Climate Change and Genocide

The average rainfall in the wine growing region of Margaret River in South West Western Australia is around 1,130mm per year with rain recorded around 129 days of the year. In recent years, however, annual rainfall has declined, so much so that the rainfall in 2024 was 762mm with only 28 rainy days recorded.

The impact of this declining rainfall can be seen with drying, dying trees, dying as the water table is not replenished, the changing use of land for agriculture, with what used to be grazing for cattle is now used for sheep, the grape crops in the local vinyards are compromised. The economic future is uncertain.

Recent talks with a ranger working for one of the councils in the south west highlighted one of the concerns of climate change and the prolonged dought experienced in the South West of Western Australia.

One of the jobs this young man does is to cull feral, dangerous and other animals which are causing nuisance; rabbits, deer and kangaroos.

Dangerous is probably a bit of a misnomer since some of the animals to be culled included an excessive number of kangaroos which were causing some problems. The prolonged dought in the region has caused many of the animals he culled to be emaciated to the point that they were in fact dying of kidney and other organ failure, apparently caused by starvation. The drought had depleted the normal native foods the kangaroos grazed on.

The animals he killed were basically skin and bone. Their evasive actions were virtually non-existant. They were too weak, too distressed to take notice of what was happening. Or perhaps they were not all that concerned about the prospect of being shot. It was probably less traumatic than the slow death they were experiencing from the starvation they endured.

As the young man was telling of that part of his job, it occurred to me that the people of Gaza are being subjected to the same conditions, except not as a result of climate change but because of the deliberate action of denying water, food and medical supplies to those effectively imprisoned in Gaza, merely for being Palestinian.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, about 1 in 9 people in the world today are undernourished, that’s about 795 million people. Undernourishment or malnutrition can be the result of war, economic crisis, floods, drought and other both natural occurances and acts of human folly. In Gaza it is the direct result of the denial of aid to a suffering people, suffering for no other reason than they are Palestinian.

The current number of those killed in Gaza since this conflict began in October 2023 is now over 43,000. That is those counted as dying because of the military offensive by Israel but does not include those dying of starvation or those who have already died of starvation.

Do people die of starvation or does the death certificate attribute the death to some other cause, like heart failure?

Starvation kills slowly.

Metabolism slows so that the body can no longer regulate its temperature, kidney function is impaired, the immune system weakens. Slowly the body appears to consume itself, heart, lungs, ovaries, testes shrink, muscle mass shrinks, body temperature drops, it becomes difficult to concentrate, people become irritable. Dr Nancy Zucker Director of the Duke Centre for Eating Disorders at Duke University explains that when nothing is left for the body to consume except for muscle, “Once protein stores start getting used, death is not far. You’re consuming your own muscle, including the heart muscle.”

That degeneration, that suffering can take anything from 21 to over 40 days, longer when there is occasional food or water consumed. Days that the dying person feels the effects of starvation, suffers a long fading away, slowly losing body function, losing strength, experiencing convulsions and hallucinations until finally the heart stops.

But those deaths are not included in the number of deaths attributable to the military conflict. Those deaths ultimately may well number over 200,000 in the short term, many more as the effects of periodic starvation take its toll. Deaths not because of a building getting bombed, not because of gun fire, not because some soldier threw a grenade but because of the deliberate with holding of supplies by a military which describes itself as ‘humane’.

The other disturbing statistic in this is that over $30billion in munitions have been supplied to Israel, but only about $1billion in aid for those suffering the bombardment.

How can they get away with that, how come this is not from page news on every newspaper in the world, how come this is not headlined on the 7o’clock news, how come this is not debated in parliaments across the world when protests against the war are being shut down?

The answer may well be staring us in the face, when the news we get from traditional sources is very much controlled, the narrative on this war is controlled by the Netanyahu government in Israel, shutting down those news sources it cannot depend on for promoting the Israeli narrative, closing down Al Jazeera in Israel, the IDF targetting reporters with over 140 journalists and reporters killed, but the most powerful means is through organisation such as AIPAC, other Jewish and pro-Jewish activists and the Israeli military using its personel to flood the internet with their version of events.

The political power of AIPAC in the US and the Jewish lobby here in Australia influences very much the political response to Israel’s aggression, its continued land grabs in the West Bank and support for it, actions in marginalising Palestinians is very evident in the responses we see headlined, for example when pro Palestinian rallies and protests are shut down, or the lack of credible coverage of the Gaza conflict. In fairness, SBS and the ABC do show some of the devastation of Gaza and some of the activities in The West Bank, but always with the over-rider of the start of this conflict, October 7, never that the problems began well before that, the NAKBA of 1948, the closing off of Gaza in 1967, the constant displacement of Palestinians as more and more is declared Israeli territory.

‘How Israel Censor Your Internet’ is a video on the Voices from the Holy Land website, one of four videos looking at the internet and social media use in influencing opinion.

Animals are dying in the Australian bush, some because of bush fires, some because of drought conditions. Climate change is causing natural disasters here and across the globe and we cannot do a great deal about that to alleviate those events, but when people are being starved as a deliberate act, with-holding food, water and medical supplies there is something we can do. We can, indeed we MUST declare that as genocide. We must work through the UN and other agencies to provide relief to those 2.3 million people trapped in Gaza, to ease that suffering and somehow dignify those people as being fully human, as human as you and me, as human as any Israeli, as human as the most strident Zionist.

Israel must be held to account.

The greatest stumbling block is the political sway that Israel has managed to develop over the years and most importantly the veto power that the US has in the UN Security Council which cancels any vote to actually do something to censure Israel.

See also: Gaza

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