by Alan C. Miller
Monday’s 180-2/Gaza crossover article only works if you remove one critical piece of history: Hamas. Once that happens, every Israeli action becomes evidence of cruelty, every American vote becomes proof of malice, and every humanitarian tragedy has only one side to blame. Hamas, and more broadly, the role of Iran and its proxies, are oddly and totally absent from the discussion.
The centerpiece of the article is the 2021 UN vote, which passed 180-2, with only the United States and Israel voting no. The author asks readers to “let that number sink in,” arguing that it means “the entire planet” looked at the two countries and asked, “what the fuck is wrong with you?” This flaming rhetoric substitutes a vote count for an argument. UN votes are political acts, not moral scorecards.
Several of those same governments making up that overwhelming majority have themselves been responsible for mass starvation, engineered famines, and horrific human rights abuses. A lopsided vote tells you this is a resolution that many governments voted for. It does not tell you who occupies the moral high ground.
The resolution itself wasn’t simply asking whether people deserve to eat. It came out of a long-running UN effort to expand economic and social rights by recognizing food as a legal right under international law. Most countries supported it because very few governments want to publicly oppose the idea that people should have enough to eat. Because the resolution was non-binding, many governments had little reason to oppose its broad humanitarian language. The dispute was over what legal obligations come with declaring food an international “right.”
The United States argued the resolution was legally vague, expanded international obligations in ways it did not accept, and, most importantly, mixed humanitarian language with broader legal and political disputes, including sanctions. Israel voted on similar grounds. You can certainly disagree with that position, but it is a far cry from the author’s repeated claim that the two countries “stood alone against the proposition that people deserve to eat,” or the extraordinary claim that the vote reflected “the principle that people do not deserve to eat by virtue of being alive.” The vote also happened in 2021, more than two years before Hamas invaded Israel on October 7. It was not about Gaza, this war, or feeding civilians during an active military conflict.
Both the US and Israel have long records of providing humanitarian assistance with little or no strategic benefit to themselves. The United States remains the world’s largest provider of humanitarian aid, responding to famines, earthquakes, refugee crises, and disease outbreaks around the world. Israel has repeatedly sent disaster-response teams after major earthquakes. Israel even treated thousands of Syrians injured during that country’s civil war despite Syria being an enemy state. None of that places either country above criticism. It does make the portrayal of two countries that fundamentally reject humanitarian principles very difficult to reconcile with the historical record, while ignoring that many of the 180 governments casting ‘yes’ votes have themselves used starvation, engineered famine, or committed grave human-rights abuses. Apparently those facts would complicate the narrative.
The author also repeats the familiar claim that Gaza is Israel’s “prison.” That ignores how Gaza got there. The extensive security barriers came only much later in the region’s history after the rise of suicide bombings, rocket attacks, kidnappings, and other terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, tightening further after Hamas violently seized control of Gaza in 2007 and openly committed itself to Israel’s destruction. Israel built barriers in response to repeated attacks, not in a vacuum.
In addition, Israel is not the only country with a border with Gaza. Egypt also maintains tight controls on its border with Gaza because it views Hamas as a serious security threat. The author presents the situation as though only Israel concluded that a Hamas-controlled Gaza posed a danger. The reality is considerably more complicated.
The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is real. UN officials have described Gaza as ‘the hungriest place on Earth’ during the current humanitarian emergency. The phrase is not a precise quantitative ranking and should not be read as one. But then the author immediately turns that humanitarian assessment into an argument about intent. Civilians are suffering enormously, but the author then jumps from that humanitarian reality to asserting that the United States and Israel “are the ones with the power to make the hunger stop and the interest in making sure it never does.” That is not a conclusion established by evidence. It is an attribution of motive. Hamas’ decision to launch the war, continue fighting from within civilian areas, hold hostages, and exercise control over much of Gaza’s internal distribution of aid are all central to the humanitarian picture, yet they receive comparatively little attention, and none by this author.
The same pattern runs through the author’s discussion of the current war. Israel deserves criticism for mistakes it has made in getting food to civilians. There has been vigorous debate inside Israel over whether its approach was too restrictive, too bureaucratic, and too slow to adapt once it became clear that food entering Gaza was not necessarily reaching civilians.
Israeli planners relied heavily on estimates suggesting enough food was entering Gaza overall. What those estimates could not account for was how much aid Hamas would divert, warehouse, seize, or sell to finance its war effort. If a terrorist organization controls distribution inside the territory, the amount crossing the border is only part of the equation. What reaches hungry families is what matters. Scarcity can increase the value of stolen aid, allowing Hamas to resell it at inflated prices and turn humanitarian assistance into another source of funding for weapons and military operations.
That is why Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur and others have argued that Israel should have adopted a much simpler strategy from the beginning: flood Gaza with food. This proposed strategy sought to make food so abundant that Hamas would have far less opportunity to profit from scarcity by reselling aid at inflated prices to finance weapons and military operations. Even if Hamas continued stealing aid, enough food would still reach civilians while making hunger a much less effective source of money and control. It would have been inefficient and imperfect, but perhaps more effective than calculating the amount necessary and assuming it would be distributed fairly once inside Gaza.
The author also states that “Israeli forces have killed over 1,000 Palestinian aid seekers and left more than 5,000 injured” in the last few months. Aid distribution sites have unquestionably been the scene of tragic and deadly incidents. Responsibility for many individual events remains disputed, investigations are ongoing, and reported casualty figures vary depending on the source. Presenting the highest reported numbers as settled fact along with assigning blame in only one direction leaves readers with the impression that there is no dispute where significant factual disagreements still exist.
Israel is fighting an enemy that embedded itself among civilians, built hundreds of miles of tunnels instead of shelters, and has been widely accused of exploiting humanitarian aid. There are few comparable examples of a country attempting to feed a civilian population while simultaneously fighting the government that controls it. That does not excuse Israeli mistakes. It does explain why the situation bears little resemblance to the simple narrative presented by the author.
The article repeatedly crosses an important line. It moves beyond disputing facts or interpreting events and begins assigning motives. Those are not facts established by the historical record. They are the author’s own conclusions about motive.
That is exactly what happens when the author claims that the two countries’ UN vote was “about protecting the right to starve people into submission,” and that it was the United States telling the world “we reserve the right to starve people when it serves our interests.” The same is true of the author’s implication that the 2021 vote somehow foreshadowed or authorized Israel’s conduct years later in Gaza after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, 2023.
The author largely removes Hamas from the story while assigning Israel responsibility for virtually everything that happens inside Gaza. The result is a morality play with one villain.
That way of looking at the world is more than just sloppy. It is genuinely dangerous. It turns one of the most complicated conflicts on Earth into a fairy tale of heroes and villains, where one side loses all agency and the other all humanity. Once you’ve decided who the monsters are, every new fact is squeezed into the same script and anything that complicates it is discarded. That isn’t how serious analysis works, and it isn’t how wars work. It is the habit of ideological thinking: begin with the conclusion, discard whatever complicates it, and mistake certainty for truth.
Alan C. Miller is a nearly-half-century resident of Davis. He has a degree in geology from UC Davis and currently works in rail transportation.
Follow the Vanguard on Social Media – X, Instagram and Facebook. Subscribe the Vanguard News letters. To make a tax-deductible donation, please visit davisvanguard.org/donate or give directly through ActBlue. Your support will ensure that the vital work of the Vanguard continues.
“begin with the conclusion, discard whatever complicates it”
Yep, also called a pre-determined conclusion and confirmation bias.
Thanks Alan, that’s also how I perceived the article in question.