The best scenario, they said, is that our three ships–one carrying 5,500 tons of humanitarian aid and two carrying the passengers–will reach Gaza and accomplish our mission. Another scenario would be that the Turkish government might cave to pressure from Israel, the United States and Germany, and prevent the boats from even leaving Istanbul. This happened in 2011, when the Greek government buckled under pressure and ten boats were stalled in Greece. With our boats docked in Istanbul today, we fear that Turkish President Erdogan, who recently suffered a crushing blow in local elections, is vulnerable to any economic blackmail the Western powers might be threatening.

Another possibility is that the ships take off but the Israelis illegally hijack us in international waters, confiscate our boats and supplies, arrest and imprison us, and eventually deport us.

This happened on several other voyages to Gaza, one of them with deadly consequences. In 2010, a flotilla of six boats was stopped by the Israeli military in international waters. They boarded the biggest boat, the Mavi Marmara. According to a UN report, the Israelis opened fire with live rounds from a helicopter hovering above the ship and from commando boats along the side of the ship. In a horrific display of force, nine passengers were killed, and one more later succumbed to his wounds.

To try to prevent another nightmare like that, potential passengers on this flotilla have to undergo rigorous training. We watched a video of what we might face—from extremely potent tear gas to ear-splitting concussion grenades—and we were  told that the Israeli commandos will  be armed with weapons with live rounds. Then we divided up into small groups to discuss how best to react, non-violently, to such an attack. Do we sit, stand, or lie down? Do we link arms? Do we put our hands up in the air to show we are unarmed?

 Photo credit: Medea Benjamin

The most frightening part of the training was a simulation replete with deafening booms of gunfire and exploding percussion grenades and masked soldiers screaming at us, hitting us with simulated  rifles, dragging us across the floor, and arresting us. It was indeed sobering to get a glimpse of what might await us. Equally sobering are Israeli media reports indicating that the Israeli military has begun “security preparations,” including preparations for taking over the flotilla.

That’s why everyone who has signed up for this mission deserves tremendous credit. The largest group of passengers are from Turkey, and many are affiliated with the humanitarian group, IHH, an enormous Turkish NGO with 82 offices throughout the country. It has consultative status at the UN and does charity work in 115 countries. Through IHH, millions of supporters donated money to buy and stock the ships. Israel, however, has designated this very respected charity as a terrorist group.

The next largest group comes from Malaysia, some of them affiliated with another very large humanitarian group called MyCARE. MyCARE, known for helping out in emergency situations such as floods and other natural disasters, has contributed millions of dollars in emergency aid to Gaza over the years.

From the U.S., there are about 35 participants. Leading the group, and key to the international coalition, is 77-year-old retired U.S. Army colonel and State Department diplomat Ann Wright. After quitting the State Department in protest over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Wright has put her diplomatic skills to good use in helping to pull together a motley group of internationals. Her co-organizer from the U.S. is Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian American attorney who is a co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and who ran for congress in 2022. Arraf  was key to organizing the very first flotillas that started in 2008. So far, there have been about 15 attempts to get to Gaza by boat, only five of them successful.

The incredible breadth of participants is evident in our nightly meetings, where you can hear clusters of groups chatting away in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Malay, French, Italian, and English in diverse accents from Australian to Welsh. The ages range from students in their 20s to an 86-year-old Argentine medical doctor.

What brings us together is our outrage that the world community is allowing this genocide in Gaza to happen, and a burning desire to do more than we have been doing to stop people from being murdered, maimed and starved. The aid we are bringing is enormous–it is the equivalent of over 100 trucks—but that is not the only purpose of this trip. “This is an aid mission to bring food to hungry people,” said Huwaida Arraf, “but Palestinians do not want to live on charity. So we are also challenging Israeli policies that make them dependent on aid. We are trying to break the siege.”

Israel’s vicious attacks on the people of Gaza, its blocking of aid deliveries and its targeting of relief organizations have fueled a massive humanitarian crisis. 
The killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers by Israeli forces on April 1 highlighted the dangerous environment in which relief agencies operate, which has forced many of them to shut down their operations.

The U.S. government is building a temporary port for aid that is supposed to be finished in early May, but this is the same government that provides weapons and diplomatic cover for the Israelis. And while President Biden expresses concern for the suffering Palestinians, he has suspended aid to UNRWA, the main UN agency responsible for helping them, after Israel made unsubstantiated claims that 12 of its 13,000 employees in Gaza participated in the October 7 attacks.

Given the urgency and danger this moment presents, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition is entering rough and uncharted waters. We are calling on countries around the world to pressure Israel to allow us “free and safe passage” to Gaza. In the U.S., we are asking for help from our Congress, but having just approved another $26 billion to Israel, it is doubtful that we can count on their support.

And even if our governments did pressure Israel, would Israel pay attention? Their defiance of international law and world opinion during the past seven months indicates otherwise. But still, we will push forward. The people of Gaza are the wind in our sails. Freedom for Palestine is our North Star. We are determined to reach Gaza with food, medicines and, most of all, our solidarity and love.

From childhood, we are told that patience is a virtue and that good things will come to those who wait. And, so, many of us work on cultivating patience.

This often starts by learning to wait for a turn with a coveted toy. As adults, it becomes trying to remain patient with long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles, misbehaving kids or the slow pace of political change. This hard work can have mental health benefits. It is even correlated with per capita income and productivity.

But it is also about trying to become a good person.

It’s clear to me, as a scholar of religious ethics, that patience is a term many of us use, but we all could benefit from understanding its meaning a little better.

In religious traditions, patience is more than waiting, or even more than enduring a hardship. But what is that “more,” and how does being patient make us better people?

The writings of medieval Islamic thinker Abu Hamid al-Ghazali can give us insights or help us understand why we need to practice patience – and also when not to be patient.

Who was al-Ghazali?

Born in Iran in 1058, al-Ghazali was widely respected as a jurist, philosopher and theologian. He traveled to places as far as Baghdad and Jerusalem to defend Islam and argued there was no contradiction between reason and revelation. More specifically, he was well known for reconciling Aristotle’s philosophy, which he likely read in Arabic translation, with Islamic theology.

Al-Ghazali was a prolific writer, and one of his most important works – “Revival of the Religious Sciences,” or the “Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn” – provides a practical guide for living an ethical Muslim life.

This work is composed of 40 volumes in total, divided into four parts of 10 books each. Part 1 deals with Islamic rituals; Part 2, local customs; Part 3, vices to be avoided; and Part 4, virtues one should strive for. Al-Ghazali’s discussion of patience comes in Volume 32 of Part 4, “On Patience and Thankfulness,” or the “Kitāb al-sabr waʾl-shukr.”

He describes patience as a fundamental human characteristic that is crucial to achieving value-driven goals, and he provides a caveat for when impatience is called for.

1. What is patience?

Humans, according to al-Ghazali, have competing impulses: the impulse of religion, or “bāʿith al-dīn,” and the impulse of desire, or “bāʿith al-hawā.”

Life is a struggle between these two impulses, which he describes with the metaphor of a battle: “Support for the religious impulse comes from the angels reinforcing the troops of God, while support for the impulse of desire comes from the devils reinforcing the enemies of God.”

The amount of patience we have is what decides who wins the battle. As al-Ghazali puts it, “If a man remains steadfast until the religious impulse conquers … then the troops of God are victorious and he joins the troops of the patient. But if he slackens and weakens until appetite overcomes him … he joins the followers of the devils.” In other words, for al-Ghazali, patience is the deciding factor of whether we are living up to our full human potential to live ethically.

2. Patience, values and goals

Patience is also necessary for being a good Muslim, in al-Ghazali’s view. But his understanding of how patience works rests on a theory of ethics and can be applied outside of his explicitly Islamic worldview.

It all starts with commitments to core values. For a Muslim like al-Ghazali, those values are informed by the Islamic tradition and community, or “umma,” and include things like justice and mercy. These specific values might be universally applicable. Or you might also have another set of values that are important to you. Perhaps a commitment to social justice, or being a good friend, or not lying.

“Nizamiyyah University Nishapur,” Digital imagining, Dall-E, 2024.

Living in a way that is consistent with these core values is what the moral life is all about. And patience, according to al-Ghazali, is how we consistently make sure our actions serve this purpose.

That means patience is not just enduring the pain of a toddler’s temper tantrum. It is enduring that pain with a goal in mind. The successful application of patience is measured not by how much pain we endure but by our progress toward a specific goal, such as raising a healthy and happy child who can eventually regulate their emotions.

In al-Ghazali’s understanding of patience, we all need it in order to remain committed to our core principles and ideas when things aren’t going our way.

3. When impatience is called for

One critique of the idea of patience is that it can lead to inaction or be used to silence justified complaints. For instance, scholar of Africana studies Julius Fleming argues in his book “Black Patience” for the importance of a “radical refusal to wait” under conditions of systemic racism. Certainly, there are forms of injustice and suffering in the world that we should not calmly endure.

Despite his commitment to the importance of patience to a moral life, al-Ghazali makes room for impatience as well. He writes, “One is forbidden to be patient with harm (that is) forbidden; for example, to have one’s hand cut off or to witness the cutting off of the hand of a son and to remain silent.”

These are examples of harms to oneself or to loved ones. But could the necessity for impatience be extended to social harms, such as systemic racism or poverty? And as Quranic studies scholars Ahmad Ismail and Ahmad Solahuddin have argued, true patience sometimes necessitates action.

As al-Ghazali writes, “Just because patience is half of faith, do not imagine that it is all commendable; what is intended are specific kinds of patience.”

To sum up, not all patience is good; only patience that is in service of righteous goals is key to the ethical life. The question of which goals are righteous is one we must all answer for ourselves.

Liz Bucar, Professor of Philosophy and Religion, Northeastern University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In this episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient, we continue our conversation about forced famine and its use as a powerful tool to control people, land and resources. Starvation has, for centuries, been a part of the colonizer’s “playbook.”

We speak with two scholars to explore two historic examples: the decimation of Indigenous populations in the Plains, North America, which historian David Stannard has called the American Holocaust and in India, the 1943 famine in Bengal. According to a recent BBC story, the Bengal famine of 1943 killed more than three million people. It was one of the worst losses of civilian life on the Allied side in the Second World War. (The United Kingdom lost 450,000 lives during that same war.) [SEE INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT BELOW.]

Although disease, environmental disasters and famine were features of life before colonialism, decades of research has shown how these occurrences were manipulated by colonial powers to prolong starvation and trigger chronic famine. In other words, starvation has been effectively used by colonial powers to control populations, acquire land and the wealth that comes with that. This colonization was accompanied by an “entitlement approach” and the belief that Indigenous populations are inferior to the lives of the colonizer.

According to scholars, prior to the arrival of colonialists, both populations at the heart of today’s episode were thriving with healthy and wealthy communities. And although disease and famine existed before the arrival of Europeans, it cannot be denied colonial powers accelerated and even capitalized on chronic famine and the loss of life due to disease and malnutrition.

As the famous economist Amartya Sen has said, famine is a function of repression. It springs from the politics of food distribution rather than a lack of food. Imperial policies such as the Boat Denial Policy and Rice Denial Policy meant that, as curator Natasha Ginwala wrote: “freshly harvested grain was set on fire, or even dumped into the river.”

Joining on this episode were two experts on the North American and Bengal famines.

James Daschuk is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies at the University of Regina. He is the author of Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life.

We also spoke with Janam Mukherjee, an Associate Professor of History at Toronto Metropolitan University, and the author of Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire. Mukherjee was recently a primary historical advisor on the BBC Radio 4 series “Three Million,” a five-part documentary on the Bengal famine of 1943.

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You can listen to or follow Don’t Call Me Resilient on Apple Podcasts (transcripts available), Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts.

You can read the transcript of this episode here:

THIS IS AN UNEDITED, UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

INTRO

Vinita Srivastava: For centuries, starvation has been effectively used by colonial powers to control populations, to acquire land, and the wealth that comes with that.

This colonization was accompanied by an entitlement approach, the belief that the indigenous populations are inferior to the lives of the colonizer. So today we’re looking at two historic examples, the decimation of indigenous populations in North America, what has been referred to as a cultural genocide, or the American Holocaust, and the famine in Bengal, India, in 1943 under British rule.

According to a recent BBC story, the Bengal famine killed more than three million people. It was one of the worst losses of civilian life on the Allied side during the Second World War. Of course, these are two vastly different populations that were decimated by a complex set of factors. But both populations had a few things in common.

They were thriving with healthy and wealthy communities. And although disease and famine existed before the arrival of Europeans, it cannot be denied that they accelerated and even capitalized on chronic famine and the loss of life due to disease and malnutrition. In other words, as the famous economist Amartya Sen has said, chronic famine springs from the politics of food distribution rather than a lack of food.

With us today are two experts on the famines I just mentioned. James Daschuk is an associate professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies at the University of Regina. He is the author of Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. And Janam Mukherjee is an associate professor of history at Toronto Metropolitan University, and the author of Hungry Bengal: War, Famine, and the End of Empire.

Thank you so much both for being here.

INTERVIEW

Janam Mukherjee: Thank you, Vinita.

James Daschuk: Thank you.

Vinita Srivastava: So, today’s conversation is a bit of an experiment, and something that we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. And that is, can we talk about the tools of colonialism as a playbook across different regions? So, let’s give it a try, and let’s jump into this conversation.

James, in your book, you mention a scholar who describes what happened in North America as an American Holocaust. This is a very complicated history with many different factors impacting things. But can you describe generally what this means?

James Daschuk: I think standards approach to American holocaust talk about the apocalyptic events that happened after the arrival of Europeans.

So not only was, They’re the displacement of indigenous people, but the diseases that came with them, unbeknownst even to the Europeans themselves, it was before the days of germ theory or anything like that. So I think the arrival of Europeans and, and all the baggage, the biological baggage they brought with them brought such monumental events that’s standard to use that term, like you said, an American Holocaust.

Vinita Srivastava: I remember reading in the very beginning of your book that stayed with me is that The indigenous population declined by almost 90 percent and that they were basically destroyed, as you’re saying. I’m wondering if we can talk a little bit about what contributed to that decline of population.

James Daschuk: It’s more than biology, for sure, but I think one of the things to think about is, Indigenous people in North America and other places around the world that didn’t have a long tradition of, for example, uh, domestication of animals.

We know now in the 21st century that animals are the reservoir of diseases. So because indigenous people in America didn’t domesticate animals, they hadn’t had the, the biological experience of passing germs or viruses between animals and humans. Europeans arrived with endemic smallpox, the people who they encountered had no biological resistance.

There’s a new interpretation that it’s more than just that. It was, it was the violence enacted by the Europeans, by the new arrivals. But I think those two things combined to create standards, Holocaust like situation.

Vinita Srivastava: One of the things I really liked about reading your book, James, is that every single thing is, is really sourced. You provide all of this information. It’s like thousands of years, like 2000 years, and you take us through this history. And one of the most famous lines that’s quoted from your book is this line that the first prime minister of Canada said, which is that we’re doing all we can basically to refuse food to Indians who are on the verge of starvation to reduce the expense. So first of all, hearing that quote, it might explain why we had this problem with statues of John A. Macdonald in Canada, why they were being asked to be taken down, why some of them were taken down. But can you explain a little bit more in the context of that very famous quote? Now, what was happening at that time?

James Daschuk: For sure. This wasn’t me being a conspiracy theorist. This was me cutting and pasting from Hansard, the official record of the house of commons. One thing we don’t tend to think about is that really provocative statement by Prime Minister Macdonald about keeping people on the verge of starvation to reduce the expense.

He was being criticized by the Liberal Party for spending too much money on food. So, there didn’t seem to be too many sympathetic actors in 19th century Canadian Parliament with regard to the well being of Indigenous people. I think he was bragging that he was controlling the population, weaponizing food, and he wasn’t embarrassed about it.

He was actually quite proud that he was able to control 20, 000 Indigenous people as cheaply as possible. He wasn’t wasting the taxpayers money, which is a very cynical thing to say. What that did was, that food as a, as a means to control the population, ensured the, the quick construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which is the backbone of the nation, especially here in Western Canada.

Vinita Srivastava: So he sacrificed Indigenous populations to build a train across Canada and to help settlers come into this nation, into this land.

James Daschuk: Yeah. And once you had an industrial means of bringing settlers in, they were coming in potentially by the hundreds every week. So the population here in Saskatchewan. Rose like a rocket over the decades after that, First Nations people were barred from leaving their reserves with a pass system. They were excluded from the commercial economy with a permit system that lasted until the 1960s. So that hunger, the initial hunger was institutionalized for decades.

And the abduction of children into the residential schools program, which we all know about. The hunger was institutionalized to such an extent that tuberculosis broke out almost universally in those kids. And Ian Mosby from Toronto Metropolitan has, has written that things were so institutionalized in the mid 20th century that there were nutritional experiments undertaken on residential school children by Canadian government physicians and scientists.

Vinita Srivastava: I saw that instead of feeding the children, they, or instead of feeding indigenous populations, they decided to study the impact of hunger and starvation. Janam, moving forward into a different time period, but also a different continent, You’ve researched and published a book about the 1943 Bengal famine in India.

Even though there’s now books published on the famine, it’s still a relatively unknown history that in the 1940s that more than 3 million people died in eastern India. It was one of the worst losses of civilian life on the Allied side in the Second World War. I know it is complicated, but I’m wondering if you could help unpack what happened in that era.

Janam Mukherjee: I think the prevailing condition of India at the inception of World War I is colonialism. Colonialism is the most dominant force politically, societally, geopolitically, etc. So we have to see colonialism itself as a sort of authoritarian regime with resort to famine throughout the colonial period.

Famine is used throughout the colonial period as a way to subjugate the colonized population. And then in particular, the other main vector creating famine in Bengal in the 1940s is war itself. So the pressures of war, particularly on Bengal in Eastern India, once Japan takes Burma and India becomes the front of the war against the Axis powers, tremendous pressure to produce for the war effort is made in Bengal.

So there’s a huge extraction of goods, uh, commodities, resources, as well as people, that puts tremendous economic pressure. And then the colonial system overlaying it. So in the name of war, they’re also claiming certain emergency powers that amount to a totalitarian state. They’re also facing armed rebellion and active rebellion from the Bengali population in particular.

So famine is a very. Useful tool in a sort of collective punishment of Bengal and India at large. So if we see these two factors of colonialism and then empire at war as being the kind of concrete context of famine, we can expand that and look at famine around the world and see the relationship between authoritarianism, war and famine quite broadly.

And I think explains a lot of modern famines.

Vinita Srivastava: Many of us are a victim of a lot of brainwashing. You know, we’ve been taught certain things in school. We’re talking about John A. Macdonald in the case of Canada, similar to what John A. Macdonald said. There’s a famous quote by Winston Churchill, who lays the responsibility of the famine on the too high population of Bengal.

That’s been a standard trope in the West that people in the Global South starve because they’re just simply too many people. And what you’re saying, I think is something very, very different that famine across the board, almost you can point to certain factors. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, like responsibility behind the famine, who was responsible for it.

Janam Mukherjee: I think famine is, is most commonly seen as a kind of by product of various systems, whether that’s economic systems or environmental systems or political systems. When you have empire at war, the kind of will towards power becomes totalitarianism, as Winston Churchill famously called the war effort, a total war.

During total war, extreme measures are taken, and those extreme measures are also categorical. I believe that famine defines a certain category of people who are beyond the pale of our humanity, who are outlined and then marked as outside of human life itself. Authoritarian regimes often resort to famine and torture.

These are the most direct, biopolitical, Aspects of a structural violence on population. And I think famine has to be seen not as a consequence of certain orders of power, but it’s really necessary of certain power structures to delimit a population that is beyond human concern or compassion or life itself, because to starve a population is a collective act, whereas torture, for instance, is an act upon individual parties.

Famine is a collectivization of a kind of torture of populations. So you starve an entire population, which is a collective punishment, whereas torture is an individualized punishment.

Vinita Srivastava: In your book, you said, the mute complicities of an increasingly callous society at large grew more indifferent month after month and year after year.

Janam Mukherjee: So, because famine, as I say, delimits a population that is understood through public discourse to be outside of human concern. I think this is why famine is allowed to occur in the world in places like Yemen today, which has been suffering a famine situation for many years. And the concern of the world is not there.

And in kind of solidarity with the people of Yemen or the people of Sudan or the people of Afghanistan, for that matter, as well as Gaza, starvation in being seen as a consequence of certain orders of power and of war is seen as an incidental. I think it needs to be seen rather as a part and parcel of certain orders of power and authority and in relation to conflict occupation and territorial expansion, as in the case in North America.

Vinita Srivastava: James, I see you nodding your head. I wonder if you want to jump in.

James Daschuk: I think here in the Canadian West, it was, it was more of a slow burn, but I’m thinking of the idea of settler colonialism. It’s not an event. It’s a structure. And here in Western Canada, our founding mythology of the Canadian society is that we’re the breadbasket of the world and we’re a haven for dispossessed European peoples and people came here to have a good life and that may all well be true, but that society is founded on the institutionalized structural In position of, if not outright starvation, of generational food insecurity that continues into the present.

We’ve got hungry kids going to bed without supper here in Saskatchewan every single night.

Vinita Srivastava: Last week on this podcast, Hilal Elver, who is the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, talks about the famine in Gaza. And then she talks about the lingering intergenerational impacts of starvation.

Not only are people living through it in the present day, but she talks about the impact on future generations. She talks about especially the impact on children. How three months or longer of malnutrition can impact so much in one’s little body. James, you write extensively about this, the lingering effects from the North American famine. That’s one of the reasons you wrote your book. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of those lingering effects?

James Daschuk: Yeah, for sure. Well, I teach in the Faculty of Health Studies. We use as an interpretive model the social determinants of health. One thing to think about, across Canada, a former federal government cabinet minister, Jane Philpott, in 2018, said there was a 15 year life expectancy between Indigenous people and the rest of the population in Canada.

So what that means is, if you’re Indigenous, you can expect to lead a shorter, sicker, hungrier life. And it’s really based on poverty. There’s no biological difference. What it is, is it’s the social forces, the structures that have kept people poor, that have created that intergenerational trauma. Think about a hundred years of a family having their children taken away from them, abducted by the authorities, sent to a place where they’re institutionally malnourished, potentially abused.

They have their language taken away from them, generation upon generation. And actually, there’s a class action lawsuit. That, that’s being organized for the survivors of intergenerational trauma. So not only are the, the survivors of schools going through that, the legal system, now the children of, of, of those people are, are starting the process of restitution.

You can physically see the impacts of two generations, three generations later. And I want to turn to Janam to talk a little bit about it because you, you talk about in your book, how directly tied you are personally to the Bengal famine. It’s part of the reason you started your research there. Your dad lived through it. Can you tell us a little bit about your personal journey?

Janam Mukherjee: My interest in the, in the spirit of time in India, in Bengal, the 1940s is the period of my father’s childhood. He was born in 1932. I was born in the U. S. in my own childhood. I heard these stories that were very disconnected from my own reality about the things that my father had seen when he was a child, and that was aerial bombardment by the Japanese on Calcutta.

His house was very close to the docks that were bombed, and he remembered the foundation cracking, The sound of the bombs, the famine, and then the civil war between Hindus and Muslims in India at the end of colonial rule. So that’s essentially what I knew of India, but famine itself in particular, I found when much later in life, I began researching it and traveling to Calcutta to do that research.

Had written a deep script in Bengali population at large. The 1943 famine was told about by parents and then grandparents and now great grandparents. It had influenced the culture of Bengal in deep ways and abiding ways in terms of aesthetics, art, food, culture, et cetera. So famine is very much with Bengali people.

I think it will remain as such in many ways. It’s also a collective experience, often of populations. You see that in Ireland. You see that in Ukraine with the Holodomor famine, where, you know, it is also a cultural foundation or, or starting point and often a nationalist, uh, starting point, it triggers off resistance and collective understanding of a collective plight, uh, so famine has that boomerang effect.

Vinita Srivastava: You said it. Resistance. I have to say that since I’ve been thinking about this, I just keep writing down in a piece of paper resistance and putting a big square around it. How do we start to talk about resistance?

In your book, Janam, there’s a scholar that talks about How people in Bengal, quote, died without a murmur. James, in your book, you talk about the collective punishment that would happen if there was resistance, that food would be withheld for a whole week. The ration of food would be withheld on that reserve. So I do want to ask you both about if you can think about instances of resistance that you can draw from in your work and in your research about these famines. Janam I can start with you and then go to James.

Janam Mukherjee: What I really aim to detail is that the Bengal famine was resisted at every stage. You can’t expect people in the last throes of starvation who are walking skeletons, who are ridden often with madness because of the condition, their physiological condition is such.

that you can’t really expect resistance from already starving masses. What you see is resistance to the policies that lead to starvation. Often those policies, particularly in the context of the Bengal famine, were related to war. So the wartime efforts to appropriate rice were resisted. The efforts to collectively punish various parts of the population were resisted in the form of armed resistance often.

So these all have to be seen as part and parcel of resistance to the power structure that is exacting famine. So resistance, I think has to be seen more broadly, but it often does delineate the power structure itself. It sheds light on the power structure. It, in a sense, exposes its weakness. Because famine is often the result of a dying power structure, of a power structure in a desperate attempt to maintain its order of power.

It’s often a last ditch of empire in particular. So we see famines at the end of many of the colonial states as empire is coming apart and colonialism is being ejected from the colonized world.

Vinita Srivastava: James, what do you think?

James Daschuk: I think the resistance was at a different level here in Canada. With the Indian Act, during the patriarchal system, adult male First Nations people were made wards of the state.

So they had the legal sanctions of children. So instead of having an organized campaign, as Janam just mentioned, I think the, the resistance was more at the community level, at the family level. One of the things that comes to mind is a film that a friend of mine, Floyd Favel just produced. Ashes and embers.

And in 1948, the residential school children made a plan and burned the school down. They warned all the other kids when it was time to make a break for it, and they burned the school down. And there are plenty of instances of that without the structure actually changing. And I think at the end of the Second World War, there was an inordinate amount of First Nations men that volunteered for service, probably to get out of reserve conditions, whatever it might be.

Also to, to get back to traditional warrior societies, that kind of thing. But when they came back, they were fighting in the same trenches as non Indigenous people. And they organized politically and worked very hard and ultimately successfully to gain recognition. You know, that recognition is still coming, but you know, these things take time.

I think it’s important to talk about resistance and all, even if it’s like, as you say, kind of an everyday in community resistance, it’s, it’s it’s very challenging to talk about what we’re talking about. You guys have both written books, but these are very challenging things to engage with. I’m wondering, how do you both see these two very different chapters of history intersecting?

Janam Mukherjee: You know, I think the way you began, the question of territorial expansion, the question of control of populations, the role that food distribution and starvation play into those orders of colonial power. are certainly in conversation with each other and are related. I always see famine as delineating the other, the colonized other, more clearly than any other act of state.

It is to make of the colonized people, the wretched masses that the colonizer wants to understand them as. It’s actually to make them physically that. And the intergenerational connection then of devitalization, of impoverishment, of the long trajectory of slow famine, that also has close similarities in the North American as well as in the Asian context.

Vinita Srivastava: James, what do you think learning about the history of this famine, starving, clearing the plains you talk about, what do you think it can teach us?

James Daschuk: Well, the stories we’ve heard about Canada being, you know, one of the kindest nations in the world probably isn’t so true. But one thing, and this is in conversation with Janam and, and, and other scholars, is the British empire, when we were kids, when I was at the French school back in my hometown, we had that, to that map with all of the pink countries, that sort of, the sun never set.

Different manifestations of colonialism, different uses of food as a weapon, uh, it wasn’t just them. You know, all different strategies. And I guess we’re coming together to deconstruct that myth of the British empire, the benevolence of the British empire. We have a long way to go down that trail, but there are actually scholars now trying to defend the British empire and receiving a backlash.

I’m thinking of Nigel Biggar, a retired professor from Oxford, who’s written a book called the Colonialism, A Moral Reckoning in an attempt basically to explain the mixed legacy of colonialism. So in one sense, the anti anti colonialists getting organized is a sign that, uh, that we’re doing our job.

Janam Mukherjee: Good point.

Vinita Srivastava: I want to turn to the current situation in Gaza and I’m wondering if you think that there’s anything to learn from these chapters of history and can we apply it to the current situation in Gaza where experts are saying famine is imminent?

James Daschuk: I’m just a simple Canadianist. But on the radio, Antonio Guterres was speaking about there are truck convoys full of food, there’s a fence, and there are people who are in imminent danger of starving to death.

That’s not an absence of food. That is the organizing principle I’ve been looking at, that Janam been looking at, and that other scholars have been looking at.

Vinita Srivastava: That there is no lack of food, basically, that famine is a structure.

James Daschuk: Absolutely. And no matter what the geopolitical implications are, children should not be starved.

Janam Mukherjee: As is also well outlined in international law. I think all famines are very specific and as a historian, I always argue for the historical specificity and not to make too gross generalizations, but we can learn from previous famines about orders of authority, occupation, and war in particular. I would suggest that famine is not a consequence of war.

It’s incidental to war. Famine is the handmaiden of war. It has been for centuries. It is part and parcel of war, no matter what legislation is made to outlaw the directed use of starvation as a weapon of war. It seems that those international laws have not worked. And famine remains part and parcel of how war is fought.

Practiced on the face of the earth. So the question of the orders of authority that war allows and the decisions made in terms of sacrificing large populations of people and subjecting them to hunger remains with us. And I think there’s a lot to learn from history in that regard. And there’s unfortunately a lot to be seen in the present in that regard as well.

Not just in Gaza, but also in Yemen and also in Sudan and in other parts of the earth as well. So you still have one out of two people living in India under the nutritional kind of global standards or one half of this hungry people on earth live in India. So these orders of power still exist.

Vinita Srivastava: I think they exist right in Saskatchewan, as James was saying, too, where he says children are going hungry and this just seems to be unacceptable that if it’s about control, then it’s unacceptable.

Janam Mukherjee: And it’s about war and it’s about winning. The ideology of war is in the modern age, regardless of all kind of Codes of conduct otherwise, it’s still what it’s always been. It’s a brutal attack on whole populations that does not discriminate well or often between enemies and civilians. And we see that collapsing in all the wars around us. Those questions of who is the enemy and the civilian population most often becomes the enemy in relation to the opposing sides in conflict.

James Daschuk: It’s really interesting to have both of us, Vinita, because in Janam’s case, it’s a conflict. In my case, it’s the establishment of what is thought of as a peaceful society and it can structures continue.

I don’t know if they diverged food insecurity, famine, that whole continuum. In the case of my research is the structure of our province and potentially Canada.

Vinita Srivastava: I thank you both very much for taking the time to have this conversation. I appreciate your time today.

Janam Mukherjee: Thank you, Vinita, and nice to meet you, James.

James Daschuk: Thanks, Vinita.

OUTRO

Vinita Srivastava: That’s it for this episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient. You heard me say at the beginning that this was a bit of an experiment from us, and I would love to know what you thought. You can reach the team at dcmr@theconversation.com, and be sure to follow us on Instagram. @dontcallmeresilientpodcast.

Don’t Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation. This series is produced and hosted by me, Vinita Srivastava. Our associate producer is Ateqah Khaki. Our student journalist is Husein Haveliwala. Krish Dineshkumar does our sound design and mixing, and our consulting producer is Jennifer Moroz. Lisa Varano is the managing editor of The Conversation Canada, and Scott White is the CEO. Zaki Ibrahim wrote and performed the music we use on the podcast. The track is called Something in the Water.

We’d love to hear from you, including any ideas for future episodes.

Join the Conversation on Instagram, X, LinkedIn and use #DontCallMeResilient.

Resources

“When Canada used hunger to clear the West” (by James Daschuk, July 19, 2013)

Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Indigenous Life (by James Daschuk, 2013)

“Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952” (in Social History by Ian Mosby, 2013)

“Proposed class action seeks damages for intergenerational trauma from residential schools” (CBC News)

Ashes and Embers: Stories of the Delmas Indian Residential School (by Floyd Favel)

Churchill’s Secret War (by Madhusree Mukerjee, 2010)

Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire (by Janam Mukherjee, 2015)

“Three Million” (The documentary podcast by the BBC)

“Witnessing famine: the testimonial work of famine photographs and anti-colonial spectatorship” (Journal of Visual Culture by Tanushree Ghosh, 2019)

“We are about to witness in Gaza the most intense famine since the second world war” (The Guardian, March 21, 2024, by Alex de Waal)

Ateqah Khaki, Associate Producer, Don’t Call Me Resilient, The Conversation and Vinita Srivastava, Host + Producer, Don’t Call Me Resilient, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

What struck me in their report is how unhappy the Middle East is. The only Middle Eastern country in the top twenty is Kuwait (for the first time in this cycle). Kuwait has oil wealth and is a compact country with lots of social interaction. The high score may reflect Kuwait’s lively labor movement. That sort of movement isn’t allowed in the other Gulf States. The United Arab Emirates came in at 22, and Saudi Arabia at 28.

These countries are all very wealthy and their people are very social and connected to clans and other group identities, including religious congregations.

But everyone else in the Middle East is way down the list.

As usual, Gallup found that the very happiest countries were Scandinavian lands shaped by social democratic policies. It turns out that a government safety net of the sort the Republican Party wants to get rid of actually is key to making people happy.

Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden take the top four spots. Israel, which also has a Labor socialist founding framework, is fifth. The Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and Luxembourg fill out the top nine.

The Gallup researchers believe that a few major considerations affect well-being or happiness. They note, “Social interactions of all kinds … add to happiness, in addition to their effects flowing through increases in social support and reductions in loneliness.” My brief experience of being in Australia suggests to me that they are indeed very social and likely not very lonely on the whole. Positive emotions also equate to well-being and are much more important in determining it than negative emotions. The positive emotions include joy, gratitude, serenity, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and altruism, among others.

Benevolence, doing good to others, also adds to well-being. Interestingly, the Gallup researchers find that benevolence increased in COVID and its aftermath across the board.

They also factor in GDP per capita, that is, how poor or wealthy people are.

Gallup Video: “2024 World Happiness Report; Gallup CEO Jon Clifton”

Bahrain comes in at 62, which shows that oil wealth isn’t everything. It is deeply divided between a Sunni elite and a Shiite majority population, and that sectarian tension likely explains why it isn’t as happy as Kuwait. Kuwait is between a sixth and a third Shiite and also has a Sunni elite, but the Shiites are relatively well treated and the Emir depends on them to offset the power of Sunni fundamentalists. So it isn’t just sectarian difference that affects happiness but the way in which the rulers deal with it.

Libya, which is more or less a failed state after the people rose up to overthrow dictator Moammar Gaddafi, nevertheless comes in at 66. There is some oil wealth when the militias allow its export, and despite the east-west political divide, people are able to live full lives in cities like Benghazi and Tripoli. Maybe the overhang of getting rid of a hated dictator is still a source of happiness for them.

Algeria, a dictatorship and oil state, is 85. The petroleum wealth is not as great as in the Gulf by any means, and is monopolized by the country’s elite.

Iraq, an oil state, is 92. Like Bahrain, it suffers from ethnic and sectarian divides. It is something of a failed state after the American overthrow of its government.

Iran, another oil state, is 100. Its petroleum sales are interfered with by the US except with regard to China, so its income is much more limited than other Gulf oil states. The government is dictatorial and young people seem impatient with its attempt to regiment their lives, as witnessed in the recent anti-veiling protests.

The State of Palestine is 103, which is actually not bad given that they are deeply unhappy with being occupied by Israel. This ranking certainly plummeted after the current Israeli total war on Gaza began.

Morocco is 107. It is relatively poor, in fact poorer than some countries that rank themselves much lower on the happiness scale.

Tunisia is one of the wealthier countries in Africa and much better off than Morocco, but it comes in at 115. In the past few years all the democratic gains made during and after the Arab Spring have been reversed by horrid dictator Qais Saied. People seem to be pretty unhappy at now living in a seedy police state.

Jordan is both poor and undemocratic, and is ranked 125.

Egypt is desperately poor and its government since 2014 has been a military junta in business suits that brooks not the slightest dissent. It is 127. The hopes of the Arab Spring are now ashes.

Yemen is 133. One of the poorest countries in the world, it suffered from being attacked by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates from 2015 until 2021. So it is war torn and poverty-stricken.

Lebanon ranks almost at the bottom at 142. Its economy is better than Yemen’s but its government is hopelessly corrupt and its negligence caused the country’s major port to be blown up, plunging the country into economic crisis. It is wracked by sectarianism. If hope is a major positive emotion that leads to feelings of happiness, it is in short supply there.

Some countries are too much of a basket case to be included, like Syria, where I expect people are pretty miserable after the civil war. Likewise Sudan, which is now in civil strife and where hundreds of thousands may starve.

Poverty, dictatorship, disappointment in political setbacks, and sectarianism all seem to play a part in making the Middle East miserable. The role of the United States in supporting the dictatorships in Egypt and elsewhere, or in supporting wars, has been sinister and certainly has added significantly to the misery. For no group in the region is this more true than for the Palestinians.

They said of the just-realeased Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) assessment, “This is unprecedented. No IPC analysis has ever recorded such levels of food insecurity anywhere in the world.” [Emphasis added.]

They continued, “Life-threatening levels of acute malnutrition have risen at an alarming rate since the last report, and we are already witnessing with horror the death of children due to starvation. Hunger cannot be used as a weapon of war. What we are seeing is not a natural hazard but a manmade disaster, and it is our moral duty to stop it.”

Borell said in Brussels, “In Gaza we are no longer on the brink of famine, we are in a state of famine, affecting thousands of people.” He added, “This is unacceptable. Starvation is used as a weapon of war. Israel is provoking famine.”

Sometimes a telling detail outweighs a statistic. Something like 25,000 babies have been born in Gaza since the Israeli campaign began.

According to reporters on the scene, many of their mothers are too malnourished to produce milk for them. Imagine the anguish and the guilt.

There is no powdered milk in the market. Most of the available water is full of bacteria, which kills newborns by giving them diarrhea and dehydrating them. One mother said that her two-month-old is like a two-week-old because of malnutrition.

Al Jazeera video: “2-month-old baby dies from hunger in Gaza | Al Jazeera Newsfeed”

The IPC review [pdf] found that 100% of the Palestinians in Gaza face food insecurity as a result of Israel’s war strategy. But matters have gone beyond the level of food insecurity in some parts of the Gaza Strip, for instance in the north.

The report says, “Famine is now projected and imminent in the North Gaza and Gaza Governorates and is expected to become manifest from mid-March 2024 to May 2024.”

We’re in mid-March. Something like 300,000 people remain in these two governorates.

People there are now suffering acute malnutrition.

Acute malnutrition, WHO explains, shows up in four broad ways: “wasting, stunting, underweight, and micronutrient deficiencies.” These conditions make people horrifyingly skinny, reducing their limbs to the dimension of sticks. Physicians measure limbs according to mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC), which tells them about the degree of Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM).

In Gaza’s children from a half-year old to 4.9 years in age, 1% were considered to be suffering from Global Acute Malnutrition according to their MUAC in September, 2023. By January it had risen to 6-9%. By February, just last month, it was 12%-16%. It has been just about doubling. So by the end of March you’re looking at at least 24%-26% of infants and toddlers and young children suffering from Global Acute Malnutrition so severely that their upper-arm circumference is tiny. But what if the numbers aren’t just doubling? The IPC provides a helpful graph of Israeli cruelty:

We don’t have the raw data to nail it down, but we probably aren’t seeing more than 2 deaths per 10,000 per day yet from malnutrition, according to the IPC. But that would be 60 people starving to death per day in north Gaza, or 1,800 a month.

The Israelis only let in half as many aid trucks in February as they had in January. That is a recipe for an exponential, not just serial increase in hunger. We could be going to half or more of north Gaza’s children suffering this extreme malnutrition. Of course, it isn’t just children, but children are half the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip.

The IPC expects a big spike in deaths from starvation beginning as early as now through May.

The worst level of malnutrition is Phase 5, which has two stages, famine and catastrophe.

The report found that fully 70% of the population of north Gaza is now in Phase 5-Catastrophe. That is 200,000 people.

An Israeli ground offensive in Rafah will push more 500,000 people into Phase 5-Catastrophe. If just 2 per 10,000 of them died daily of starvation as a result, that would be 100 per day or 3,000 a month, on top of the ones in the north. That is nearly 5,000 people a month dead of malnutrition, and that is if it stays at the rate of 2 per 10,000 per day. It won’t.

The IPC concludes, “The persistent attacks on hospitals, health posts, ambulances, water services, civilian telecoms services, and IDP sites must cease. Attacks against health care workers must cease. Civilians and civilian infrastructure must be protected, as required under International Humanitarian Law. (Already stipulated in the December 2023 FRC report.”

The authors note that the only proven way to avert famine is to deliver food to those threatened by it. Moreover, they point out that unless people are in fair health, they can’t take in the nutrition, so health care has to be restored as well.

Jake Johnson

( Commondreams.org ) – Patients on Medicare Advantage spoke out against the privatized plans this week as part of a coordinated campaign to shed light on the program’s care denials, treatment delays, and overbilling—and to pressure U.S. President Joe Biden to rein in the insurance giants raking in huge profits from such abuses.

“These corporations do nothing to increase positive outcomes in medical care. So don’t fall for their bullshit,” Jenn Coffey, a retired EMT from New Hampshire, said during a livestream hosted by People’s Action on Wednesday night.

The stream featured testimony from several patients who have experienced the kinds of delays and denials for which Medicare Advantage is notorious.

Rick Timmins of Puget Sound Advocates for Retirement Action said it took five months and “multiple calls and emails” for his insurance company to approve his referral to a dermatologist for a suspicious lump on his earlobe that turned out to be malignant melanoma. The delay stemmed from a byzantine process known as prior authorization, whereby doctors are required to prove a treatment is necessary before an insurer will cover it.

By the time his referral to a specialist was approved, Timmins said, the previously tiny lump “had tripled in size” and was “quite painful.”

Coffey, for her part, ended up on a UnitedHealth Medicare Advantage plan after she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013. She later developed two rare diseases—including complex regional pain syndrome—and required expensive treatments that her Medicare Advantage plan refused to cover.

“If Medicare Advantage has it their way, they’re going to deny me care and delay me care until I’m dead,” Coffey, a healthcare advocate, said in a video published Thursday by the advocacy group Be A Hero as part of a social media day of action against the for-profit plans.

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

“They only make money when they don’t have to spend it on you,” said Coffey.

Once enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan, patients often find it difficult to get out.

“They like to tell you: ‘Medicare Advantage numbers are so high, can’t you tell people love it?'” said Coffey, alluding to the fact that more than half of all eligible Medicare beneficiaries are now enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan. “No, we don’t. We’re stuck. It’s the Hotel California: You can check in, but you can’t get the hell out.”

Next month, the Biden administration is expected to finalize 2025 payment rates for Medicare Advantage, which is funded by the federal government. Medicare Advantage plans frequently overbill the government by making patients appear sicker than they are.

An analysis released last year by Physicians for a National Health Program estimated that Medicare Advantage plans are overcharging U.S. taxpayers by as much as $140 billion per year—an amount that could be used to completely eliminate Medicare Part B premiums or fully fund Medicare’s prescription drug program.

Patients and advocacy groups are calling on Biden to “not fork over more money for insurance companies like UnitedHealthcare,” as Coffey put it during Wednesday’s livestream.

A petition sponsored by Social Security Works urges Biden to “reclaim Medicare” from Medicare Advantage providers, which “have delayed and denied care to millions of Americans in order to turn a massive profit.”

“Medicare Advantage isn’t really Medicare, and it isn’t an advantage to the seniors and people with disabilities who rely on the program,” reads the petition, which has over 22,800 signatures as of this writing. “In the 25 years that it has existed, it’s clear that Medicare Advantage is riddled with the same problems as the rest of private insurance: Opaque bureaucracy and extraordinary fees. Seniors who enroll in these for-profit plans are being price-gouged by massive corporations.”

The Biden administration has proposed a 3.7% payment increase for Medicare Advantage in 2025—a change that insurers have portrayed as a cut. But Social Security Works noted in response to the industry’s complaints that “MA companies are not hurting for profits.”

“In 2022 alone, seven healthcare companies that comprise 70% of the MA market brought in over $1 trillion in total revenue and over $69 billion in profits, and spent $26.2 billion on stock buybacks,” the group observed. “These same companies claim that if the government doesn’t increase their already bloated payment rates, they will have no choice but to slash benefits for patients. This is false, and should be seen for what it is—MA plans holding patients hostage to extort the government for profits.”

In an op-ed for STAT last month, former insurance industry insider Wendell Potter—who is now an outspoken critic of private insurers—and John A. Burns School of Medicine professor professor Philip Verhoef wrote that “private plans have no business administering Medicare benefits.”

“Traditional Medicare is already more efficient than its private counterpart, in large part because the approval process is much simpler and there aren’t the same incentives to upcode,” the pair wrote. “Traditional Medicare spends far less of its funds on administrative overhead, and overall it spends less money per patient than Medicare Advantage while providing far superior access to doctors, hospitals, and treatments.”

“Medicare Advantage isn’t working for any group: the government, patients, taxpayers, and now even investors,” they added. “It’s time to turn to what we already know works. We need to support and strengthen traditional Medicare.”

Doğan and other volunteers were trying to bring food and medical aid to Gaza. After their cargo was seized by the Israelis, the latter actually delivered it to the UN for distribution in Gaza. This act served as an admission that the cargo was inoffensive, and there had been no reason to kill all those volunteers.

PBS NewsHour Video: “News Wrap: U.S. Army ship en route to Mediterranean for construction of pier for Gaza”

Doğan’s impulse has been vindicated by President Biden’s decision to send a US Navy flotilla to Gaza to succor the starving Palestinians. Biden’s action has the same legality as that of the crew of Mavi Marmara. Since Biden seems now to agree that someone should do something to stop Israel’s government from starving the Palestinians, he should give Doğan a medal for having thought of it first and having tried to do something about the food insecurity imposed by Israel on Gaza from 2006. Doğan gave his life at the age of 19 for a cause that Biden is now implicitly admitting was just.

On May 31, 2010, Israeli commandos boarded five humanitarian aid ships in international waters, whose crews and aid workers had expressed the intention of sailing to Gaza to break the Israeli embargo on aid to its occupied territory. The occupation of four of the five ships went smoothly, but it may be that some aid workers put up a fight on the fifth, the Mavi Marmara, finding anything to hand to fend off the Israeli parachutists. They had no firearms or formal weaponry. Since the ship was in international waters, they were within their rights to attempt to prevent the boarding of their ship. Encountering opposition, the Israeli commander ordered his troops to open fire on these unarmed civilians, killing ten noncombatants. One was Doğan, the American citizen, and the nine were Turkish nationals. The American was a journalist. No weapons were found aboard the ship, despite complaints by the Israeli military that a ship had some iron bars on it, which were wielded as bats. The world’s most whiny army initially tried to depict the ship has having had arms (it didn’t) and charged that the volunteers were terrorists (they weren’t, except insofar as having sympathies for oppressed Palestinians makes you a terrorist.)

A UN Human Rights Council report found the attack on the aid ships “clearly unlawful.” The report said that “there is clear evidence to support prosecutions of crimes such as wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, and wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health.”

VP Biden in 2010 justifying Israel's deadly raid on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla that was attempting to get humanitarian aid into Gaza 👇 @jricole https://t.co/6umdaWv8AX pic.twitter.com/K0QT6wqttM

— Fahad Desmukh (@desmukh) March 11, 2024

The UN concluded, “Furkan Doğan, a 19-year-old with dual Turkish and United States citizenship, was on the central area of the top deck filming with a small video camera when he was first hit with live fire. It appears that he was lying on the deck in a conscious, or semi-conscious, state for some time. In total Furkan received five bullet wounds, to the face, head, back thorax, left leg and foot. All of the entry wounds were on the back of his body, except for the face wound which entered to the right of his nose. According to forensic analysis, tattooing around the wound in his face indicates that the shot was delivered at point blank range. Furthermore, the trajectory of the wound, from bottom to top, together with a vital abrasion to the left shoulder that could be consistent with the bullet exit point, is compatible with the shot being received while he was lying on the ground on his back. The other wounds were not the result of firing in contact, near contact or close range, but it is not otherwise possible to determine the exact firing range. The wounds to the leg and foot were most likely received in a standing position.”

The ships were attacked to maintain illegal Israeli control over the Palestinians of Gaza.

Israel had withdrawn troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but retained control of its land borders, its air space, and its seacoast. After Hamas won the 2006 elections, Dov Weisglas, spokesman for the prime minister, explained of the Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” As a result of this policy of limiting aid into the Gaza Strip, a majority of the population was reduced to food insecurity.

The BBC reported that after a few years of this blockade, an Israeli report on it was released by court order: “The report cites a number of ailments suffered by Palestinian children in Gaza. Ten percent of children under 5 have stunted growth due to prolonged exposure to malnutrition. Anemia, caused by an iron-deficiency, affects 58.6 percent of schoolchildren, 68.1 percent of children nine to 12 months old and 36.8 percent of pregnant mothers.” That was in 2012.

Since the Israelis were allowed to get away all those years with half-starving the Palestinians, the Netanyahu government appears to have decided that it has carte blanche to up the ante from putting them on a diet to actually starving them to death. Biden has been forced by public outcry to at least try to put a band-aid on this problem by sending in the US navy with food aid. It is too little too late. If Biden had had Furkan Doğan’s empathy and decisiveness, we would not be in this mess.

Imagine this: since March 2023, 16 million Americans — yes, that’s right, 16 million — have lost healthcare coverage, including four million children, as states redefine eligibility for Medicaid for the first time in three years. Worse yet, the nation is only halfway through the largest purge ever of Medicaid as the expansion and extension of healthcare to millions, brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, have ended, leaving some families no longer eligible, while others need to reapply through a new process in their state.

This thrusting of tens of millions of Americans out of the national healthcare system at a moment when healthcare outfits, pharmaceutical companies, and health insurance corporations are making record profits has been termed “the great unwinding.” And it couldn’t be more cruelly ironic. After all, states have the power and authority to expand healthcare to all their residents; the federal government could similarly extend the declaration of a public health emergency that would let so many of us keep distinctly life-protecting access to healthcare. Yet millions have instead been pushed violently and rapidly from such life-saving care.

Some states are feeling the impact especially strongly. In Georgia, for instance, more than 149,000 children lost their pandemic Medicaid enrollment in just six months. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Texas is the epicenter of Medicaid’s unwinding. There, more than two million Americans have been removed from the state’s Medicaid program since federal pandemic-era coverage protections were lifted last April. As Axios reported, new state data indicates “that’s the most of any state and nearly equivalent to all of Houston — Texas’ most populous city, with 2.3 million residents — losing coverage in less than a year.” In fact, 61% of enrollees in Texas have lost Medicaid since last April.

Death by Poverty and the Lack of Healthcare

In my home state, policy analysts predict that more than 1.1 million New Yorkers will be pushed off Medicaid roles in this same unwinding. Fortunately, people are organizing in response, calling for the right to healthcare, living wages, the abolition of poverty, and more. 

On Saturday, March 2nd, I stood next to Becca Forsyth of Elmira, New York, at the Poor People’s Campaign’s Mass Poor People and Low Wage Workers Statehouse Assembly in Albany, New York. Becca was one of dozens of low-income people who testified at simultaneous assemblies held in 31 state capitals and Washington, D.C. These assemblies launched 40 weeks of the mobilizing and organizing of poor and low-income eligible voters in the lead-up to the 2024 elections, while challenging those running for office, as well as elected officials, to confront poverty as the fourth-leading cause of death in America. Becca was not the only speaker to touch on the crisis of healthcare (and its connection to poverty and death), but her words stuck with me:

“Just since December 19th, I have lost more than a dozen people I loved dearly. In 74 days, I’ve watched as people I’ve known most of my life were literally squeezed to death by poverty and the catastrophic impact it has on our entire lives. People like Missy, a 47-year-old woman who was found lying beside the railroad tracks, dead… Or Gary, who died at the hands of the police while in a hospital for a mental breakdown. Or Loretta, a friend who was a friend before I even knew what the word friend meant, who is no longer with us because my community won’t spend money on substance-use treatment. Chemung County leads this state in way too many negative ways. We rank 59 out of the 62 counties in New York for health outcomes. We have outrageous homelessness, food insecurity, premature death rates, and lead poisoning. Our chances for getting out of poverty are extinguished before we even have a chance!”

Buy the Book

Just two days before I stood with Becca in Albany, the state capital, demanding the right to thrive and not just barely survive, I rallied with healthcare workers and community members at SUNY Downstate Hospital. With the support of New York Governor Kathy Hochul, SUNY Chancellor John King recently announced that his outfit may close SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, one of the few remaining public-safety-net hospitals in the state.

At that rally, community members, hospital workers, local politicians, and faith leaders shared information about the crucial role that hospital has played in the community. It served as a Covid refuge where thousands of lives were saved in the heat of the pandemic, as a critically safe birthing place for Black moms (crucial given the maternal health outcomes for so many women of color), as the only kidney transplant hospital in Brooklyn, and as one of the only remaining teaching hospitals in the area after the closure of such facilities, particularly in impoverished neighborhoods, across Brooklyn and the rest of New York.

Sadly, closing down hospitals or reducing their services in poorer neighborhoods is becoming all too typical of this nation. Big conglomerates are buying up chains of them and making decisions based only on their bottom lines, not the needs of our communities. In fact, more than 600 rural hospitals are now at risk of closing due to financial instability and that’s more than 30% of America’s rural facilities. For half of them, the possibility of closure is immediate, according to a new report from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform (CHQPR).

Our Unwinding Health

Such Medicaid cuts and hospital closures are but two manifestations of a far larger attack on American health and healthcare in what’s fast being transformed into a death-dealing nation. They are but harbingers of an even larger “unwinding” of our health as a nation. Before the pandemic and the most recent cuts, 87 million Americans were already uninsured or underinsured. We’re talking about people sharing heart-attack medicine because they can’t afford their own prescriptions, burying their children for lack of healthcare, and relying on emergency rooms rather than preventative care, while going bankrupt in the process.

It’s simple enough. All too many of us are skipping needed care. In 2022, more than one of every four adults (28% of us) reported delaying or going without some combination of medical care, prescription drugs, mental healthcare, or dental care simply because they lacked the ability to pay.

Meanwhile, medical debt is growing all too rapidly. A Census Bureau analysis of such debt found that, in 2021, 15% of all American households owed medical debt — or 20 million people (nearly 1 in 12 adults). Indeed, the SIPP (Survey of Income and Program Participation) survey suggests that, in total, Americans owe at least $220 billion in medical debt, the biggest source of bankruptcy in the nation.

And of course, as I’ve written before, this is all connected to another reality: that life expectancy is down for everyone, while the poor can expect to die, on average, 12 to 13 years earlier than rich people. Worse yet, the death-rate gap between rich and poor in this country has risen by a staggering 570% since 1980. As the Washington Post reported, “America is increasingly a country of haves and have-nots, measured not just by bank accounts and property values but also by vital signs and grave markers. Dying prematurely has become the most telling measure of the nation’s growing inequality.”

Poor Health

In the face of all of this, you might wonder how things could get any worse. Recently, Congress announced potential cuts to another crucial food and health program for the poor. The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (known as WIC) is at risk of a $1 billion shortfall, essentially guaranteeing harmful cuts to that lifeline for low-income families and children. If Congress refuses to fully fund the program, current funding levels simply won’t cover all eligible participants.

In fact, the $1 billion shortfall now slated to occur equals 1.5 months of benefits for all program beneficiaries or six months of benefits for all pregnant women and infants participating in WIC. House Republicans are currently refusing to approve the budget for this vital program that helps mothers and children up to age five access staples like fruit, vegetables, and infant formula, and connects them to healthcare resources.

In a statement to NBC News, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack called WIC, “one of the most consequential, evidence-based public health programs available.” He implored Congress to fully fund the program, which provides “life-changing benefits and services” to its participants.

And Vilsack is anything but wrong when he speaks of the importance of that pro-poor, pro-health program. An abundance of research suggests the critical role that WIC plays in “supporting maternal health and child development. WIC participation during pregnancy is associated with lower risk of preterm birth, lower risk of low birth weight, and lower risk of infant mortality.” Children on WIC are more likely to consume a healthier diet, and this impact only grows the longer a child stays in the program, which also has a significant reach. As the Department of Agriculture reports, “Nearly 40 percent of America’s infants participate in WIC, which is available only to pregnant women, new mothers, infants, and children who meet income guidelines and are determined to be at nutritional risk by a health professional.”

So Much More Is Needed

But as such programs are cut to the bone and more people experience a plethora of problems already plaguing the health of the nation, many are likely to give up entirely, assuming there’s nothing to be done and that it’s just too costly to address inequality and poor health. As someone who has been organizing among the poor for more than 30 years, however, I want to suggest that, as a nation, this just can’t be as “good” as it gets.

Across the span of my lifetime, there have been debates about how to address the larger health crisis in American society. When I was in high school, there was already debate about the effectiveness of establishing a national healthcare program, as President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton campaigned on expanding healthcare and actually proposed a new plan for it in 1993. At the time, I remember hearing criticism of the Canadian system of nationalized healthcare. People there, it was said, experienced long lines, way too much paperwork, and a lack of options for patients.

Today, considering the way our healthcare system is unwinding, I could almost laugh (however grimly) at what it would mean to have that Canadian system of years past. All too sadly, however, that country has followed the United States in cutting and privatizing its healthcare system.

Many consider the Affordable Care Act (ACA) one of the most important policies adopted under the presidency of Barack Obama, given that more than 20 million people gained health coverage through it and the ACA’s policies made it easier for eligible people to enroll in Medicaid. In particular, the ACA expanded Medicaid coverage to nearly all adults with incomes up to 138% of the Federal Poverty Level ($20,783 in 2024) and helped states with matching federal dollars expand Medicaid to more of their residents. Yet the ACA didn’t go nearly far enough. To date, 40 states and Washington, D.C., have adopted Medicaid expansion, while 10 states have not. Even in states with Medicaid expansion, too many of us are still not covered. And now we’re witnessing one of the greatest attacks on health and healthcare in decades (and just imagine what we’re likely to face if Donald Trump becomes our next president and/or the MAGA Republicans take Congress).

What this nation truly needs is a complete overhaul of its healthcare system. As a start, Medicaid needs to be expanded, extended, and built into a single-payer, universal healthcare plan. Workers need the right to living-wage jobs with generous benefits, including guaranteed paid family sick leave. Social welfare programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, WIC, and the Child Tax Credit need to be strengthened so that the abundance of this society is experienced by everyone. Household and medical debt would have to be cancelled, while drug-recovery programs would need to be fully funded. And parks and recreation centers, as well as grocery stores with quality, affordable food, would have to proliferate, starting in poor communities.

It’s not enough to protest the unwinding of pandemic Medicaid programs. Even that classic protest chant — “They say cut back, we say fight back!” — doesn’t go far enough. Instead, the 135 million poor and low-income Americans, and for that matter, the rest of us, must make healthcare and so much more into basic human rights.

Let me end then not with words of mine but with Becca Forsyth’s challenge to Americans in her Poor People’s Campaign testimony that day in Albany. “We must stop this raging storm of policy violence that is killing our friends and neighbors,” she said movingly. “It doesn’t have to be this way! We can wield our votes as powerful demands. The time for sitting on the sidelines is over. We have to move forward together like our lives depend on it… the lives of our children! Because they do!!”

How right she is!

Copyright 2024 Liz Theoharis

Via Tomdispatch.com

The response of some in the Biden administration to do an end-run around President Joe Biden’s studied unconcern with these child deaths by joining in a Jordanian air drop effort ends up being more a public relations effort than an effective food provision strategy. On Sunday, the US air-dropped 38,000 meals for 2.2 million people, which is like putting a band aid on an amputated leg. Air drops are costly and inefficient and would be rendered unnecessary if Israel allowed in sufficient food aid and actually began governing this territory it military occupies instead of playing shooting fish in a barrel with it.

Although the Biden administration says it has pleaded with the fascist government of Binyamin Netanyahu to allow in more food trucks, the US doesn’t have to beg. The Israelis ran out of ammunition a long time ago, and can only continue to bomb and shell Gaza because Mr. Biden supplies them with the requisite rockets and shells on a daily basis. After the Israeli government promised to let in more flour under (mild) US pressure, fascist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that he personally intervened to sequester the flour and keep it from going into Gaza. Unless Biden cuts off the arms supplies, his PR pleadings that he wishes Netanyahu and his black shirts would behave more humanely are just bunk.

Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of civilian structures and refugee camps has killed some 12,500 children, but many times that are in danger of dying of lack of food and potable water. UN’s OCHA reports that “Between the afternoon of 1 March and 10:30 on 4 March, according to the MoH in Gaza, 306 Palestinians were killed, and 543 Palestinians were injured, including 124 killed and 210 injured in the past 24 hours.” These deaths are disproportionately women and children and cannot be justified as a war on “Hamas,” since you cannot destroy a clan-based guerrilla movement with bombing raids on densely populated buildings and camps.

Ten-year-old Yazan al-Kafarneh put a face on the horrifying phenomenon of deliberate child starvation as a weapon of war when pictures of his leathery, emaciated little corpse emerged onto the internet.

“Yazan al-Kafarneh,” by Juan Cole, 2024, Digital, LunaPic/ IbisPaint.

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus reported on a visit by WHO aid workers to two hospitals in northern Gaza over the weekend.

“Grim findings during @WHO visits to Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals in northern #Gaza: severe levels of malnutrition, children dying of starvation, serious shortages of fuel, food and medical supplies, hospital buildings destroyed.

The visits over the weekend were the first since early October 2023 despite our efforts to gain more regular access to the north of Gaza.

The situation at Al-Awda Hospital is particularly appalling, as one of the buildings is destroyed.

Kamal Adwan Hospital is the only paediatrics hospital in the north of Gaza, and is overwhelmed with patients. The lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 children. The lack of electricity poses a serious threat to patient care, especially in critical areas like the intensive care unit and the neonatal unit.

We managed to deliver 9,500 litres of fuel to each hospital, and some essential medical supplies. This is a fraction of the urgent lifesaving needs.

We appeal to Israel to ensure humanitarian aid can be delivered safely, and regularly. Civilians, especially children, and health staff need scaled-up help immediately. But the key medicine all these patients need is peace. Ceasefire.”

Given this situation, and the way in which the US is deeply implicated in these starvation deaths, the air drop comes across as a tasteless gimmick, a mere blowing of kisses to dying children.