FOR aeons, famine has been a feared word. Until, that is, the Israelis made famine a state policy, yet another weapon to be used against defenceless Palestinians. Few know that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s paternal grandfather was a rabbi and that his father, on immigrating to the then Mandated Palestine, changed the family name from Mileikowsky to Netanyahu (‘God has given’).

Or that Benjamin Netanyahu served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations (1984-88). During those years, the far-sighted Netanyahu became a friend of Fred Trump — President Donald Trump’s father. As Agatha Christie said: “Old sins have long shadows.”

The Abrahamic holy books are replete with accounts of large-scale migrations to escape famines, starting with the migration of Abraham to Egypt and later his son Isaac to the land of the Philistines. Jesus Christ prophesied that in time “nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines”. And the Holy Quran warns of “hunger, loss of wealth, lives and fruits”.

Over history, famines have been seen variously as divine punishment, or as natural disasters, or manmade afflictions. Perhaps the most infamous occurred during wartime in Bengal in 1943-44. PM Winston Churchill is supposed to have had little sympathy for the colony that supported his war effort but whose people were denied sustenance.

One can count the ribs through the paper-thin skin.

Like many Britishers, Churchill admired individual Indians (he liked Nehru) but loathed India: “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.” Caustically, he wondered why, if there were food shortages, Mahatma Gandhi — whom he dismissed as “a half-naked fakir” — was still alive?

Since independence, the spectre of a near famine has haunted every Pakistani government. Mismanagement in western Punjab — once the granary of pre-1947 India — made the country dependent on the US and its PL-480 programme. That drip-feed lifeline was designed to help Pakistan with food aid but to keep it dependent on American largesse.

Succour under PL-480 continued from 1954 until 1991. It was suspended not because Pakistan became self-sufficient in food grains but because the US objected to its nuclear programme. (Z.A. Bhutto once famously boasted that “We [Pakistanis] will eat grass, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own [atom bomb]!”) If PM Modi persists in his suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty, we may well need to squabble with cattle over grass.

As early as the 1960s, India undertook a Green Revolution, led by an agricultural scientist M.S. Swaminathan. He and his team used technology, mechanisation and high-yielding seeds. In parallel, villages were lin­­ked to towns by road, electrification ext­ended a farmer’s working hours, and above all, an aggressive drive encouraged interaction between farmers and agricultural universities. By 1970, Indian Pun­jab (which had received 30 per cent of the least arable land under the notorious Radcliffe Award) produced 70pc of all India’s food grains.

In today’s world, famine should not be a natural phenomenon. Modern famines are caused by human failure. The 19th-century British administrator Charles Trevelyan, who witnessed the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-52 in which one million died and another 2m migrated, argued that famines were not caused by a physical evil but “the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of people”.

PM Netanyahu and his accomplices could hardly be ex­­pected to agree with Trevelyan. They are practising a targe­ted genocide (a mass murder without gas chambers) that will replace the Holoca­ust in the memory of mankind. Pales­tin­ians in Gaza are dy­­ing even as they queue for food. They are losing their bir-th­right, their land, as they are losing their lives, inch by inch.

This is not to denigrate the efforts of courageous outspoken governments, the UN and its various aid agencies. Their too little is already too late and clearly not enough. Their utterances — however well-meaning — cannot fill a child’s belly. Death is a dismal prospect for a young Palestinian not old enough to spell the word ‘decimation’.

Readers may recall a photo taken in 1972, during the Vietnam War. It showed a nine-year-old girl, fleeing naked after a napalm attack on her village. It became an iconic symbol of that senseless war.

Its equivalent today would be the image published of an emaciated, skeletal Palestinian child cradled in the lap of a helpless mother. One can count the ribs through the paper-thin skin. More disturbing, that photograph showed that the starving child wore imported paper diapers.

One could almost hear the echo of an earlier French cynic: ‘What if they have no milk; let them wear Pampers!’

The writer is an author.
www.fsaijazuddin.pk

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2025