The Breaking Point
On October 25, 2023, just two weeks into Israel’s siege of Gaza, Egyptian-born author Omar El Akkad reposted a video on X of a leveled city block, writing, “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”
His words, reposted 58,000 times, captured a widespread preemptive despair. The hypocrisy of global liberalism, it seemed, would accommodate barbarity until the precise moment that its own survival required a brazen revision. Twenty-one months later, that bitter prophecy, almost claustrophobic in its parsimony, seems more likely all the time: We will not account for this crime until it has been accomplished.
Over the past few weeks as starvation in Gaza, long in the making and orchestrated by Israel, has reached unprecedented levels — nearly 12,000 children under the age of 5 are suffering acute malnutrition, according to the World Health Organization — politicians have finally risked criticism of the regime responsible. Even stalwart defenders of Israel, such as New York representative Ritchie Torres, have begun to question the war’s aims. On July 28, Marjorie Taylor Greene — no ally of the Jewish state — became the first Republican to call Israel’s actions a “genocide.” On July 30, 27 senators from the Democratic caucus voted for Bernie Sanders’s bill to halt firearms shipments to Israel, up from just 15 who voted for similar resolutions in April. Key holdouts remain — including Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand — but as a former Biden official told Politico, such a result was recently unimaginable.
In the media, the New York Times, long accused of cowardice and printing propaganda on Israel’s behalf, published a damning investigation of starvation in Gaza, igniting the wrath of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who told Fox News that the paper “should be sued.” “I am actually looking into whether a country can sue the New York Times,” he said. From the center right, critique has come in the voice of a concerned friend. David French, Ross Douthat, and even Bari Weiss’s Free Press have all recently betrayed ambivalence about Israel’s actions. They see that the country is spending down its moral capital at an alarming rate.
Global condemnation has gotten louder. In the last days of July, 31 countries signed on to a joint statement calling for an immediate cease-fire. France, the U.K., and Canada warned they would formally recognize a Palestinian state as long as Hamas disarms.
On July 28, President Trump, in his desultory way — more like a disinterested onlooker than the commander-in-chief — contradicted Netanyahu’s claim that no one was starving in Gaza: “Based on television … those children look very hungry.” Axios later reported that Trump planned to “take over” the aid effort in Gaza. “He does not want babies to starve,” an unnamed official said. Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said it seems “very unlikely” the president “will apply real pressure on Israel to do much of anything relating to Gaza.”
Also on July 28, Israel’s own top human-rights organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights–Israel, concluded that Israel is committing genocide. On August 1, some 600 former Israeli security officials, including past leaders of Mossad and army chiefs, urged Trump to bring an end to the war, and a few days later, a letter signed by more than 4,000 influential diaspora Jews, including wealthy pro-Israel philanthropists, called on Netanyahu to negotiate a peace, “enforce the law in the West Bank,” and reject the use of “starvation or expulsion as weapons of war.” The kettle logic that prevailed for months among Israel’s apologists — that there is no starvation and that the starvation is Hamas’s fault — has lost all plausibility. The most shameless maintain that previous famine warnings (in spring and fall 2024 and in March 2025) were misinformation; only recently have they become true.
If the tide is indeed turning, why now? Perhaps it is in part due to the character of starvation: The blame can be diffuse. The people of Gaza are being starved, but for those who prefer an agentless tragedy, they are also merely starving. Famine, however, has threatened Gaza since the very beginning of the war. In fact, food conditions were not particularly good in the blockaded territory before October 7. Some attribute the flurry of concern to newly captured aerial photography — shot from Spanish and Jordanian planes dropping food — that depicts Gaza as nothing more than flattened concrete. But once again, photos like these have been circulated since the very first weeks of the war.
“It’s hard to understand exactly why this is happening now,” said Peter Beinart, author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. Perhaps it’s a matter of scale and duration. “The human suffering has gotten worse and worse as it’s also become clearer and clearer that Israel can’t achieve its stated goals,” he said. The media has a herd mentality. And anyway, Beinart coolly noted, July and August are typically lean months for political news.
Among Democratic politicians, there is also the Mamdani effect. “A year ago, antiwar progressives like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush were ousted for challenging U.S. policy on Gaza,” Democratic operative Waleed Shahid told me. “Zohran Mamdani’s victory has opened political space and reshaped the calculus of what’s electorally viable. Many center-left liberal-minded politicians don’t want to feel like they’re behind the curve.” Even Mamdani’s arch-rival, Andrew Cuomo, criticized Israel in early August before distancing himself from his own comments hours later.
Wertheim doubts the change will last. People “have memory-holed numerous episodes in the course of the Israel-Gaza War in which there was a new swell of opposition to Israel’s conduct,” he said, “and then it just died out. So I worry that we’re back on that cycle.”
When I reached El Akkad early this month, he said he had “absolutely no illusions about the motivations” for the change among politicians: “There’s a survival instinct that’s kicking in.” Reputation management is the easiest way to interpret the maneuvering of former Biden officials, such as national security adviser Jake Sullivan, who enabled this disaster as much as anyone but in a recent op-ed condemned the “ongoing humanitarian catastrophe.” He did not acknowledge the most direct way to end the suffering: stop arming Israel.
There is something crazy-making about all of this: the posture of ingenuous lament by the engineers of our predicament. One wonders if this moral wakefulness is merely prelude to another nightmare. On August 8, Netanyahu’s government approved a plan to expand the war by taking control of Gaza City — ignoring the advice of its own military. As Yezid Sayigh, a Palestinian analyst in Beirut, told the London Review of Books, Israel’s leaders have cornered themselves. The civilian population in Gaza remains the principal obstacle to the colonization of Greater Israel: “Israel has set itself on a trajectory for which it has no solutions other than a final solution.”
If Israel is on the precipice of all-out ethnic cleansing, the moral plaints of western leaders appear to be late petitions for their own innocence. “People want to look like they were on the right side of history,” said Wertheim, “just before a new threshold is crossed.”
In the first week of August, Anthony Aguilar, a retired Green Beret who has said he witnessed the IDF using “indiscriminate and unnecessary force” against starving civilians in Gaza, predicted it would be “days, not months,” before Americans have a truer sense of the devastation there: “It’s going to bring the world to its knees.” It seems western leaders have summoned precisely enough political will to fail to stop a world-historic crime.
Is it actually too late? El Akkad said that of course it is and, at the same time, “there is no such thing as too late.” Despair is no use to the living.
Related