Voices around the world are saying: it’s now or never for a Palestinian state.
( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Most Israelis are too focused on the atrocities that Hamas committed on October 7 to acknowledge, much less denounce, the atrocities their government is committing on an ongoing basis in Gaza. The Israeli public is desperate to save the 20 or so remaining Israeli hostages that are being hidden somewhere in that besieged strip. Israelis seem less concerned that the entire Palestinian population of Gaza is being held hostage by the Israeli military.
In a recent dispatch from Israel for The New Yorker, David Remnick describes this Israeli response as “zones of denial.” This echo of The Zone of Interest, the novel by Martin Amis about the indifference of Nazi families living next to the genocide in Auschwitz, is unmistakable.
This indifference to the suffering of Palestinians is not universal inside Israel. Amid all the starvation, the killings, and the displacement in Gaza, Israelis are finally beginning to utter the “g” word. This week, two Israeli human rights organizations—B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel—concluded that the Israeli government is indeed engaged in an attempt to systematically wipe out the Palestinian population in Gaza by killing, starving, or forced removal.
“The systematic destruction of the health care system, the denial of access to food, the blocking of medical evacuations and using humanitarian aid to advance military objectives—all indicate a clear pattern of conduct, a pattern that reveals intent,” says Guy Shalev, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.
This is also the conclusion of Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov, who specializes in Holocaust studies at Brown University. He has identified
a pattern of operations that conformed to the statements that were made in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack, which was to systematically destroy Gaza. That is to destroy schools, universities, museums, everything – hospitals, of course, water plants, energy plants. In that way to make it uninhabitable for the population and to make it impossible, if ever this is over, for that group to reconstitute its identity as a group by completely erasing everything that is there.
A group of 31 prominent Israeli figures have also published a letter urging the international community to impose “crippling sanctions” on Israel in response to the government’s policies facilitating starvation in Gaza. The group, which includes an Academy award winner, a former Israeli attorney general, and a former speaker of the Israeli parliament, is also calling for an immediate ceasefire. Asking the world to sanction their own country is almost as incendiary in Israel as using the “g” word.
Don’t hold your breath for the U.S. government to describe Israeli policy as genocidal. However, Donald Trump did point out this week that Palestinians are starving to death in Gaza. The photographic evidence is clear enough that even the U.S. president, who is quick to dismiss plenty of facts as fake news, said that “some of those kids are — that’s real starvation stuff. I see it, and you can’t fake that.” It takes a lot for Trump to break with his pal Bibi, so the genocide in Gaza must be starting to cause reputational damage to Trump and his self-described role as peacemaker. But Trump is only talking about supplying money for food deliveries; he won’t take the next step of pressuring Israel to end the crisis.
The Israeli government, not surprisingly, denies the allegations that it is deliberately starving people in Gaza. It pins the blame, however improbably, on Hamas, which has been reduced to a force that can barely remain viable much less control access to food for two million people.
The Netanyahu government has recently responded to international pressure by allowing in more aid. But it’s grotesquely insufficient. The worst-case scenario of famine is now unfolding in Gaza, according to a recent UN report.
The Politics of Famine
There is no more glaring example of the political nature of famine than Gaza. Starvation is happening not because of crop failures or market dysfunction. The Israeli military has levelled the area and destroyed the means for growing and selling food. It has imposed a blockade on the delivery of aid. Plenty of food is waiting just outside Gaza.
The United Nations refused to participate in what little food distribution takes place in Gaza. Instead, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has set up distribution centers in four evacuation zones—Tal al-Sultan, the Saudi neighborhood, Khan Younis, and Wadi Gaza—and precipitated a dystopian, Darwinian struggle to access that food. Hungry people must travel, in some cases, considerable distances, to get to these centers. And then, if they get there, they face more obstacles.
According to GHF’s Facebook page, the sites remain open for as little as eight minutes at a time, and in June the average for the Saudi site was 11 minutes. These factors have led to accusations from NGOs that the system is dangerous by design. The Unrwa chief, Philippe Lazzarini, has said “the so-called mechanism … is a death trap costing more lives than it saves.”
Israeli soldiers have so far killed more than 1,500 Palestinians trying to access aid.
Civilians must also contend with armed groups that loot the food convoys. Contrary to Israeli government assertions, these armed groups are not affiliated with Hamas. In fact, an internal U.S. government analysis found that Hamas has not engaged in any significant diversion of food aid.
Rather, the armed groups are specifically anti-Hamas, and they have been supported by the Israeli government. In fact, the Netanyahu government has openly embraced this divide-and-rule strategy.
A Palestinian State?
Even as the material basis for a state is slipping through the fingers of Palestinians like so much sand through an hourglass, countries around the world are responding to the current crisis by recognizing what so far doesn’t exist. The most recent country to recognize a Palestinian state is France. The Labor Government in the UK has vowed to follow suit in September if Israel doesn’t agree to a ceasefire. Australia and Canada are currently on the fence. Even before France made its move, 10 European Union countries recognized Palestine, and they are part of the 147 out of 193 UN members to have done so.
France also teamed up with Saudi Arabia to organize a three-day conference at the UN this week to discuss Palestinian statehood. Neither Israel nor the United States participated in the proceedings.
Forget about a two-state or a one-state solution. Netanyahu is all about a no-state solution. The
Israeli government seems determined to make Gaza uninhabitable for Palestinians (though perhaps not for Israeli settlers or rich people interested in buying waterfront villas). Meanwhile, at the end of May, the government announced a major increase in settlements in the West Bank, approving 22 new settlements. Defense Minister Israel Katz was blunt in his rationale for the move: it “prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel.”
It all has the feel of the dispossession and expulsion of Native Americans during the Andrew Jackson presidency and the land grabs that white settlers were quick to execute. Jackson, of course, is Donald Trump’s favorite president.
After Genocide
In the bad old days, states resulted from genocide. The United States, for instance, was built on the genocide committed against Native Americans. Australia and New Zealand similarly grew out of the ashes of the atrocities committed against indigenous peoples. Dig around enough and you’ll find similar skeletons in the closets of many states: in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa.
“Gaza 49,” Digital, Midjourney, 2025
In the modern era, the equation has often been reversed. Stateless minorities have gone through genocides and only then been awarded a state. That was certainly the case for Jews and Israel (1948). But it’s also what happened for Bangladesh (1971), East Timor (2002), and, after a considerable lag time, Namibia (1990) and Armenia (1992). Kurds are still waiting for their state—they have part of a state in Iraqi Kurdistan—and they are not the only stateless minority longing for an internationally recognized homeland.
Palestinians have been waiting since the nakba of 1948 for their state. It’s not only Israel that has stood in their way. Other Arab states have displayed varying degrees of indifference, with the Abraham Accords the latest proof of how easy it is to bribe countries like the United Arab Emirates and Morocco to take Palestinian statehood off the table. Hamas sent its expeditionary force into Israel on October 7 in part to forestall Saudi Arabia jumping on the Abraham Accords bandwagon.
Now, with Palestinian suffering at levels unseen for several generations, it is impossible for many countries to avert their gaze. France is planning to push the issue of statehood at the UN General Assembly meeting in September. The minimum conditions for such a state would, of course, be a credible ceasefire, an end to Israeli occupation of Gaza, Palestinian governance of the territory, and an end to new settlements in the West Bank.
The current government in Israel would not likely support these conditions. But international pressure, along the lines of the crippling sanctions recommended in the letter of the prominent Israeli critics and long recommended by the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement, might oust Netanyahu as surely as the global anti-apartheid movement managed to force a political transition in South Africa.
Voices around the world are saying: it’s now or never for a Palestinian state. It’s beyond horrible that Palestinians must suffer a genocide for the world to take seriously their demands for a state. But it would be incomparably worse if, once again, they get nothing for their pains.
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