Starvation as a Weapon of War: Human Rights Watch Denounces Israel for Denying Gaza Access to Food Support our work: democracynow.org/give Israel is deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food and fuel in Gaza, ...
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Readings for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Isaiah 55:1-3; Psalm 145:8-9, 15-16, 17-18; Romans 8:35, 37-39; Matthew 14:13-21
Today's Gospel is about hunger. And so, unfortunately, is today's world. But the kind of hunger I want to talk about today is not simply the tragic hunger caused by drought, crop failure, poverty, or some mysterious shortage of food. I want to talk about something far more disturbing: deliberately inflicted hunger, the use of food, water, medicine, and even fuel as weapons of war.
That's hardly a new idea. Siege warfare has been around almost as long as warfare itself. If you can't defeat your enemy on the battlefield, surround his city, cut off his food and water, and wait until hunger accomplishes what your weapons could not. Eventually, the thinking goes, people will become so desperate that they will surrender or overthrow their own leaders.
What's disturbing for us this morning is that our own government is deeply involved in precisely that kind of warfare today.
Think first of Gaza. For years now Israel has bombed that tiny strip of land, displaced most of its population, destroyed homes, hospitals, farms, bakeries, water systems, and other elements necessary for ordinary human survival. At crucial points it has also blocked or severely restricted the entry of food and other humanitarian supplies. The United Nations Human Rights Office has not minced words about the result. It has said that famine in Gaza resulted directly from Israeli restrictions on goods necessary for civilian survival and has reminded the world that using starvation as a method of warfare is a war crime.
And let's not pretend that this is simply Israel's doing and therefore none of our concern. The United States has supplied the weapons, the money, and the diplomatic protection that have made Israel's war possible. Whatever distinctions lawyers might want to make about degrees of responsibility, as Americans we cannot simply wash our hands and say that the starvation of Gaza has nothing to do with us.
Then there's Cuba, where our responsibility is even more direct. For more than sixty years, the United States has maintained an economic embargo whose purpose has always been to make life sufficiently difficult on that island to produce political change.
Now the Trump administration has intensified that strategy by going after Cuba's supply of oil. President Trump has publicly declared that there will be no more Venezuelan oil or money going to Cuba-- ZERO!" was his word-- and has told Cuba to "make a deal." His administration has gone further by threatening economic penalties against countries that supply Cuba with oil.
Think about what that means in practice. Cuba is an island of roughly ten million people. Oil doesn't simply fuel automobiles. It generates electricity. Electricity refrigerates food and medicine, pumps water, illuminates hospitals, and keeps factories running. Fuel powers tractors and trucks that move food from farms to cities. Cut off the oil and eventually you affect virtually everything necessary for ordinary human life, including food itself.
All of that makes today's familiar Gospel story about the loaves and fishes sound remarkably contemporary. For what happens there represents almost the exact opposite of what we're witnessing in Gaza and Cuba.
Today's story comes from Matthew the Evangelist, but it's found in all four canonical Gospels. Matthew tells us that five thousand men were present. As so often happens in patriarchal accounts, the women and children disappear from the statistics.
And yet I want to suggest that those invisible women may actually hold the key to understanding what happened.
In any case, a huge crowd has followed Jesus to the other side of the Lake of Galilee, and the people become hungry.
In John's fuller account, Jesus turns to Philip and asks where they might buy enough bread to feed everybody. Philip effectively replies that they can't. Even a year's wages wouldn't provide everyone with more than a mouthful. So the market solution is briefly considered and dismissed. There simply isn't enough purchasing power to solve the problem that way.
Jesus solves the problem by doing something surprisingly simple. He has everybody sit down. Mark's version adds that the people organize themselves into groups. An anonymous crowd begins to look more like a collection of communities. People who had been strangers can see one another's faces.
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