David Mencer was once a director of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI). Now, he’s a propagandist for Israel’s war-criminal colonial regime. And he has just made an utterly ridiculous claim about food in Gaza.
David Mencer: disgusting Zionist propaganda
Israel is used to playing dirty during negotiations, and has just stopped allowing aid into Gaza to push Hamas into changing the current ceasefire deal. A resumption of fighting now seems likely.
Amnesty International has stressed that “humanitarian aid must never be used as a bargaining tool” and “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is a war crime”. But ex-LFI director David Mencer, who’s now an Israeli government spokesperson, has tried to claim it’s Hamas’s fault that people in Gaza don’t have enough food. And he even alleged that Hamas had “enough food to fuel an obesity epidemic”.
If you rightly think it’s important to be sceptical about the claim of someone shilling for war criminals, of course, you’ll find it hard to verify the allegation because Israel has barred journalists from entering Gaza and murdered scores of local journalists who bravely stayed to document the colonial power’s genocide there.
Genocide deniers & the UK government
The “opaquely funded” LFI lobby group has invested a lot of money in getting British MPs on side for genocide. And its supporters dominate the top team of the current Labour government under genocide apologist Keir Starmer, who has happily embraced the pro-Israel lobby. And why wouldn’t he? Because as journalist Alan MacLeod wrote previously, LFI – which has very close ties to the Israeli state – “was crucial in smearing and defeating the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn”.
In 2024, Declassified UK revealed that half of Starmer’s cabinet had received money from the pro-Israel lobby. Then, openDemocracy revealed that the “tax haven-based hedge fund with shares in oil and arms” that had donated £4m to Starmer’s Labour also “stood to profit” from Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Starmer’s ongoing participation in that genocide seems to be the result.
If David Mencer’s links to LFI weren’t enough to doubt his trustworthiness, we can find other evidence. Another ridiculous claim he has made, for example, is that the BBC has somehow given ‘radical’, ‘one-sided’ coverage in favour of Palestine. That could hardly be further from the truth, in terms of the BBC‘s timidity in the face of lobby pressure and its general failure to talk about the influence of the pro-Israel lobby in parliament.
Israel’s long record of starving Gaza
Aside from David Mencer’s statement, before saying anything about Hamas, we must always come back to the context of Israel’s brutal settler-colonial occupation, which existed long before Hamas did, and long before the group came to control Gaza.
Israel has overseen what the UN has called “decades of de-development” in all of occupied Palestine, and in Gaza in particular. But then Hamas won the 2006 election, largely because of “decay, corruption, and infighting” in the ruling Fatah party, and the latter’s role in helping to ‘institutionalise the power imbalance‘ between the Israeli occupiers and the occupied Palestinian people. And Hamas’s more assertive stance towards Israel allowed the occupying power to justify turning Gaza into “the world’s largest open-air prison”, strangling it with power cuts, border restrictions, and regular military attacks.
If Fatah’s failures and a highly flawed peace agreement paved the way for Hamas, the blockade on Gaza from 2007 onwards sowed the seeds for more conflict. Because as award-winning British journalist Jonathan Cook explained in 2012, Israel had set out to “put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”. It severely limited how much food could enter Gaza, and highly favoured “nutrient-poor sugar” products over healthy ones. Ten years later, this had contributed to “high rates of overweight and obesity and several chronic non-communicable diseases”. And anaemia had become “a severe public health problem”.
In 2022, one year before the current genocide began, 62% of people in Gaza needed “food assistance” (and even more “experienced some form of food insecurity“), while “78% of piped water in Gaza [was] unfit for human consumption”. Israel had manufactured “momentous de-development” of the occupied territory, and 81.5% of Palestinians in Gaza (mostly refugees) lived “below the national poverty line”.
What Hamas has or hasn’t done is not the issue
Palestinians themselves have been critical of Hamas, and continue to be. Hamas increased taxes at numerous points during the blockade, for example, which didn’t exactly make things easier for ordinary people. But while there are allegations of Hamas historically stockpiling some of the resources they can get hold of, there appears to be little evidence of widespread hoarding.
There have been, however, some signs that Hamas isn’t what Israel paints it to be. Israeli forensic doctors, for example, found that late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar “had not eaten for three days before he was killed”. Not exactly what you’d expect if Hamas had abundant supplies.
In a besieged territory where Israel has targeted law enforcement and humanitarian workers, meanwhile, it’s no surprise that civilians have effectively needed to fend for themselves. Thieves have stolen goods as Israeli forces watched on without intervening, and then gone on to resell the products at higher prices. In this environment, Hamas has pledged to treat looters of aid trucks “with an iron fist”. But clearly, people are desperate.
David Mencer: another in a long line of genocide apologists
As the UN said in January 2024, the genocide has affected the entire population of Gaza, leaving children and others “in inhumane conditions” and deeply traumatised by:
a man-made disaster compounded by dehumanizing language and the use of food, water and fuel as instruments of war.
Israel’s assault has killed most livestock in Gaza, damaged over 40% of croplands, and further contaminated the groundwater.
Whatever Hamas may have done, we know full well what Israel has done since 2023, since 2007, since 1967, and beyond. So when any genocide apologist – like David Mencer – tries to blame Hamas for starving people in Gaza, you know exactly how to respond.
Featured image via the Canary
