding in 1944, AFP has never lost a colleague to starvation.
We do not want the memory of our agency to be one where a colleague dies of hunger.
And it's signed by the outgoing board of the SDG, which is the AFP's journalist union.
Plus 972 magazine is an excellent news journal staffed by Israelis that are often critical of the government.
And they also publish Palestinian writers and have worked with Palestinians as well.
Obviously, 20% of Israel are Arabs, but also people in the West Bank and Gaza are basically under the control of the Israeli government, that they have no voting rights, which is one reason why a lot of senior Israeli officials will say that what Israel is, is an apartheid state.
And here's what they published today, the title, We Are Starving.
My body is breaking down.
My mother is collapsing from exhaustion.
My cousin cheats staff every day for a morsel of aid.
Gaza's children are dying in front of our eyes and we are powerless to help them.
The text, I am so hungry.
I've never meant those words in the way I do now.
They carry a kind of humiliation that I can't fully describe.
Every moment I find myself wishing, if only this were just a nightmare, if only I could wake up and it would all be over.
Since last May, I was after I was forced to flee my home and take shelter with relatives in Con Yunus refugee camp.
I've heard these same words uttered by countless people around me.
Hunger here feels like an assault on our dignity, a cruel contradiction in a world that prides itself on progress and innovation.
Then there's my little niece and nephew, Ertal 6 and Adam 4, who ask for bread all the time.
And we adults try to withstand our own hunger just to save whatever scraps we can for the kids and the elderly.
Since Israel imposed the total blockade on Gaza in early March, which it eased only marginally in late May, we haven't tasted meat, eggs, or fish.
In fact, we've gone without nearly 80% of the food we used to eat.
Our bodies are breaking down.
We feel constantly weak, unfocused, and off balance.
We grow irritable easily, but most of the time we just stay silent.
Talking uses up too much energy.
Here is on Instagram a post by Maji Fatih, who is a photographer who's based in Gaza.
He's worked with Western outlets.
And it's a silent video, but there's a caption on it, which is, Gaza is without flour.
And these are people, Palestinians in Gaza, who are desperately digging through sand because some sand has a little bit of flour mixed into it.
And you can see these desperate people, it's kind of digging.
And obviously digging requires a lot of energy, which if you're very hungry, let alone suffering from famine and starvation, you don't have.
And then a few of them take bags and run back home.
So you see these images, these stories, they're basically everywhere.
And they're documented by all kinds of organizations and the like.
And you're about to hear from certainly one of, if not the leading expert, in famine who's going to describe the context of this a bit more.
Here is a tweet from Dr. Muhammad Hamad.
He's a surgeon who works in a hospital, which has been an absolutely horrific way to work.
He's had to, like most doctors in hospitals, he's seen the worst things possible, operating on children with no anesthesia or even painkillers.
And he says this, quote, I will now go look for food.
I will not return until I find food for my children and my cat, even if it costs me my life.
Please pray for me.
How do you, and here's the image of that doctor.
You know, this is like, how does the world watch this and just not feel compelled to stop it?
Especially getting has the leverage to do so.
Let's go back to that CNN article quickly.
Just to tell one more story.
This is from June, June 21st.
Four-year-old girl died.
Is this June 21st or July 21st?
Can we check that?
Four-year-old girl dies of hunger in Gaza as Israel throttles food supply.
Quote, four-year-old Razan Abu Zayr gave up her fight for life on Sunday.
It's a very strange formulation.
She gave up her fight for life as though it was a decision she made, as opposed to she died because Israel starved her to death.
She died at a hospital in central Gaza from complications brought on by hunger and malnutrition, according to a medical source.
Her skeletal body was laid out on a slab of stone.
At least 76 children in Gaza, 76 children in Gaza, have died of malnutrition since the conflict began in October 2023, as well as 10 adults, the Palestinian Health Ministry says.
According to the World Health Organization, most of these occurred since Israeli authorities imposed a blockade at the beginning of March.
Rizan was one of at least four children to succumb in the last three days, the youngest, just three months.
Over the past 24 hours, 18 Deaths have been recorded due to famine in Gaza, the Health Ministry says, reflecting a deepening crisis in the territory.
And just in the kind of name of, I guess, whatever, objectivity or journalistic balance, here's Benjamin Netanyahu being disgustingly interviewed, by which I mean worshipped, by one of the most watched podcasts in the country, the Nelk Boys, hosted by two complete morons who ask questions like, hey, that guy in New York, what's his name?
Yeah, Zoron, the anti-Semite guy.
What do you think that he's going to be mayor of New York?
How's that happening?
Why would people vote for an anti-Semite?
Those are the kind of questions they presented to Netanyahu.
And here they asked him about the starvation, and this is what Netanyahu said, smirking as he says it.
Why do they say Israel's like starving the people of Gaza?
Well, because we're trying to get the food in, and we let food trucks in, and guess what happens when we let them in?
Hamas steals the food, takes the good chunk for itself.
Then they jack up the prices, and then they sell the food to its population, to its hungry population, if they give them at all.
And then use the money that they take from their own people to recruit more killers into their territory.
Yeah, it's all Hamas's fault.
Everything is Hamas's fault.
How come Hamas has been governing the Gaza Strip for the last 20 years since 2005, 2006, and it was only since Israel announced that they were blocking all food from entering Gaza using the IDF and its forces, paid for again by the United States and the West, that mass famines broke out?
Why wasn't Hamas stealing all the food for itself and selling it off and depriving its people of food if this is what's been going on?
Nobody believes this.
No one but the most complete idiots believe that.
And the world is done even entertaining it, other than people like that.
So we're going to delve in a little bit further.
I also want to cover the AOC vote, where she voted to fund a major part of Israel's air defenses with the money of the American worker who she pretends to represent, even when other members of the squad and people like Marjorie Taylor-Reen and Thomas Bassey voted no.
Why should the United States keep funding Israel, especially given what they're doing, what AOC herself calls a genocide at the same time she wants to keep funding it?
We'll get into all of that.
And right after this brief message, we're going to be joined by Alex DeWal, who is a scholar of famine, has studied famines all throughout the world, all the different types.
And he obviously has been paying a great deal of attention to the worst one currently on the planet in Gaza.
And we will talk to him in just a second.
Thank you.
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Greenwald Alex DeWall is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts.
He's considered one of the foremost experts on famine and starvation, having studied the Sudan at the Horn of Africa.
His scholarly work and practice has also probed humanitarian crises and responses, human rights, and conflict and peace building.
His latest book is Mass Starvation, The History and Future of Famine, and he joins us tonight to discuss the increasingly alarming and I would almost call it unprecedented famine in Gaza.
Thank you so much for joining us tonight.
It's great to see you.
It's good to be with you.
I would like to say it's a pleasure, but the topic is so awful that it's really not a happy occasion.
Yeah, I don't know if you heard, I think it was before you joined, but I was talking about how you, on the one hand, have to cover this, have to discuss it, and sometimes you feel like you just are running out of words to convey the horrors that are going on there and the moral responsibility of our governments, your government, my government, governments throughout the West, for what's happening there, not because of passivity, but because of active support.
All right, so, you know, it's funny, I had, not funny, but I guess notable that last week I had on the UN rapporteur for the Palestine, occupied Palestinian territories for the UN, Francesca Albanese, and she's been obviously very outspoken about the abuses of the Palestinians in Gaza because that's her job.
And she routinely gets accused of obviously being anti-Semitic or obsessed with Israel, not paying attention to other abuses, when in reality, her whole life before 2023 has been focused on abuses all over the globe that have nothing to do with Israel.
And because you're here to talk about famine in Gaza and the way Israel is using it as a weapon of war, I'm sure the same criticism gets made of you.
So could you talk about the other types of famines you've studied throughout your adult life that have nothing to do with Gaza and Palestine and Israel?
So I've been working on this topic for just over 40 years.
And the famines that have most preoccupied me in the last few years are a terrible famine, which is actually not yet over, in Ethiopia, which was a siege famine inflicted on the people of Tigray in northern Ethiopia by the government of Ethiopia.
And until recently, I would have said that is the Worst, the most egregious case of deliberate use of starvation.
And then we have the ongoing famine in Sudan, which is actually the largest in terms of the numbers affected.
And it's more than 8 million people in what the UN would describe as emergency, where they are really on the cusp of losing everything, of descending into the worst stages, according to the UN's measurement of catastrophe and famine.
And both of these are war famines.
Both of these are famines brought about by men.
They are man-made famines, and the gendered language is very deliberate because in modern history we are yet to see a woman-made famine.
But what's really remarkable and unique about what we're seeing in Gaza today, it's not the largest in terms of the numbers, those in Ethiopia and Sudan and indeed in Yemen have been larger, but it's the most intense, the most severe and the most sort of minutely engineered.
There is no other case since World War II that I can think of where you have a people being subjected to this degree of starvation and literally just a few miles away, there are aid givers with the resources, with the expertise, with the plans, with everything worked out, which at the flick of a switch could actually deliver a very comprehensive package of aid.
It wouldn't solve the problem, but it would be an infinitely lot better than what the people of Gaza are facing today.
I haven't seen that in my career.
So in looking at your work, but also thinking about the famines I've heard about and have reported on, sort of in an ancillary way, I'm by no means an expert.
There's different ways famines can happen.
You can have natural disasters or droughts.
You can have civil wars and societal collapse where just society stops functioning and distribution becomes impossible.
There's sometimes, as you say, it's just a byproduct of war, not necessarily intentional, but from the nature of the destruction of war that can happen.
And then there's famine as a weapon of war.
Can you talk a little bit about, you mentioned since World War II, you haven't seen something quite so severe, not necessarily in terms of magnitude, but intentionality.
What is the nature of famine as a deliberate weapon of war?
So famine or starvation can be used for a number of different military and political objectives.
And here it's important to note that the way the war crime of starvation is defined in international law is it's not just food, it's objects indispensable to survival.
So you can be responsible for the war crime of starvation by depriving people of drinking water, of sanitation, of health care, of shelter, of fuel, maternal care for children.
So it's everything that is necessary to survive.
That is what is the definition of the war crime of starvation.
And it can be used in order to try and compel an adversary to submit.
It can be used as punishment against a group.
It can be used in pursuit of ethnic cleansing or genocide.
It can be used tactically in a specific locality or very strategically across a broad locality.
And the very worst cases, which date back to the World War II and immediately afterwards, are genocidal starvation.
So the worst case on record was the Nazis.
And we all know about the Holocaust and how appalling was the program of planned extermination of European Jews.
What I think is less well known is that starvation was a major component of that.
And in fact, one of the reasons why the Nazis turned to gas chambers and death squads was that starvation, hunger just wasn't rapid enough to achieve their goals.
The hunger plan, which actually encompassed not just the Jews, but up to 30 million people in Eastern Europe and what was then the Soviet Union, the plan was to exterminate these people through hunger.
But the Allies also used it.
In fact, the siege of Japan by the United States in 1945, when they mined the Japanese harbors and stopped food from coming in, was candidly called Operation Starvation.
And the British also used starvation routinely as a weapon of war.
And fortunately, we haven't seen, even today, even with the worst case that we see in Gaza today, we haven't seen that extreme of anahalatory intent, the intent to destroy the entire population through starvation.
What we're seeing is absolutely appalling, but it does, for now at least, fall short of that.
Right, but it falls short, but you have to go back to World War II to find something worse in terms of the intentional use of feminism weapon, as I understand what you're saying.
So let me, actually, you know, I had another question to follow up.
I wanted to ask you about World War II because it's oftentimes something that people who try and justify the atrocities of war will say, which is, oh, well, in World War II, you know, we bombed Dresden and, you know, we firebombed cities in Japan and we had no regard for civilian life and then we starved them and we siege them, exactly as you said.
As though that's kind of the, whatever was done in World War II is sort of the model of what we want to replicate when we prosecute wars now.
And at least my understanding of having grew up and understood the history of World War II is that the world kind of came together after and said, wow, given what we're capable of technologically and what we unleashed, it was a level of inhumanity and atrocity and destruction that we want to make sure we never replicate again.
And we created international bodies and entire conventions under the Hague Convention and international tribunals to ensure that those weren't repeated.
And it seems now there's almost like this reverse ethos, which is, well, if we did that to the Japanese or we did it to the Germans or they did it to us, that's proof that it's permissible.
Can you talk about that perspective that seems to be emerging?
I think you've absolutely nailed it.
I think that the generation, the men and women who came out of World War II and my parents' grandparents' generation were part of that.
And one of my predecessors as executive director of the World Peace Foundation, Leyland Gudrich, was part of the Secretariat for the United Nations that was set up in San Francisco in 1945.
And he was responsible for the drafting of the statute of the International Court of Justice, the World Court.
And the whole, the preamble of the United Nations Charter is, you know, twice in our lifetimes we have seen the scourge of war and we don't want to see it again.
And it was precisely because of the inhumanity of what had been suffered during the World Wars and the potentiality of that being repeated that these laws were put in place.
And the idea that one would set that aside and go back to the ethos that led to such unrivaled destruction, killing, bombing of cities, as you say, death camps, extermination, mass hunger.
As many people perished of hunger in World War II as perished from violence.
The idea that we would go back to that and somehow say it's acceptable because we did it then is quite astonishing.
Surely we have learned from that and surely we should implement, we should put in place those very same measures that were forged 80 years ago to prevent it from happening.
You know, I don't want to make this comparison because it sounds too glib, but I want to kind of drop a point, which is that we all do have the experience of sometimes being hungry or we can't get food for whatever reason.
Most of us, especially in the West, when we say that means, you know, we skip breakfast and then we get involved in work and we haven't eaten all day.
Maybe there's a couple days you go hiking or whatever.
And people have that sensation of what that feels like.
You know, you feel like your body is weakening.
Sometimes your breathing is affected.
Your brain doesn't quite work as well.
And we're talking here about something, an infinitesimal fraction of what people suffer when we're talking about mass starvation, let alone famine and then death from starvation.
I've always thought of death from starvation as one of the worst ways for a human being to die, if not the worst way.
Can you describe why it's considered so uniquely horrific?
So yes, I would say to my grandparents who lived through much of the hunger of World War II, I would say, I'm hungry, and they would say, no, no, no, you have an appetite.
And on my grandfather's side, the family is Dutch.
There was a famine in the Netherlands in 1945.
On my grandmother's side, they are Austrian and they were forced to flee and also went through hunger.
And this is something that stays with you, not just because of the physical pain, and let me speak a little bit about that, but also because of the sense of humiliation and degradation.
So the physical aspect of hunger is very extreme.
It takes about 60 to 80 days for a healthy adult to die subjected to complete starvation.
The body wastes, it consumes itself.
And it's not only a physical symptom, it's also mental.
People actually go crazy, they become obsessed with food, they begin to lose their sense of reason.
And for children, it's much more rapid.
Young children will starve much more quickly, and they will also succumb to infections.
And one of the things that I think isn't widely understood is that in most of these situations of famine, only a small proportion of those who perish are actually diagnosed as dying of hunger itself, of malnutrition.
The majority of children, what happens is as they lose weight, they become more susceptible to infections, particularly diarrheal diseases.
And it's these and the dehydration that goes with that combination of malnutrition and infection that causes most of the deaths.
And so the great majority of those who die, who are children under five, most of those children are actually not diagnosed as dying of hunger itself.
They're diagnosed as dying from other diseases.
But then there's the social aspect too, and this is something that I think is not widely appreciated, which is that as people are forced more and more to seek food by any possible means, this is deeply humiliating.
They are forced to beg, to steal, to hide food, to, you know, a mother will be forced to feed this child and not that child, to turn away Hungry nieces and nephews from the door,
to scavenge around in garbage, to eat animal food, to break food taboos, and this is one of the deepest sort of humiliations is not only the suffering that people feel themselves, but the sense that they are actually betraying their closest families and friends.
They are being cruel to others by not sharing the very, very little they have.
And one of the reasons why, for example, the great famine in Ireland from the 1840s was not publicly commemorated for almost 150 years.
There was this sort of great silence that descended upon it.
People would talk about it in abstract terms, but no one wanted to talk about those day-to-day humiliations and cruelties and traumas that the society went through.
And I think one of the things that we see very, very graphically and horribly in Gaza today, and some of the quotes that you were giving from physicians, from parents in Gaza, brings out that degree of the sense that people are losing their humanity.
They're being degraded, turned almost into animals.
And this is as painful as any of the physical symptoms of starvation, which are, as you say, extraordinarily painful in themselves.
Yeah, and I think you're seeing some of that desperation, that animalistic instinct manifesting.
And the way the Israelis are dealing with it is by first supposedly shooting warning shots, but massacring crowds as the only way to kind of control this desperation for the food from the starvation that they themselves have caused.
If I could jump in on that.
Yeah, for sure.
So, you know, the United Nations, if you look at the humanitarian principles, they have the dignity of the recipient as one of the key points.
So if you were to design a humanitarian program for anywhere in the world or a conflict-affected area, you try and do three things, basically.
You provide enough food to feed everybody.
You provide extra particular services.
So you provide specialized therapeutic food for young children who can't just eat pasta or flour.
They need special foodstuffs.
You provide water and sanitation and everything else that is necessary for living, cooking fuel, for example.
And then you do it in a way that supports the community, supports the families.
So the UN had on the table a plan for doing all this.
They had 400 distribution sites all across Gaza.
They were hugely restricted in what they could do, but they were seeking to give all these forms of assistance.
And they were seeking to do it in a way that met the Israeli demand that nothing should go to Hamas, so everything would be tracked.
And I have to say that, you know, Israel always complains about Hamas stealing food.
As of this time last year, they had not shared any reliable information about that with the United States.
The US was not able to produce anything when questioned about to support Israeli allegations.
And some colleagues of mine at a group called Forensic Architecture in London tracked some of the food that was on trucks which had been videoed with armed men.
And these videos were being circulated by Israel.
Here's Hamas stealing food.
What was actually happening in at least one of these videos was that the community were putting armed men on those trucks to stop the aid being stolen.
And they could track the trucks going, protected by these armed men from the community, to the warehouse and being distributed.
But because of that video, which was being distributed by the Israelis, that access was closed down.
Now what we have instead now is a different model, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, so-called.
Instead of 400 places where this full spectrum of aid is distributed, there are four locations, three of them in the south, one in the center.
And they're only open for, you know, perhaps 30 minutes, perhaps an hour, an hour and a half every day, with very, very short warning time.
And they're located in no-go zones, free fire zones.
But they're so far away from where people are living and that people need to relocate to places to stay where when they get on the Facebook page announces, yes, this feeding station is going to open in 45 minutes.
They can get there.
They need to get there.
So they are camping in the rubble in these military zones.
And the only way to get there is past the military units of the IDF.
And the IDF soldiers, I don't know if they shoot to kill or not.
They say they don't.
But they do say that their only way of communicating with these crowds of people is by gunfire.
They try and, as it were, use gunfire like you would use a sheepdog to herd sheep, shooting at them to try and get them to stay away from certain areas, to try and go to other areas.
And dozens of people are being killed every day.
Some people are also being killed in the, you know, suffocated in the crush.
And so people are faced with this terrible dilemma.
Do we let our children starve?
Do we risk our lives by being forced to go through this extraordinarily difficult and dangerous trek in order to get these rations, which we don't even know whether we'll get them properly?
This is not a humanitarian system.
This is a system for deliberately controlling and humiliating and degrading the people of Gaza.
That is the only conclusion that one can draw.
Absolutely.
You know, the last question, and it's a lot to take in, I'm sure, for everybody, certainly for myself, and probably not easy for you to describe, but there are obviously gradations when we talk about hunger, starvation, famine.
There's long been, you know, I've been covering Israel and Gaza for a long time, and there are these phrases that the Israelis notoriously use.
They call it mowing the lawn when they kind of want to go in and just kill some people to show dominance and force.
And then they've always had this other phrase, putting the Gazans on a diet where they control through the blockade what gets in and out of Gaza, and they just arbitrarily reduce the amount of food that gets in.
We're talking about here is something much, much different, but famine groups and experts have created, I guess, a system of gradation to understand the severity of the famine.
I guess it goes from stage one to stage five, with stage five being the most severe.
And I've seen some assessments suggesting that what's happening in Gaza is nearing stage five, if not already within the range of it.
And that once you enter stage five, it essentially becomes irreversible.
Even if you were to surge food, then for most people, the damage would be permanent and long-term and irreversible.
Can you talk about what that system is and where we are in it when it comes to Gaza?
So the system is called the, it's a mouthful, it's called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification System, or IPC for short.
And it takes information about how much food there is and how much is being consumed by households.
It takes information for child malnutrition and it takes information about the mortality of children under five.
And as you say, it has this five-level scale of one, normal, stressed is two, crisis is three, emergency is four, and then catastrophe or famine is stage five.
And for the first nine months of this disaster, this war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, what we saw was that every time the humanitarian data indicated that it was about to cross the level five, the famine threshold, Israel would, as it were, turn on the aid tap under pressure from the Biden administration.
Didn't want to see famine being determined there.
And then the level of malnutrition would begin to come down.
Now, what we've seen in the last nine months is that the information really is no longer there.
Israel has taken a different approach, which is that it knows that the famine review committee of the IPC, who are these independent experts, they're extremely cautious.
And if they don't have the full data, they won't say famine.
And because they cannot get data about reliable data about child malnutrition, and especially reliable data about the numbers of children who have perished from hunger and disease, they won't declare a famine.
And so Israel is sort of gaming this system.
But the last assessment that was made after six weeks of the total siege, which was made in May, made it very clear that what would happen is within weeks, Gaza would completely run out of food and we would see mass starvation, irreversible, really, starvation.
And when people get to this stage, as you say, they need intensive medical care in order to recover.
You can't just recover by giving them food.
And what the aid that has been provided over the last six weeks has done is it hasn't been enough.
It hasn't been the full spectrum of aid, especially aid for children.
And it has been allocated, provided in this extraordinarily cruel way.
So it hasn't, the descent into outright famine, mass starvation has not been as sharp as it would have been if there'd been no food, but it is continuing.
And it is really only a matter of days before we see the most appalling cases, the most unspeakable evidence for mass starvation and all the depravities associated with that.
All right.
Well, I wish we had had an opportunity to have you on under better circumstances, though I guess is the nature of your work that this is the sort of thing that you focus on.
But it's been very enlightening, very informative.
I think that's important when things are getting thrown around to hear from somebody who actually has specialized knowledge in all of this.
And I know it was illuminating for me.
I'm sure for everybody else as well.
And I really appreciate your taking the time to come on tonight and talk to us.
Well, thank you for making the time for this.
And let's really hope that for the people of Gaza that something is done to ameliorate that terrible suffering.
Absolutely.
All right.
Have a good evening.
Thanks so much.
Thank you.
All right.
So there you hear it, and I'm not really sure how human beings hear what's going on in Gaza.
No matter what you think of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, no matter what you think of October 7th and Hamas and Hezbollah or whatever.
It just seems to me, and this is not something I say often because it's a very didactic way of looking at things, that just being a decent human being would make you deeply disturbed when you see what is going on.
I mean, it's just, it's human cruelty and suffering on an unthinkable scale.
And it's not a natural disaster causing it.
It's a deliberate, man-made weapon that is being imposed on a large population of half children and a huge number of innocent people as well.
But not everybody, fortunately, In the West, is doing nothing.
There have been some people who have been willing to stand up with increasingly vocal opposition to what's taking place and especially trying to get their government, which is what they can influence, to do what it can to put leverage and pressure on the Israelis to stop the worst of these abuses.
And one of the people who has increasingly become outspoken, for a lot of people, a very unexpected source, is the Republican congresswoman from Georgia, Marjorie Teller-Greene, who basically has built her career.
She was never a career politician, quite the opposite.
She was a person who just worked and had a couple of businesses that had been prosperous and thriving, but she was never seeking public office.
And she got inspired by Donald Trump and his America first rhetoric and policy and worldview and agenda.
And she believed it.
She believed that what America needed was to stop being so deeply entrenched in all these wars around the world and feeding all these other people money and weapons and to focus on communities like her.
She really believes that.
Whatever else you think about her, and she has controversial, polarizing opinions.
I think she has developed a political maturity from delving more deeply into these issues than she had previously.
I'm not suggesting in any way that if you think she's said or done things offensive or whatever, that that's invalid.
But what I am saying is that to me, she's someone who's very genuine.
And even as recently as, I think it was two years ago we had her on the show to talk about Ukraine.
She had become very vocal and gave this speech that was just so pure in its outlook, essentially saying at the time there was a shortage of baby formula where women couldn't get baby formula for their kids.
It was out of stock and there was price gouging.
They couldn't afford it.
She gave this speech like, why are we sending hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine when women in our country, in our districts, the people who we're supposed to be representing, can't even get baby formula?
And we had her on.
She was very vocal about Ukraine, applied that framework to it.
But when I tried to get her to do the same for Israel, she was reluctant because she understood that that was kind of a red line for politicians.
And I don't think she had the knowledge yet about Israel and Palestine sufficient to make herself willing to go there.
A lot of other people on my show who are very vocal about Ukraine wouldn't apply the same rationale to Israel.
But since Donald Trump has been elected, she has very much been willing to criticize him more than almost any other Republican in Congress, even though, as I said, she built her political career as a Trump supporter.
She traveled the country with him.
She as pure MAGA as it gets.
But she so takes seriously these principles that when he did things like restart the bombing campaign against the Houthis or bombing Iran for Israel or sending huge amounts of money to Israel, you know, she's been one of the people standing up and saying, what is this?
This is the exact opposite of what we were told we were going to get.
And she has now broken that barrier where she's no longer willing to make an exemption for Israel for her principles, where she's willing to object to every other expenditure for foreign countries and their wars, but not say anything about Israel.
She doesn't have any specific animus toward Israel.
She just sees it as a foreign country, which is what it is, and is applying the same rationale to Israel as she is to every other country, to the worldview she thought she was joining Congress in order to advance and promote.
And she's now at the point where she sees that we're sending all this money to pay for Israel's defense.
They start a war and we pay for their defense.
And there are people in her district suffering, people throughout the United States suffering.
And so she went to the floor, I think it was on Thursday of last week, yeah, it was Thursday of last week, and offered her amendment on the House 4, which would essentially terminate American funding for Israel's so-called defensive weapon systems, like the Iron Dome and defensive missiles.
So before we break this down, here's what Marjorie Taylor Greene had to say in defense of why she was offering this amendment.
Mr. Speaker, the American people are $37 trillion in debt.
The Department of Defense's mission statement is to deter war and ensure our nation's security.
That is their mission, and that is exactly what their funding should be for.
I'd like to ask, what foreign country showed up to help Americans in our need, in our time of distress, in our humanitarian crises?
Which foreign country has come to clean up the hundreds of people that die every single day on the streets from fentanyl?
Which foreign country showed up to defend our border as we were invaded by millions of people for the past four years?
Which foreign country said, here, America, here's millions and billions of dollars to help you?
I'm going to tell you, zero.
Zero foreign country showed up.
And here we are again, while the American people are enslaved by $37 trillion in debt, a debt we can never climb out of, but yet a debt that continues to rise because here in Congress, we go by this belief that we have to fund every foreign country all around the world.
And I say enough.
And the American people say enough.
Right now, Americans can't afford their rent.
They can't, young people cannot afford to buy a home.
Ask any 20-year-old, 30-year-old, and ask them if they believe they will ever be a homeowner.
And their answer overwhelmingly is no.
Americans can't afford their bills.
They can't afford car insurance, health insurance, homeowners insurance.
And life does not look good in the future.
But you want to know why inflation is high?
Do you want to know why life continues to be unaffordable?
Because Congress cannot rein in its America-last spending.
It cannot stop, and it refuses to stop.
It continues to say yes to the lobbyist for the military-industrial complex.
It continues to Say yes to every lobbyist that walks in this institution.
As congressmen and women take donations into their campaign accounts, Americans are the most generous in the world.
Americans can donate through charities to foreign countries to help foreign issues and foreign people.
But the American people should not be forced to write the check, and the Department of Defense should be able to focus on their mission to deter war and ensure our nation's security.
Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to support this amendment, and I yield.
She then gave a separate speech as well where she basically zeroed in on Israel and was saying, you know, Israel is a nuclear-armed country.
And for a long time, it was utterly taboo in the United States to say that.
Israel's position is, oh, we don't say if we're a nuclear power.
We don't say if we have nuclear weapons.
And for some reason, everybody in the United States government feels compelled to go along with that charade when the whole world knows that Israel has a huge nuclear weapons program, the only country in the Middle East to have it for all the obsession on Iran's nuclear program.
It's actually Israel.
That's the only country in that region that has a nuclear program that they keep secret.
And that was her point.
It wasn't anything, there was nothing antagonistic about Israel.
There was no animus toward Israel.
It was just, it's a foreign country.
Why are we paying for their weapon systems?
And this was the amendment.
It was a House Amendment 55 to strike funding for the Israeli cooperative program.
And the text is this, quote, strike section 8067, section 8067.
Of the amounts appropriated on this act under the headings procurement, defense-wide, and research, development, test, and evaluation defense-wide, $500 million shall be available for the Israeli cooperative programs, provided that of this amount, $60 million shall be for the Secretary of Defense to provide to the government of Israel for the procurement of the Iron Dome Defense System to counter short-range rocket threats subject to the U.S.-Israel Iron Dome Procurement Agreement.
$127 million shall be for the short-range ballistic missile defense program, including cruise missile defense research and development under the SRMBD program.
$40 million shall be for the co-production activities of SRBMD systems in the United States and in Israel to meet Israel's defense requirements consistent with each nation's laws.
Remember, this is a United States bill in the U.S. Congress talking about funding to, quote, meet Israel's defense requirements.
And she's saying the reason this happens is because lobbyists come into Congress and pour money into the coffers of Democrats and Republicans and they do their bidding.
And that's exactly correct.
And the last part says $100 million shall be for an upper-tier component of the Israeli missile defense architecture, of which $100 million shall be for the co-production activities of Aero 3 upper tier systems in the United States and in Israel to meet Israel's defense requirements consistent with each nation's laws, blah, blah, blah.
And then finally, $173 million shall be for the Aero System Improvement Program, including development of a long-range ground and airborne detection system.
Now, why can't Israel is not an impoverished country?
Israelis have access to things like free health care and all kinds of opportunities to pay for college that millions of people in the United States lack, including people in Marjorie Taylor Greene's district.
And so her point is, why are we, okay, if you think Israel should have air defense, great, they can pay for it themselves.
They're more than capable of that.
They provide a better safety net and better social programs to their citizens than we do to many of ours.
Why are we paying for their defense systems?
And obviously defense systems are inextricably linked with their offensive systems.
One of the reasons they feel so comfortable bombing other countries is because they know we give them money for protections so their countries can't get bombed back.
Turns out it doesn't work as well as people thought.
As President Trump said, Israel got hit very hard by Iran.
They banned media coverage of the places they got hit, except when the missile strayed and hit a civilian structure.
But many of their military facilities and government buildings were hit very hard, said President Trump, and he was clearly right.
But it still is part of what goes into their entire military budget.
Money is fungible.
So if you're giving $500 million for Israel and saying, oh, that's just for their air defense system, that's $500 million that's then freed up for them to buy bomber jets that destroy Gaza or bomb Syria and Lebanon.
It's all inextricably linked.
You can't separate one from the other.
Marjorie Della Greene was able to attract one Republican, Thomas Massey, who coincidentally is somebody that Donald Trump is desperate to remove from Congress.
And four Democrats, Ilyan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Al Green, and Summer Lee.
So that's a total of six votes.
422 were against.
422 to six.
As I've often said, the only time you see bipartisan majority so overwhelming is when there's something on the floor relating to Israel.
It's always like 413 to 3, 419 to 7.
The only kind of thing that produces votes like that is Israel.
Now, one of the people who was not on the list of six voting against sending $500 million for Israel's military, and she was in fact a no vote, one of the 422 no votes, was Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, queen of the left, queen of the working class.
And she voted to send, have American workers send $500 million to bolster Israel's military.
And here's what she had to say when there was an obvious uproar over the fact that the queen of the left and the queen of the working class voted that way, while Marjorie Taylor Green and Thomas Massey and those four Democrats didn't.
Here's what she said: Marjorie Taylor Greene's amendment does nothing to cut off offensive aid to Israel, nor end the flow of U.S. munitions being used in Gaza.
Of course, I voted against it.
Okay.
What she's saying there is that, look, Marjorie Taylor Green's bill didn't cut off everything.
It cut off some stuff, but not everything.
And so of course I voted against it.
How does that make any sense to the world?
Especially, as I said, because if you don't send them $500 million on those replenishing of their air defense, that's $500 million of their own that they have to spend, they have less than to spend on the stuff the OC pretends she wants to stop.
And the reason Marjorie Taylor Greene didn't try and cut off all that funding is because it's already in law.
This was a bill pending that had this money for this specific military program, and that was what she was able to cut off.
So that part of that rationale is so stupid as to be insulting to all of her supporters.
And I have to say, even the ones who usually are willing to swallow whatever she feeds them did not accept that.
It makes no sense.
And the way she says it, like, of course I voted against it.
It's the most obvious thing in the world.
Like, she didn't cut off everything.
She just cut off some things.
Of course I voted against it.
And then this is what she goes on to say, quote, what it does do is cut off defensive iron dome capabilities while allowing the actual bombs killing Palestinians to continue.
I have long stated that I do not believe that adding to the death count of innocent victims to this war is constructive to its end.
That is a simple and clear difference of opinion that has long been established.
I remain focused on cutting the flow of U.S. munitions that are being used to perpetuate the genocide in Gaza.
Okay, so get this.
According to AOC, Israel is currently guilty of the worst crime a country can possibly commit, which is the crime of genocide.
The extinguishing of an entire population based on race, ethnicity, or nationality.
Israel, she says, is committing genocide in Gaza.
For a long time, she didn't say that.
She got publicly harassed, and finally she said it, but that's her view.
Israel is committing genocide.
So imagine saying that.
This country, Israel, is committing a genocide against the 2.2 million people in Gaza, or however many are left.
And at the same time, I want to pay for the air defense system of the country that's committing the genocide.
I want to send the country that's committing the genocide $500 million so that they don't have to pay for their own air defense system and are free to use that money on the weapons that she says that she wants to stop.
How unbelievably stupid is that?
How insultingly twisted is that rationale?
You call it a genocide and then justify in the same breath, sending that same genocidal country $500 million, not for welfare, not for educational opportunities, not for eliminating racial inequality or whatever, but for their military.
It's their military budget.
It's the same thing.
It's like the U.S. military budget.
It doesn't differentiate between defensive and offensive weapons.
And when you have the ability to protect yourself, for example, let's say that there are these YouTubers who get very wealthy and they hire huge bodyguards theoretically to safeguard them and protect them in case they're attacked.
But obviously, that gives them a massive amount of confidence to go around harassing people, and many of them do, knowing that they have these bodyguards right there to defend them in case anything happens back.
So if you build Israel an iron dome and say, don't worry, we're going to pay for it.
The U.S. workers are going to pay for it.
You don't have to pay for it.
Your workers don't have to pay for it.
Don't worry about it.
We have that under control.
That's what then enables Israel to go have the confidence to go fight and bomb other countries is knowing that we've paid for a system that prevents their country from getting attacked back.
It's totally fungible.
You cannot just, this differentiation between, oh, I want to pay for genocidal Israel's defensive system, but not offensive, it makes no sense whatsoever.
And then the other point she's basically saying is that, look, I am, what I am above all else, AOC is saying, I am a humanitarian.
I don't want to see any innocent people dying.
And so although I think Israel is committing genocide, it doesn't mean that I want innocent Israelis to be killed.
I don't want to see any innocent people being killed.
So of course I'm going to pay for their, force American workers, including people in my district, to pay for Israel's defensive systems that prevent their civilians from being killed.
But then that prompts the question, why doesn't there are a lot of countries who are either in danger of getting bombed or who are getting bombed?
Russia, for example, is getting bombed by Ukrainian missiles and drones.
The Iranians are constantly being threatened with that and just got bombed for 12 straight days and have been bombed previously by Israel.
The Gazans are being bombed.
People in the West Bank are being bombed.
Syria is being bombed.
Lebanon is being bombed.
Why isn't AOC saying we should pay for air defenses for any country that's in danger of being bombed or is being bombed to protect their civilians?
Because I, AOC, am such a humanitarian that I'm even willing to pay for the air defense systems of a country that I claim is committing genocide.
But she doesn't want that.
She doesn't advocate for that.
She's never said, let's build, have the American worker build an air defense system for Iran to protect innocent Iranians or Russia to protect innocent Russians or innocent Syrians or innocent Lebanese or even innocent Gazan.
She doesn't want to arm Gaza to let it protect itself.
She only invokes this super humanitarian principle for one country and one country only, and that country's name is Israel.
While she pretend it's a universal principle, she only defends it for one country.
And it just so happens to be, it's a huge coincidence because we know AOC is not a scheming, conniving, principle-free, craven politician.
She's a humanitarian, but it's just, I can't help but note the coincidence that if you want to get elected to statewide office in the state she's from, which is New York, like if you want to be senator of New York and replace Chuck Schumer, want to be governor of New York, it's really helpful to be able to say,
oh, look, I stood up for Israel and paid for its Iron Dome and its defensive weapon system, but I didn't do that for Gaza or the West Bank or Iran or Syria or Lebanon just for Israel.
You know what?
If you want to pay for Israel's defense system, don't pretend that you think it's committing a genocide because sending a country committing genocide $500 million is one of the most insultingly deceitful things I ever heard a politician say.
Now, sorry.
The Democratic Socialists of America, who formed the basis of her original support and continued to provide their major force in the New York left, put out a statement that said this on the Iron Dome vote.
Quote, the Democratic Socialists of America stand in unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian people in their ongoing struggle for liberation and against the U.S. state, United States-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza.
This is why we oppose Representative Alexander Ocasio-Cortez's vote against an amendment that would have blocked $500 million in funding for the Israeli military's Iron Dome program.
While the congresswoman voted against the Defense Appropriations Bill itself, voting against funding for the Imperialist Military Industrial Complex and the Israeli genocide, we were further deeply disappointed by her clarifying statement on her position on the Iron Dome.
That's the thing.
This vote was bad enough.
It made people angry.
The statement she put out was so much worse.
I don't know who advised her to put out that statement.
I think she's so online that if she sees a lot of people criticizing her among her supporters, she feels compelled to use that really sanctimonious voice.
Like, she didn't even acknowledge the validity of the concern.
She's like, of course, this is Marjorie Taylor Green.
Of course, I voted against it.
And DSA is saying, we're not just mad about the vote.
We're very disappointed by her clarifying statement.
Quote, along with other U.S.-funded interceptor systems, the Iron Dome has emboldened Israel to invade or bomb no less than five different countries in the past two years.
We are proud that DSA member and Congresswoman Rashida Talib, as well as allies representatives Ilyan Omar, Summerley, and Al Green, voted to cut this military money to Israel in opposition to 422 members of Congress before voting no on the overall package.
DSA reiterates our call for an arms embargo on Israel.
Not one more cent should go to fund the genocide of the Palestinian people.
We won't stop until Palestine is free.
Those responsible for this war are held to account.
And we have a government that works for the working class majority, not the rich and powerful.
If you believe that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide, that is the only consistent, cogent view.
And the fact that they are defending Marjorie Taylor Greene's bill and condemning AOC for voting against it and for her just obnoxiously incoherent statement, manipulative statement to justify what she did, for DSA to defend Marjorie Taylor Greene's bill and condemn AOC's vote against it, shows you how extreme that has to be.
Just as a sample of what AOC saw when she posted the statement, some prominent leftists who often support her, Caitlin Johnson wrote, I don't give the mass shooter guns and ammunition.
I just bought him a bullet brew fast so nobody could stop the massacre.
Summarizing what AOC is saying, oh, I didn't give the mass shooter the guns and ammunition.
I just bought him a bullet brew fast so nobody could stop him.
Aaron Mate said, if you recognize that Israel is committing a genocide, why are you voting in favor of giving it $500 billion for anything?
Jank Iger said, I don't know why you voted for it because otherwise mainstream media would have obliterated, I know why you voted for it, because otherwise mainstream media would have obliterated you.
But just saying Israel needs defensive missiles, a misnomer, doesn't address the question of why we have to pay for it.
Why do we owe them anything when they're in the middle of a genocide?
Z Squirrel, who is not typically an AOC supporter anyway, but for exactly these reasons, said, there's no such thing as defensive military aid.
When you give Israel the military infrastructure that ensures it can do its genocide and launch its wars against Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, Syria with full impunity, you are directly and intentionally funding and arming the genocide.
Kyle Kalminsky, who most definitely is typically a supporter of AOC, said simply, this is pathetic.
And there's hundreds and thousands of comments like that from people on the American left who, again, are usually willing to swallow what AOC is saying, many of them.
But in this case, it was so brazenly idiotic, made no sense on its own terms, that unless you have supporters who want to be lied to and manipulated and maybe fed a reason to like you, then no one's going to buy this from her.
And she recognized that and she went back to make yet another statement justifying what she did.
And of course she did so by depicting herself as the victim.
This is what she wrote today on both Blue Sky and X. Google is free.
If you're saying I voted for military funding, you are lying.
Receipts attached.
Okay.
How is it not military funding If you're voting to send Israel $500 million for missiles and air defense systems, what do you think that is?
Social spending?
Of course that's military spending.
And then she has receipts attached where she voted against sending billions of dollars to buy weapons, other weapons.
Then she went on, drag me for my positions all you want, but lying about them doesn't make you part of the left.
And then she added this, if you believe neo-Nazis are welcome and operating in good faith, you can have them.
What does that even mean?
I mean, because she thinks Marjorie Taylor Greene is a neo-Nazi, then that's all the reason that that's why you should vote against her bill, no matter what it says.
And also, is she accusing Ilyan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and Al Green and Summer Lee, all of whom voted for Marjorie Taylor Greene's bill because they've said what's happening in Israel is genocide, and that's the only cogent position.
Is she accusing them of like acquiescing to neo-Nazis?
And also, if Marjorie Taylor Green's view is simply, hey, we shouldn't go around trying to dominate the world militarily.
We should just use the military for our own interest at home.
Isn't that the opposite of the Nazi mentality, which is to say, let's go conquer the world?
And for that matter, if you believe that the Israelis are committing a genocide because they don't value Palestinian life, isn't it more of a Nazi position to want to send them $500 billion while they're doing that than to offer a bill at political risk to yourself to cut off that funding?
Classic AOC.
I'm being victimized.
I'm being lied about.
How dare you say I want to fund their military spending when it's exactly what she did?
And then at the end, she just randomly implies that Marjorie Taylor Greene is a Nazi as though that's relevant and that nobody on the left should want anything to do with her when four of her much more courageous colleagues just voted with Marjorie Taylor Green because they agree with her, regardless of what they think of her?
Just everything, every classic AOC tactic, self-victimization, whining, making herself the victim, calling people Nazis.
Anyone who criticizes her as lying in bad faith.
Zero, zero.
Willingness to say, I understand why you're angry, I get the argument.
No, none of that.
She can't even give an inch, not even to her own most faithful supporters.
She's grown out of the left.
She's willing to let the left vote for her, but she doesn't care about the left at all.
She has her eyes on much bigger prizes.
It's why she loves going on Face the Nation or CNN or whatever, but never any of the left-wing podcasts that helped put her into office.
She in her mind is Senator Ocasio-Cortez or House Speaker Ocasio-Cortez.
She's Nancy Pelosi, basically.
The morphing is very clear.
I'm not saying it's complete.
She's still missing the huge insider trading-driven, massive stock portfolio, although I have no doubt in some way wealth is coming her way.
But she's very much on her way there, and that's really, that's the only thing that explains this, is she has ambitions in New York and knows that voting against this bill would be in her mind to death now.
This is not the first time she did this.
You may recall that in 2021, there was a vote on whether to fund Israel's Iron Dome.
And what happened was, here's the New York Times, September 24th, 2021, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez apologizes for her, quote, present vote on Iron Dome funding.
She voted present.
In a letter to constituents, the New York Congresswoman suggested she had changed her no vote because she had been subjected to, quote, hateful targeting for opposing the aid.
So like she voted no to fund Israel's Iron Dome, and because there was anger, she switched her vote to present to avoid the angry reaction.
What kind of coward is that?
Is that a political leader?
It's like, oh my God, I voted no because I believed we shouldn't be funding their Iron Dome, a complete reversal of what she says now.
But at the last minute, I changed my vote to present because people seemed really angry at me, and I didn't want them angry at me for my principled view.
So I just went to the neutral position.
I just said, I'm present.
I'm not for, I'm not against, but I'm here, I'm here, I'm present.
Like the most cowardly thing that a politician can do.
And then yet again, she made herself the victim in this melodrama as well as she wept on the house floor over what had happened here.
Designed by Mr. Lawson of Florida, pursuit the house resident the house that Ms. Lawson.
Oh, there she is.
She's being comforted.
I think that's, I'm not sure.
It might be Barbara Lee.
It was at the time of the pandemic, September 2021, so she's wearing a black mask and she's crying because she changed her vote and she had to be comforted.
She put her head on the shoulders of one of her strong colleagues.
She's telling, it's okay, OC, it's okay.
You're going to be fine.
There she is, wiping her.
she's got thick glasses wiping away the tears And that was the bill to fund the Iron Dome.
So then first she voted no, then she moved it to present while she cried about it, because it's all about her, and now she's voting yes.
Jerry Nadler, who at least admits to being a supporter of Israel, so there's not the same deceit as we have with AOC, he voted the same way AOC did against Marjorie Taylor Greene's bill.
And this is what he said.
I proudly will vote against Marjorie Taylor Green's brutally anti-Israel amendment.
Brutal.
How is it a brutal anti-Israel amendment to say Israel should pay for its own air defense and not the American worker?
Which seeks to eliminate funding for the Iron Dome and other joint U.S.-Israeli missile defense programs critical to Israel's fundamental security.
If it's so fundamental to Israel's security, let Israel go pay for it.
He adds, I have long supported such funding, and it has been crucial to defending innocent Israeli civilians, especially in existential attacks against Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.
And let's be clear.
This is what he said.
Listen to this.
The only amendment coming to the floor of the DOD funding bill that cuts funding for Israel's security, including programs like Iron Dome, is being offered by a Republican, not a Democrat.
Meaning, Democrats are united in our eagerness to pay for Israel's defense.
It's Republicans with their crazy America First ideas who are saying, wait, why are we paying for this?
Israel's more than capable of paying for it.
Why don't they pay for it?
And that seems to be very notable, is that that's his rationale.
Here's Thomas Massey, who said this, which is here he's laying out foreign aid in the DOD appropriations bill, $300 million to Syria and Iraq,
$118 million overseas disasters, $15 million for Asian Africa, $500 million to Israel, $350 million to Kuwait, $1.27 billion in foreign security, $500 million to Taiwan, $500 million to Jordan, $267 million to reimburse countries.
And he then said, this is not America first.
I voted against this because it won't make America great again.
It will bankrupt us.
And then he went on to say, thank you, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tim Burchett for also voting against this misappropriation of military funds.
And it's a screenshot of Marjorie Taylor Green's amendment.
And then finally, Thomas Massey on June 20th said this, quote, I'm opposed to getting the U.S. involved in another war in the Middle East.
My bipartisan war powers resolution to force a vote on U.S. involvement in Israel's war against Iran has 39 co-sponsors.
The law requires Speaker Johnson to bring this to a vote, which of course they didn't.
And then Marjorie Taylor Greene added, this is June 21st, every time America is on the verge of greatness, we get involved in another foreign war.
There would not be bombs falling on the people of Israel, of Netanyahu, who had not dropped bombs on the people of Iran first.
Israel is a nuclear-armed nation.
This is not our fight.
Peace is the answer.
So there you see the difference between people who take the America First politics seriously and don't make an Israel exemption for it, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massey.
That's the only cogent position.
And then for people on the left, if you want to say you think Israel is committing a genocide, the idea that not just that you kind of reluctantly decide, but of course you decide you're going to send $500 billion, a half a billion dollars to pay for Israel's missile system that allows them to attack other countries without getting attacked back.
To call that incoherent is to radically understate the case.
It's so morally warped.
And the only reason you would take that position is because you have no beliefs other than your own political advancement.
And for a long time, that's been quite obvious that that is the case for AOC.
And if it wasn't to some of you then, it certainly should be now.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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