It is indeed heart-breaking to see pictures of innocent children starving in Gaza. I have lived long enough to remember decades’ worth of such images from every country around the world caught up in war. The fault lies with the far-right Israeli government and with Hamas. Despite what the pro-Hamas Left in the West want people to think, the ordinary citizens of Israel hiding in bomb-shelters are not causing Gazan children to starve, and Jewish people around the world are not causing these poor children to starve. However, far-left activists are harassing and persecuting Jews around the world as if we were PERSONALLY to blame, or as if every Jew around the world has a personal hotline to the Israeli government (shocking revelation: we don’t). Ordinary Israelis have tried many times to get Netanyahu to change his mind on a number of issues over the years, most times without success; it is like banging your head against a brick wall. Jewish people have as much chance of affecting the decisions of the hard-right Israeli government as non-Jews do.
Additional note: We also need to be aware, as I have recently found out, that Hamas is using images of sick children (i.e. not starving) to claim there is widespread famine. The children you are seeing actually have genetic diseases and other illnesses – their parents are not starving, and their siblings are not starving. Yes, there is widespread hunger, but not on the scale that we have historically seen in places like Biafra in the 60s, and Ethiopia in the 80s, and more recently, Yemen, where up to 17 million people are on the brink of starvation, and nearly a quarter of a million people have already died from hunger; no one is demonstrating for them, and no one is reporting it.
Hamas deliberately steals aid that is delivered into Gaza, in order to intentionally cause hunger to its own people, for propaganda purposes – to paint Israel in a bad light, which the world is all too eager to believe. It is in the nature of psychopaths to enjoy manipulating people, and Hamas are expertly experienced manipulators, and the world falls for their mind games. In real famines, not only the children suffer, but the adults are pitifully thin too; there are no adults like that in Gaza. The day it does happen, it will have been caused by Hamas – at the moment, the only adults starving in Gaza are the Israeli hostages, who are forced to dig their own graves in the tunnels where they are kept prisoner.
Causing innocent people to starve is a sin. When someone has committed a sin, but haters start cursing, hating and causing deliberate harm to someone ELSE instead who has not committed that sin, such blaming and harassment is a crime. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t feel pain at what I see happening to the children in Gaza. I do what I can as an ordinary individual who is concerned with human rights (I’ve written to Netanyahu, never once got a response), but blaming me as a Jew for what is happening in Gaza is itself a work of evil.
When Trump does something sociopathic, do people blame all Americans? No. Whenever Sunak did something unconscionable during his time as PM, were all British Indians to blame? No. When the IRA were bombing London, were all Catholics to blame? No. So when Netanyahu and his far-right government do wicked things, why demonstrate outside Jewish shops, businesses, care homes, schools and synagogues? Why hold all Jews around the world responsible for his despicable actions?
I pray that this awful war will end soon, and that the people of Gaza will be free of everyone who oppresses them, and that the ordinary people of Israel (Jews, Christians, Druze & Muslims) will be free of the psychopaths who want to eradicate them.