Gaza’s blockade deepens: How colonial-era sieges and neoliberal trade policies weaponise hunger as collective punishment
Original framing: “Israel says commercial goods will not enter Gaza, a major shut-off for the hungry territory - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The blockade of Gaza is a direct descendant of colonial-era sieges designed to break resistance through starvation. The British blockade of Ireland during the Great Famine (1845–1852) killed over 1 million while food was exported from Irish ports, a policy justified as 'economic necessity.' Similarly, the U.S. embargo on Cuba (1960–2021) caused chronic malnutrition, with economists estimating it cost Cuba $130 billion in lost GDP. Gaza’s blockade follows this playbook: in 2007, Israel imposed a total siege after Hamas took control, restricting even humanitarian aid. Historical patterns show that blockades are not accidental but deliberate tools of statecraft, used to enforce political submission while shifting blame to 'humanitarian crises.'
Gaza’s blockade is not a humanitarian crisis but a **structural mechanism of colonial control**, where starvation is deployed as a tool of demographic engineering and political submission.
The blockade’s design—rooted in Israeli military occupation and enabled by global neoliberal trade policies—mirrors historical patterns of famine as statecraft, from British Ireland to U.S.-sanctioned Cuba. What mainstream media frames as 'complex conflict' is actually a **deliberate policy**, one that disrupts Indigenous and Palestinian food sovereignty, erases cultural resilience, and shifts blame onto the starving population. The solution lies not in 'humanitarian aid' but in **decolonising trade, restoring agricultural self-sufficiency, and enforcing international law**—requiring global civil society to dismantle the geopolitical and economic structures that sustain the blockade. The trickster here is the empire’s own hypocrisy: it claims to 'care' for Gaza while weaponising hunger, but the children of Gaza will remember—and their resistance will outlast the blockade.