Hunger as a weapon

The faces of famine include those who cause it

Aug 22, 2025

The famine that killed one million people in Ireland in the mid-1800s is a well-known event, and so is the proximate cause of the tragedy: a fast-spreading potato blight that all but wiped out the country’s staple food.

What is perhaps less well known is that the blight was only the start of the story. Other crops, such as wheat, were not affected by the blight. But this food was withheld from the Irish peasantry by the country’s British overlords, who made a deliberate choice to export it for profit rather than use it to alleviate the starvation.

In that important way, Ireland’s Great Famine is not unique, but emblematic of the traumatic events that have inflicted similar suffering in widely disparate places: Ukraine in the 1930s, India in the 1940s, China in the early 1960s, and Sudan and Gaza today. A famine may sometimes begin with a natural disaster, but the conscious policy decisions of those who rule the affected area always play a major role. Famine victims have human faces – and so do the people who caused or contributed to it.

The victims of the Irish famine are memorialized in a stark monument in Ardsley, N.Y., a suburb of New York City. The bronze figures are designed to provoke powerful emotions, and they succeed. They are gaunt and careworn, yet erect and proud. Four members of a family face forward, looking ahead to a long journey across an ocean, their sparse belongings piled at their feet. The fifth, a boy, turns to look back at the devastated homestead they are leaving behind, and a bushel of rotting potatoes that become skulls.

The memorial was erected after a campaign and fundraising drive by a local group of Irish-Americans, many of them descendants of the two million people who were driven to emigrate from their homeland to escape the famine.

The chairman of the fundraising committee, real estate executive James J. Houlihan, told the Catholic New York newspaper when the memorial was dedicated in 2001 that its goal went beyond commemorating victims of the famine. He said he hoped it would “make people more understanding and compassionate to immigrants newly arrived and those who suffer from hunger and homelessness.” Those feelings seem to be in short supply today, even as memories of past trauma linger.

The tragedy of famine is embedded in the historical memory of the Irish people. It is also braided into the consciousness of Ukrainians, who see a direct connection between the famine of 1931-33 that killed four million people and their struggle today to defend their country against Russian invaders.

This famine was in no way the result of a failed harvest. It came about because of Stalin’s calculated decision to impose a crash agricultural collectivization program in the most fertile grain-growing regions of the Soviet Union – Ukraine, southern Russia and Kazakhstan – and then to confiscate most of the grain that was produced. The goal was to break the resistance of the peasantry, who were slandered as “kulaks” – rich, selfish landowners – regardless of whether the label actually fit.

In Ukraine, there was the added motive of revenge for more than a decade of pro-independence campaigns. In addition to the imposed famine, the Soviet leadership launched a campaign of systematic repression against Ukrainian intellectuals, religious leaders and public officials. Raphael Lemkin, the international legal scholar who coined the term genocide and offered its original definition in 1944, wrote nine years later that the Soviet actions in Ukraine clearly merited the term.

The full story was vividly told by the journalist and historian Anne Applebaum in her 2017 book, Red Famine. In it, she highlights another all-too-common feature of famines: the refusal of much of the world to believe what was happening, even when presented with clear and convincing evidence. In Ukraine, a young British writer named Gareth Jones managed to get into the areas stalked by famine, at considerable personal risk, and revealed what he had observed once he left Soviet territory. “We used to feed the world and now we are hungry,” one Ukrainian peasant told Jones. The Soviet authorities blandly dismissed the reports of famine as false, with considerable help from sympathetic or cynical western journalists.

Today, a similar process of denial is at work in Israel over the situation in Gaza.

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists based in Gaza invaded southern Israel, murdered some 1,200 people and took 250 hostages. The Israeli military response began almost immediately. As part of it, Israel proclaimed a total cutoff of all food – as well as other necessities – to Gaza.

“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip,” then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Oct. 9, 2023. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

The Israelis have periodically relaxed this blockade, usually in response to protests and pressure from the outside world. But the amount of food that is reaching Gaza – which has always been largely dependent on external supplies – is far less than what was being shipped in before the war, and far short of what is needed by Gaza’s population of more than two million.

“It is a man-made famine. Famine is not about food; it is the deliberate collapse of the systems needed for human survival.” — UN Secretary General António Guterres on Gaza

In addition, the Israelis shut down the distribution system run by the UN, claiming it had allowed Hamas to divert some supplies, and set up a new system that has proven to be chaotic and dangerous. According to the UN World Food Program, a third of Gaza’s population goes for days without eating. An international group of experts that monitors food crises has declared that a state of famine exists in Gaza City, the most populous city in the enclave before the war began, and that at least half a million people face the most dire conditions it measures: starvation, acute malnutrition and death.

Israel and its supporters stubbornly reject all responsibility for the large-scale malnutrition in Gaza, blaming practically everyone else – Hamas, the UN, Arab governments, western aid groups, the international news media – for the situation. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has even denied that hunger exists in Gaza. “There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza,” he said last month. “We enable humanitarian aid throughout the duration of the war to enter Gaza – otherwise, there would be no Gazans.”

If Israeli citizens believe these claims, it is perhaps not surprising, because Israel’s media, with very few exceptions, simply do not report what is happening in Gaza. But nearly everywhere else – including in countries that historically have been Israel’s strongest allies – criticism of Israel’s policies has become a deafening crescendo.

In Ireland 175 years ago, there was an escape valve from the hunger, in the form of migration to an America that still had an open-door policy toward immigrants. In Gaza today, no such option exists, as the enclave’s borders with Israel and Egypt are tightly sealed. Israeli officials have talked about a “voluntary migration,” and have floated the idea of removing Gazans to the African nation of South Sudan – itself plagued by conflict and poverty. Human rights groups say the notion that such a transfer would be voluntary is a fiction.

“There’s nothing voluntary when you’re making Gaza unlivable, when you are destroying the civilian infrastructure that is necessary for civilian life,” said Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “Continuing to force people out is not voluntary.”

The Irish who came to America to escape the famine encountered fierce hostility from nativists who feared them as invaders who would steal jobs from Americans and pollute our culture. But they prevailed over the bigotry and greatly enriched their new country, which for the most part was then still confident enough to appreciate how newcomers could contribute to a growing America.

The Great Hunger Memorial commemorates these people – but it also points an accusing finger. The words on the plaque next to the statue are understated and terse, but they carry a meaning that echoes down the centuries: “While millions starved, an abundance of food was exported for commerce. Tragically, this situation still exists in the world today.”

Ken Fireman is the author of The Unmooring, a historical novel about America in the 1960s. During his work as a journalist, he covered Washington, post-Soviet Russia and other battle zones.

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