Portside

The people of Gaza are being starved. The scale of this man-made catastrophe — a cruel, seemingly terminal phase in Israel’s genocide — is impossible to overstate. “The level of urban starvation in Gaza has not been seen since the Dutch Hunger Winter and the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War,” Alex de Waal, an expert on famine, wrote in the London Review of Books.

Those words were written in February. Today, at least one in three people in Gaza goes days on end without eating anything at all. At the same time, thousands of humanitarian aid trucks sit idle at the border, blocked by Israeli occupation forces. On its own, the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) has 6,000 trucks on standby, waiting to be allowed entry. "This is unlike anything we have seen in this century," the United Nation World Food Program’s Director of Emergencies Ross Smith said. Everyone in Gaza is now at risk of slow and painful death by hunger.

But Gaza is just a microcosm, a radical condensation of a much broader crisis of structural violence that imperialism inflicts daily on the world’s working and oppressed people. Most victims do not die because of bombs, bullets, or artillery shells. They die from the thousands of deprivations that are threaded — actively or passively, with intent or as a byproduct of systems of accumulation — through the global economy.

Sanctions are one of the main tools in this arsenal of ruin, and their effect is lethal. According to a landmark new study of mortality rates and sanctions in 152 countries conducted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and published in The Lancet Global Health, United States and European Union sanctions have contributed to 38 million deaths between 1971 and 2021. In the past decade alone, these sanctions have killed approximately 560,000 people every year. That amounts to roughly 1,500 people per day, a death toll comparable to that imposed by Nazi Germany on Leningrad during its 872-day siege.

Economic sanctions are often framed as a humanitarian alternative to war — a way to pressure "rogue states" or "terrorist regimes" to change their behavior without resorting to armed conflict. But the latest research confirms what the victims of sanctions regimes have long known: sanctions are more lethal than any bomb. By some estimates, over the period subject to the CEPR study, US and EU sanctions have claimed at least as many lives as all the armed conflicts and genocides that swept the planet combined — forms of violence that were often also imposed by the very same sanctioners.

Today, roughly 25% of the world’s countries are under US, EU, or UN sanctions, with a large part of these imposed unilaterally by the US without the approval of the UN Security Council.

This is no accident. Sanctions form just one part of a broader imperial arsenal, one that includes clandestine operations, aerial bombings, propaganda campaigns, political isolation, diplomatic pressure, wars of aggression, and economic strangulation. Together, these tools seek to force states to submit to an international economic order dominated by Western powers. Like a medieval siege, which denies food and supplies to a territory, sanctions gradually erode states’ capacities to develop, while weakening the resolve of their people to defend their sovereignty.

In this way, sanctions function as collective punishment, violating fundamental principles of international humanitarian law while remaining cloaked in the language of diplomacy and security.

But in the corridors of the State Department, the aims of sanctions are explicit. In the case of Cuba, for example, a memo issued in April 1960 called for the US to take all actions to deny “money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Their effects are acknowledged, too. In the 1990s, the UN reported that US sanctions against Iraq killed half a million children. When former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked about the deaths, she said that “the price, we think, is worth it.”

In aggregate, the scale of the violence imposed by imperialism on humanity is so great that it amounts to a “structural genocide” — a continuous wasting of human lives and nature. This was the subject of last week’s lecture of The People’s Academy, in which Professor Ali Kadri taught a class on his landmark book, The Accumulation of Waste. Capitalism, Kadri argues, has reached a point where it has become an instrument of death, which devalues people and nature to the point of their systematic destruction in order to guarantee continued profits. (You can watch the lecture here and sign up for future classes of The People’s Academy here.)

Through strategies of permanent and deepening deprivation, imperialism deforms and truncates human lives, beating people into submission and exhausting their very belief in resistance. This is what sanctions do globally, and what hunger and attacks intended not to kill, but to maim, do to the Palestinian people. A body depleted by hunger can't raise its fist, and a limbless child will never pick up a gun. But it might find itself surrendering its land to destruction or working for a pittance before collapsing, unceremoniously, from exhaustion — this is imperialism’s agenda for all the world’s working people.

Juxtaposed with the abundance just beyond its walls, the forced starvation of Gaza offers us a mirror image of the wider world under imperialism — one where great misery exists among obscene abundance, quarantined behind fences, across seas, and beneath turrets prepared to mow down those seeking sanctuary from deprivation. This profound contradiction was captured by a young Palestinian poet named Taqwa Al Wawi, writing from Gaza amid its growing and all-consuming hunger:

In a world of full plates And overflowing shelves, A crumb of bread is rare.

What will we eat When there is no food?