Jewish Concern for Gaza

Trump said on Monday that children in Gaza “look very hungry” and that “we have to get the kids fed,” indicating disagreement with Israeli officials who have denied that anyone is starving there, as he opened a day of talks in Scotland with Britain’s prime minister. Mr. Trump also indicated frustration with President Vladimir V. Putin and said he had decided to shorten a 50-day deadline he had given Russia on July 14 to end the war in Ukraine. He said that the new deadline would be 10 or 12 days from Monday.

Trump sounds like a pathetic loser, but yes, they do look very hungry.* They are hungry. 

A separate article discusses the minority of Israelis who seem to actually care.

Despite the desperate humanitarian crisis, a survey conducted in May by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University found that 64.5 percent of the Israeli public was not at all, or not very, concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza.

That's depressingly tragic. The fact that it is far from surprising underlines why people correctly despise Hamas. They attacked on 10/7 with the clear knowledge of their enemy. The response is unsurprising. The only thing reasonably unexpected (perhaps) is the scope.

About 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed by Palestinian assailants during the October attack, making it the deadliest day in Israel’s history, and about 250 others were taken hostage. Many Israelis held Hamas solely responsible for the subsequent suffering in Gaza and said they felt little sympathy for civilians there.

About 60,000 Palestinians have since been killed in the war, according to Gaza health officials, whose tally does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, but includes more than 10,000 children. The war has displaced most of the two million residents of Gaza several times and brought the territory to the brink of famine. More than 80 children have died from starvation and malnutrition, according to the Gaza health ministry.

We must, as moral humans, not just skip over these details. The "deadliest day" resulted in a backlash in which FIFTY times the number of people have died on "the other side." 

If one-tenth of that number died, it would come off as rather disproportional (a principle in just war). The numbers, even before they became as obscene, caused concern among Jews as well as non-Jews. The article notes:

Some prominent Israelis have also raised alarms. Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister, decried what he called the “cruel and criminal killing of civilians” and the starvation of Gaza as a government policy. Moshe Yaalon, a former military chief and defense minister, has warned for months of ethnic cleansing. Yair Golan, a former deputy chief of the military and leader of the Democrats, a left-leaning opposition party, caused a furor when he said the government was killing babies “as a hobby.”

This whole thing comes off as a Greek tragedy, with far from equal harm being suffered on each side. Trump's son-in-law apparently did not solve the crisis in the Middle East. Now, his father (the ambassador to France) is trolling about it.  

We are left with the words of Jeremiah:

A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping; Rachel, weeping for her children, refused to be comforted for her children, because they were no more.

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* Trolls cite the fate of the Palestinians as a reason why Harris lost. Biden > Trump, including in this area, no matter how much you want to argue he didn't do enough on this issue. 

A different article discusses how "Donald Trump’s meetings at his Scottish golf course provide the latest example of how he uses his presidential power in ways that help his family businesses." 

Another way to frame that is as a form of corruption that violates the text and spirit of the emoluments clauses of the Constitution.