The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Michael Fakhri, will present his latest report to the UN General Assembly this week, on 18 October 2024. The report is on ‘Starvation and the right to food, with an emphasis on the Palestinian people’s food sovereignty’, and can be read here. The report includes a devastating account of the Israeli state’s starvation of the Palestinian population in Gaza during this past year. The report begins as follows:
On 9 October 2023, Israel announced its starvation campaign against Gaza. By December, Palestinians in Gaza made up 80 per cent of the people in the world experiencing famine or catastrophic hunger. Never in post-war history had a population been made to go hungry so quickly and so completely as was the case for the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.
At a TWAIL/Palestine workshop at Rutgers University in June 2024, Prof. Fakhri gave a public lecture outlining his reflections and analysis towards what was at that point a draft version of his report. You can listen to the recording of that lecture here:
The Substance of the Report
The Special Rapporteur’s report offers a rich conceptual analysis across a wide range of intersecting issues, including:
—food sovereignty as a reflection of power, relationships, care and reciprocity;
—the systemic and structural nature of starvation, and the elements of political economy, dependency and extraction;
—the centrality of power over land to starvation campaigns and the function of starvation as a technique of displacement, dispossession and occupation;
—the role of legal frameworks in making it possible to starve a population;
—the relationship between starvation and forced displacement & migration, and the correlation between displacement and hunger;
—the reality of famine as a political (rather than purely technical or humanitarian) problem;
—the limits of international humanitarian law and international criminal law in addressing and preventing starvation;
—the international dimension of famine and the complicity of third states and corporations in many situations of famine and starvation;
—famine as a form of slow violence, and the intergenerational social trauma that famine and starvation produces;
—the death of children from malnutrition and dehydration as the clearest indication that a community’s core structures have been critically attacked and that there is a famine;
—starvation as a tactic of genocide;
—starvation as a form of individual and collective torture;
—the impact of occupation, siege and blockade as attacks on a territory’s food system.
In the face of its documentation of the dire situation in Gaza, the report concludes with a recognition of Palestinian steadfastness and ‘dignity despite suffering’, and a vision of transformative food sovereignty in our collective futures:
104. Today, people in Gaza are still expressing their dignity through how they cook and eat and in how they continue to celebrate holidays even when surrounded by suffering. The Special Rapporteur received an account from Um Ahmad in Gaza wherein she described how she continued to cook summaqiyyah, a quintessential Gazan festive dish dating back to the eleventh century CE, with indigenous sumac berries (after which the dish is named). To feed people during Eid al-Adha, she had to improvise without access to most of the usual ingredients. People like Um Ahmad, who carry and create recipes like this, hold knowledge about a people’s ongoing relationship to the land, territory and history. This knowledge comes from the struggle of cooking and feeding one’s family and community, regenerating life itself. This knowledge is critical for the realization of people’s right to food.
106. The ingredients currently available in Gaza markets are acquired at exorbitant prices. These recipes, like many recipes, are embedded in knowledge about the Palestinian people’s ongoing relationship with their land, territory and history. Collecting and sharing recipes is so much more than developing a cooking guide since it is a practice that preserves local knowledge, and changes as more people cook. Cooking, along with the collecting and sharing of recipes, is also a practice of being steadfast and adaptable in moments of profound pain and suffering while expressing one’s sense of dignity, reciprocity, care and self-determination.
108. … Millions of people recognize that the tools and techniques that will free the Palestinian people from occupation, oppression and exploitation will ultimately be the same ones that can free us all. By fighting Israel’s starvation campaign against the Palestinians, people are in effect also fighting for their own freedom from hunger. Most of the world’s population suffer under food systems that harm or kill them through slower forms of violence than in Gaza today.
109. People want to transform these systems to become based on care and reciprocity. The challenge with transformation does not lie in a scarcity of solutions. We already know what States must do to realize the right to food – agrarian land must be redistributed more fairly, while recognizing and respecting strong tenure and territorial rights. Labour laws should be enacted and enforced to ensure dignity in the workplace. Territorial markets should be supported so that local communities and regions are better connected and less vulnerable to global markets. Solidarity economic enterprises should be supported because they prioritize social purpose over profits. Solutions abound.
110. The main challenge lies in stopping corporations and States from continuing to amass great amounts of power, which they use to manufacture scarcity and cause harm through food systems. Viewing the current “war” from that perspective, we can understand that Israel is not “defending itself” against a “terrorist organization” but is attacking the Indigenous Palestinians as a people. This past year, Israeli settlers and armed forces inflicted record rates of violence against peasants and pastoralists in the occupied West Bank. As a result, peasants were not able to harvest their olives. Olives are of course an important source of food and livelihood. But the Palestinian people’s relationship to olive trees, which can live for hundreds of years, is also about their relationship to their ancestors and to their future, just as small-scale fishing is an integral part of a life of harmony with the sea and not only a means to gather food, or foraging for wild za‘tar is not just a culinary choice but a practice that retains an inherent connection to the land.
111. Food sovereignty means that the Palestinian people, as a people, have the right to their lands, territories and resources to compensate for a long history of illegal and unjust dispossession. The power of food sovereignty does not derive from the political form of a State or a national authority. It arises from people’s long-standing relationship with the land, with the rivers and the sea, and their capacity to feed their own communities, in opposition to the prevailing, yet cracking, international system in place today. Once this cracking system crumbles, what might we build from the salvage?
The power of food sovereignty arises from people’s long-standing relationship with the land, with the rivers and the sea, and their capacity to feed their own communities, in opposition to the prevailing, yet cracking, international system in place today. Once this cracking system crumbles, what might we build from the salvage?
Illustrating the Report
The other significant contribution of the Special Rapporteur’s report is the illustrated graphic reports by artist Omar Khouri that come with it. As the report explains:
7. Words cannot capture certain aspects of the horror of Palestinian life during the current starvation campaign by Israel. Nor do words alone adequately provide a vision for a better future for the Palestinian people and the world. The Special Rapporteur has therefore prepared a graphic report, illustrated by Omar Khouri, a renowned artist. The illustrations are essential to the present report and can be found on the Special Rapporteur’s United Nations web page.
Gaza fishers
The first graphic report illustrated by Omar Khouri highlights the Israeli attacks against Palestinian food sovereignty in Gaza through the story of the Gaza fishers:
74. The graphic report summarizes and illustrates the first-hand testimony of Zakaria Fadel Hasan Baker, an activist and specialist in Gaza’s fishing sector: like in any coastal community, life in Gaza is defined by the sea. Small-scale fishers are the heart of that life. Before October 2023, Gaza’s fishing community was made up of 4,500 regular workers, approximately 1,500 seasonal workers, 1,050 motorboats and 900 rowboats. They had five marinas at which to dock their fishing boats: North Gaza, Gaza City, Deir el Balah, Khan Younes and Rafah. Since 7 October, Israel has denied all fishers access to the sea and destroyed over 75 per cent of the fishing sector. All this destruction is yet another way that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians since 1991. Under the Oslo Accords, Palestinians were supposed to be able to fish within 20 nautical miles from the shore. Israel, through the blockade, limited fishers to about 6 nautical miles from the shore, where fishing was not easy due to shallow waters with sandy and rocky sea floors. They were also regularly shot at and arrested by Israeli forces simply for fishing in Palestinian territorial waters. The life of fishers tells you a lot about a place. In Gaza, it is telling us that the starvation of the Palestinian people is not a sudden and unpredictable consequence of the latest aggressions by the occupation forces but a gradual and deliberate strategy that was set in motion many years ago.
Dignity despite Suffering
The second graphic report highlights the centrality of food to Palestinian communal life, and, as noted above, the role of cooking, along with the collecting and sharing of recipes, as ‘a practice of being steadfast and adaptable in moments of profound pain and suffering while expressing one’s sense of dignity, reciprocity, care and self-determination’:
105. To understand what is at stake, turn to the graphic report, “Dignity despite suffering”. In the graphic report, the Special Rapporteur shares the stark difference between two ingredient lists from two recipes for summaqiyyah before and after this war in Gaza.
Palestinian people’s food sovereignty
In the third and final graphic report, Omar Khouri illustrates the Special Rapporteur’s narration of ‘the specificities of the Palestinian people’s food sovereignty and the universal struggle for the realization of the right to food’:
108. The graphic report illustrates the following account: how States and international institutions are responding to Gaza is redefining the very nature of international law. In parallel, an extraordinary global wave of solidarity movements supporting the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination is rolling across the world. Millions of people recognize that the tools and techniques that will free the Palestinian people from occupation, oppression and exploitation will ultimately be the same ones that can free us all. By fighting Israel’s starvation campaign against the Palestinians, people are in effect also fighting for their own freedom from hunger. Most of the world’s population suffer under food systems that harm or kill them through slower forms of violence than in Gaza today.
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Discussing the Report
Prof. Fakhri will be speaking at a number of events organised in advance of his presentation to the General Assembly in New York. Registration for online attendance at the ‘Comics & Human Rights’ event (poster below), featuring both Michael Fakhri and Omar Khouri and others, is available here.
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A recent Al-Jazeera Fault Lines documentary, Starving Gaza, also addresses some similar themes as the Special Rapporteur’s report: