The destructive legacy of mass starvation

PHILADELPHIA — In the year since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 surprise attack, Israeli forces have killed an estimated 41,200 Palestinians, including 16,700 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. But a recent letter in The Lancet puts the true death toll in Gaza much higher, at more than 186,000, when counting those killed as an indirect result of the conflict.

Severe food shortages are certainly a contributing factor. Israel’s blockade and devastating bombing campaign have prevented the entry and delivery of humanitarian aid. As a result, the United Nations World Food Programme found that 96 per cent of Gaza’s population is facing acute food insecurity, with more than two million people at crisis levels of hunger or worse. This is forced starvation, a well-known tactic of genocide, and one with which Americans are all too familiar.

Many Americans first learn about such cruelty in elementary school. Textbooks explain how, in the early nineteenth century, the US military began systematically displacing indigenous people to steal their land. That effort involved tactics intended to cause starvation, from slaughtering millions of buffalo to forcing these communities onto tiny plots of land, to weaken their resolve. Even so-called safe zones were attacked, such as when the US military massacred about 300 Lakota people at Wounded Knee in 1890.

Israeli forces are taking a similar approach in Gaza. They bombed, using US-made weapons, a humanitarian safe zone, killing at least 40 people living in tents. The military has also targeted healthcare and aid workers, killing more than 1,000 of them, including seven World Central Kitchen team members who were attacked while delivering food.

To understand the consequences of these policies of expansion and domination, one need look no further than the United States. Genocide is a historic trauma, perhaps best understood as a “soul wound”, among indigenous people that still reverberates. The establishment of the reservation system, the scant provision of food, and other acts of ethnic cleansing in the nineteenth century eroded indigenous sovereignty.

That legacy can be seen in today’s subpar housing, inadequate healthcare and underfunded education programmes for America’s impoverished indigenous communities. Likewise, the Native American boarding school system, spurred by federal assimilation policies, harmed tens of thousands of children, leaving them more vulnerable to depression, suicide and addiction, which can be passed down from generation to generation.

Moreover, rates of food insecurity among indigenous communities in the US have hovered around 25 per cent for many years, but reached as high as 77 per cent for the Navajo (who call themselves the Diné), and more than 90 per cent for the nations of the Klamath River Basin in southern Oregon. By contrast, 13.5 per cent of US households were food insecure in 2023, according to a report by the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, and that rate is even lower among white Americans, at 10 per cent.

While researching food insecurity among women and children in the US over the past quarter-century, I have interviewed many Black women and women of colour about their struggles to feed their families. Time and again, they provided insight into not only the previous year, but also their childhood experiences of violence and deprivation. Often, their parents and their grandparents faced poverty; some even reported five generations’ worth of hardship. These trajectories are shaped by America’s history of slavery and genocide, which triggered cycles of racism and discrimination that continue today. The original harms are woven into American family life through lower wages for people of color and racially discriminatory healthcare, welfare, and foster-care policies.

The US government can and should make some immediate fixes, such as reinstating the temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit and offering universal school meals (both of which provided vital support for American families during the COVID-19 pandemic), as well as improving access to health care. But while these steps can lower overall levels of food insecurity, they cannot address the inequities that lead women and children of colour to experience higher rates of hunger.

The mothers I interviewed want policymakers to address the root cause of hunger in the US: the exposure to racialised and gendered violence in the family and community, which can be traced back to America’s legacy of slavery and genocide. The US government has not atoned for its past sins, and until it returns land and pays reparations, these original traumas will remain unhealed, and unequal food security will persist.

To witness the starvation and suffering in Gaza today is to be reminded of the enduring consequences of America’s divisive history. The unbearable trauma should force US policymakers to ask how to end this cruelty and begin making amends. As in Gaza, an immediate “ceasefire” would be a good start. But then the more difficult and more urgent task is for the US government to divert the money being spent on bombs to social programs that will provide food, education, and health care for all.

Mariana Chilton, professor of Health Management and Policy at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University, is founder of the Centre for Hunger-Free Communities and the author of “The Painful Truth about Hunger in America: Why We Must Unlearn Everything We Think We Know — and Start Again” (MIT Press, 2024). Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024. 

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