Gaza starvation: Like that meme, we’re all trying to find out who did this | Opinion
As it turns out, humans, even Palestinians, need food to live. But before we discuss such a lofty dispensation 21 months into a near-total blockade of humanitarian aid, a brief bit of levity:
For my money, the best sketch comedy show out isn’t “Saturday Night Live,” but former “SNL” writer Tim Robinson’s “I Think You Should Leave.” Robinson specializes in constructing surrealist, cringe-inducing social nightmares, then extracting side-splitting comedy with an extremely committed performance with a flawless, unforgettable one-liner.
One of the show’s most memorable sketches, “Hot Dog Car,” starts with a mysterious hot dog-shaped car crashing into a clothing store. The whodunit is solved within seconds as Robinson emerges with a series of excessive and absurd denials that the car is not his — all while wearing a hot dog costume.
“Now, we’re all trying to find the guy who did this,” he claims, rejecting his obvious culpability while clumsily portraying himself as someone zealous to find the real culprit. Epitomizing the Shakespearean embarrassment of a man who “doth protest too much,” nobody at the store is convinced.
Anyway, fun’s over. Back to the genocide.
Roughly 2.1 million people remain in Gaza, and according to the UN World Food Programme, a third of those have gone multiple days in a row without food. Doctors Without Borders says 100,000 women and children are suffering severe acute malnutrition.
Gazans do not have food for the same reason they do not have medicine; for the same reason they do not have homes or hospitals or schools or mosques or churches. It’s the same reason they do not have electricity or fuel (which means they do not have water), the same reason they don’t have journalists on the ground able to tell you what happened to these things they used to have.
While I appreciate those who have acknowledged that no children should have their ribcages poking through their skin — an ideological spectrum that stretches from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump — this reality was obvious to many millions of Americans who took to the streets and student halls in protest months and years ago. As Jewish Currents writer David Klion notes, a larger consensus around the atrocities of the war would have been far more useful then than now.
The Biden administration dismissed lawmakers who called for an immediate ceasefire as “repugnant” and “disgraceful.” Those who protested the governments responsible for restricting the safe passage of food — including the Palestinians watching their people go hungry and the Jews who bore witness — were collectively characterized as antisemites. As the bombs fell and the food dwindled, then-President Joe Biden insisted Israel “wants to do all it can to ensure civilian protection.”
Some who begrudgingly admit that Gazans are starving lay the blame primarily at the feet of Hamas militants who provoked Israel’s ongoing siege when they killed about 1,200 Israelis and took about 250 hostages. If only Hamas would simply release the hostages, then everyone else (including the hostages) would have food, the argument goes.
Even assuming most spoken and implied false premises about the nature of this conflict were correct — such as the charge that Hamas won’t agree to ceasefire proposals or that Israel does not itself have thousands of Palestinian prisoners, many of them held without charges — it operates under the fundamental logic of collective punishment, a notion that civilians should suffer for the choices made by their government.
Consider the implications anywhere else. If you happen to read this on star-telegram.com or in our print edition, chances are high that your governor pardoned a white supremacist murderer and agreed to build literal concentration camps. Vile acts of discrimination and tacit support for terrorism at best. Systemic stripping of human rights at worst. All escalations towards lethal violence we all decry. I personally would not like to be punished in any regard for the decisions of any elected official, even one as charming as Greg Abbott. Palestinians deserve that, too.
There is no lone culprit or solitary super villain. But since November, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been wanted for arrest by the International Criminal Court, a judicial body representing 125 countries on charges of, among others, “starvation as a method of warfare.” None of those accusations stopped a bipartisan group of senators, some of whom mourned the fatally malnourished on social media, from meeting with Bibi and, naturally, posing for the ‘gram.
Our valiant detectives are assuredly, to quote Hot Dog Guy, “trying to find the guy who did this.” I wish them well on their chase.
This story was originally published July 31, 2025 at 4:53 AM with the headline "Gaza starvation: Like that meme, we’re all trying to find out who did this | Opinion."
