The chilling parallels between famine in Palestine and colonial Bengal

Gaza is being ravaged by famine, the result of a brutal policy of starvation by Israel. This crisis has startling parallels to another famine a century ago – caused by the British in Bengal.

Both resulted from deliberate acts.

The famine in Gaza underscores economist Amartya Sen’s contention in the context of the Bengal tragedy that no functioning democracy has ever experienced a famine. Democratic governments, accountable to their citizens through elections and a free press, have a strong incentive to prevent large-scale starvation to avoid political consequences, he noted.

Just as the British colonial government did not have such constraints, neither do the Israelis in occupied Palestine.

In the Gaza Strip, 514,000 people of the total population of 2.1 million, are experiencing famine, the international partners behind the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the global standard for classifying the severity of food insecurity and malnutrition, said on August 22.

By their standard, famine has a high threshold: at least 20% of households in a territory must be facing extreme lack of food; at least 30% of children must be suffering from acute malnutrition; and two people of every 10,000 residents must die each day due to “outright starvation”.

The partnership concluded that all three thresholds had been met in Gaza. Earlier,...

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