In Prince Edward County we celebrate food.

And where there isn’t enough for others, we speak up, we lobby, and we support initiatives like The County Food Hub, the Prince Edward Learning Centre, and the food banks. We hold galas and fundraisers, like last week’s Road Apples concert at The Regent Theatre.

The right to food is a human right. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights assures the right to adequate food.

Israel, like Canada, was a keen signatory to that law.

That was the Israel I know and love, the idea of Israel as the “shining light,” “the light onto all nations,” as described by the prophet Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible, which stresses ethical conduct and moral inspiration.

Its first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, envisioned Israel as a moral and social beacon, a spiritual mentor to all peoples, all nations.

Heartbreakingly, today, that beacon, that light, is barely flickering. And Israel, the only functioning democracy in the Middle East, is faltering.

Several decades ago, I was a guest of the Red Crescent Society (RCS), the equivalent of the Red Cross, in the West Bank and Gaza. Today, I support Jose Andreas and World Central Kitchen (WCK), and their efforts to feed the hungry in crisis and disaster situations in Ukraine, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Gaza. 

This past April, seven WCK team members in Gaza — volunteers from Canada, the UK, and the US — were killed in a targeted attack by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).

Shockingly, figures from a classified Israeli military intelligence database also indicate that 5 out of 6 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza have been civilians.

That is an extreme rate of slaughter of mostly women, children and the elderly.

The Palestinian death toll in Gaza now approaches 70,000; over 83 percent of those deaths are of civilians. Only 17 percent are Hamas fighters.

That is a ratio of civilians to combatants that has never been seen in modern combat, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program.

Things may be much grimmer for Palestinian civilians: but we just don’t know.

Why?

Well, while the County thrives on its print and radio journalism, especially its in-depth and controversial coverage, the disastrous and shameful opposite is happening in Gaza.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, “Israel is engaging in the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that the CPJ has ever documented.” Almost 200 journalists have been killed in the Gaza-Israel war, and 90 imprisoned.

In contrast, 18 journalists have been killed to date in the Russia-Ukraine war. In fact, Brown University asserts that IDF attacks have killed more journalists than the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam, all the wars in the the former Yugoslavia, and in Afghanistan, combined.

While we may not (ever) know the full horror, what is happening in Gaza today is certainly a blunt force injury to our collective consciousness.

If images of destroyed hospitals, schools, apartment blocks, and emaciated children starving to death don’t motivate us to speak up collectively and individually, nothing will.

Silence is not a reasonable moral option.

Just as it isn’t an option not to forcefully condemn the absolute horror of the vicious, senseless attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023, an attack that involved the gruesome murder of 1,195 people, including 815 civilians.

While moral clarity demands acknowledging October 7 as a horrific crime against humanity, what is happening in Gaza is unquestionably also a crime.

Speaking and peacefully acting out in opposition to tens of thousands of innocent women, children and elderly being bombed and starved is not automatically antisemitic.

Indeed, semitic peoples are not an ethnic group, they are a language group, one that includes Hebrew and Arabic; both are rooted in the Biblical name Shem, traditionally observed as the direct ancestor of both Jews and Arabs.

The United Nations has declared a famine in Gaza, where children are withering from starvation, and buried alive under bombed apartment-buildings, while Netanyahu’s most extreme right-wingers block essential humanitarian aid — food — in defiance of the International Court of Justice.

The Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem, recently came to the “unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking co-ordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip.”

Just last month the International Association of Genocide Scholars, a non-partisan group of 500 academics, educators, psychologists, lawyers and artists, concluded “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide,” as set out in the UN 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Food is the immediate urgency, as is a sustainable ceasefire and the release of all hostages.

But neither Israel nor Hamas seem to see it that way. Just last week, Hamas murdered innocent Israeli civilians at a bus-stop, while Israel struck at Hamas negotiators in Qatar.

Yet, I have hope.

The famine in Gaza needs Canada to engage our allies to provide “safe-guarding” (there’s no peace, so, sadly, no peacekeepers) to facilitate humanitarian aid deliveries.

And please, no American Islamophobic biker gangs! The BBC has confirmed that members of the Florida-based Infidels Motorcycle Club are working for UG Solutions, a private contractor providing “security” at those Trump-Israel designated sites where hundreds of civilians seeking food have been killed in scenes of anarchy and automatic weapons fire.

Among gang members’ Facebook comments are: “Make Gaza Great Again,” “Deport these pathetic skanks to a pathetic third world crap hole where they won’t be offended by the Holy Bible,” and  “Filling my magazine to the max…would not be the first time we’re at odds with Muslims.” These are the paid humanitarians? Hard to find the right words for such a stunningly cynical and deeply disturbing travesty.

But I mentioned hope…

In Judaism, the idea of “repairing the world” (tikkun olam) insists on one’s responsibility for kindness, justice, compassion, and humility.

In 2012, former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, in receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama, said, “I believe that peace with the Palestinians is most urgent…more urgent than ever before. It is necessary. It is possible.”

Maybe it’s not too late to heed Peres. Perhaps, in this terrible crisis, there’s an opportunity. Maybe one day, we can claim to have been actively opposed to this intentional emaciation of Gaza, to have worked to end its heartbreaking tragedy.