00:00Mr. President, the mass starvation and death sweeping through Gaza is a moral tragedy and
00:09a strategic abomination.
00:12What started as a war with a just cause to go after Hamas for the unspeakable atrocities
00:19it committed on October 7th and bring home the hostages quickly turned unjust and immoral.
00:28Now everybody knows how complicated and fraught the Middle East is.
00:33Everyone knows that navigating this generations-long conflict requires nuance and depth and a historical
00:40understanding in order to try to get it right.
00:46Everyone knows that smart and sincere and decent people can disagree on this issue.
00:54But what is happening today is entirely different.
00:58There is no excuse for this horrific suffering.
01:03It is not making Israel or Israelis or Jews any safer, nor is it helping to bring home
01:11the 50 remaining hostages who have been in brutal captivity for almost two years.
01:19The fact that this catastrophe was preventable is precisely what makes it so indefensible.
01:28People have been warning for months that the Israeli government's actions would result in
01:32exactly this kind of tragedy.
01:35Where children are dying by the dozens and hundreds of thousands of people have been starving
01:40for days.
01:41The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which Israel scrambled to set up two months ago, has failed.
01:52According to the BBC, where there used to be 400 U.N. aid distribution sites all across Israel
02:01and Gaza.
02:02There are now just four run by the GHF.
02:08And as a result, a third of Gazans, a third of Gazans are going multiple days in a row without
02:15eating.
02:17The World Health Organization reports that at least 63 people, many of them children, have
02:22died from malnutrition this month alone.
02:27And more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid at GHF sites, according
02:33to the U.N.
02:36In May, the GHF's first executive director resigned, saying, quote, it is clear that it
02:45is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles
02:51of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, end quote.
02:59Whether you believe that this organization was set up to fail intentionally from the start,
03:05or more charitably that the Israeli government established it without understanding that
03:09it couldn't succeed.
03:11It doesn't matter.
03:13What is plainly obvious now is that it is not working.
03:17You don't have to be some left-wing organization or get your data from the Hamas government to
03:21acknowledge that the GHF is failing at its fundamental mission of feeding people.
03:29Which raises the question, why?
03:34Here, we have an Israeli security apparatus that can and did synchronize an attack of exploding
03:42pagers across an entire country.
03:46They can reach and gather intelligence from the high command of their greatest adversaries.
03:51The IDF is widely viewed as punching way above its weight in almost every way.
03:58And yet Israel is asserting that given all of those capabilities, the one thing they can't
04:03do is facilitate aid distribution.
04:06That's too hard for them.
04:10Food and medical assistance routinely gets into conflict zones around the world.
04:15Yemen, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo.
04:20Gaza should not be any different.
04:23What is different are the stated goals of the extremists in the Israeli government.
04:33Quote, the only way to win the war and bring back the hostages is to completely stop the
04:42humanitarian aid, conquer the entire Gaza Strip and encourage voluntary migration.
04:50That was the national security minister of the government of Israel, completely stopping
04:58humanitarian aid, conquering the entire Gaza Strip, encouraging migration.
05:04These are their words, these are not my words.
05:11And as the starvation takes hold, their response is to deny that it is even happening.
05:19There is no starvation in Gaza.
05:21Who said that?
05:22The Prime Minister of Israel.
05:25Ben-Gavir added, I have to collect myself before saying what Ben-Gavir said.
05:32If they were hungry, they would have returned the hostages home.
05:37If they were hungry, they would have returned the hostages home.
05:42It is worth pausing on that for just a moment.
05:46Too many people in the Netanyahu government make no distinction between the actual enemy
05:51that is Hamas and innocent civilians.
05:54The idea that a desperate mother malnourished herself and out of breast milk for her infant
06:00or a seven-year-old running to the front of an aid line to get whatever scraps he can for
06:04him and his siblings.
06:05The idea that these people are in charge of which hostages are released and when, that
06:12they suddenly are being held to account for the actions of Hamas on October 7th is preposterous.
06:23It's another example of the casual dismissal of civilian death and suffering as if it's
06:30an inevitable consequence.
06:32War is hell and all of that.
06:36But what possible explanation is there for letting infants and two- and three-year-olds starve?
06:43What tactical advantage is being gained?
06:46Standing up for our shared humanity, whatever our other differences and preferences, should
06:54not be a matter of controversy.
06:57But too often when someone is critical of Israel and they are a Jew, they are characterized as
07:03a self-hating Jew.
07:05And if someone is critical of Israel and they are not a Jew, they are characterized as anti-Semitic.
07:11Like, I want to be crystal clear, anti-Semitism is among the oldest and most vile prejudices
07:21that exist.
07:23It is real, it is scary, and it is on the rise in the United States.
07:29It should be fought at every turn, left, right, and center, and anyone who simply waves it away
07:35or denies the urgency of addressing it is either not paying attention or lying.
07:41But criticizing the conduct of this war, criticizing Minister Ben-Gavir, who talks about ethnic
07:47cleansing, criticizing the withholding of aid, criticizing the excessive tolerance for
07:52civilian casualties, criticizing Prime Minister Netanyahu's apparent willingness to cling
07:57to power at the expense of Israel, Israelis, and Jews everywhere, that is a separate matter.
08:06Everybody gets to do that.
08:08Just like Americans get to criticize their president without hating America or the people
08:13within it.
08:14People are more than their governments.
08:17The government of Israel is behaving terribly.
08:21The conduct of this war is indefensible.
08:24And it is not in spite of my Jewishness and my Judaism that I say that.
08:31It is because of it.
08:34There are a lot of people, including people I know personally, and I believe this, who believe
08:43in the sacred idea of Israel.
08:46They are good people, and this cannot be about vanquishing one side of the political spectrum,
08:51whether that's the left and center left or the right and the alt-right.
08:57This is about grounding ourselves in the very basic principle, which is, whatever else we
09:04are fighting about, can we please hold the children harmless?
09:10I yield the floor.
09:13I yield the floor.
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