IT WOULD be a mistake to underestimate the significance of President Trump’s rejection of Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that “There is no starvation in Gaza.” The rest of the world was aghast at the brazen affrontery of the Israeli Prime Minister. The images of emaciated children emerging from the strip have done what months of diplomacy and protest could not: they have forced the world to look again. This is no longer just war: it is mass starvation.
President Trump did not dodge the reality. “There is real starvation in Gaza,” he said, adding that he had told the Israelis: “Maybe they have to do it a different way.” It is a mild rebuke — but, coming from Donald Trump, it matters.
He said something else important. President Trump acknowledged that the US and the UK are not aligned on the exact way forward on Palestinian statehood, but that this should not cause friction between him and Sir Keir Starmer. “I’m not going to take a position,” President Trump said, but “I don’t mind him taking a position. I’m looking for getting people fed right now.”
This offered an important gloss on the hostile statement that Washington issued on the conference that Saudi Arabia and France have been holding in New York on how to bring about a two-state solution — after years of Israeli attempts to undermine that prospect by encouraging settlers to steal Palestinian families’ land in the West Bank.
The pressure on the Netanyahu regime is building from all directions. In response, it has authorised limited aid drops into Gaza — symbolically significant, but, practically, grossly inadequate. Air drops are not a strategy: they are an admission of failure. The only meaningful solution is to allow food in at scale, and that requires a ceasefire, not the additional trickle that Israel has authorised this week.
Two Israeli human-rights groups have now said outright that this is genocide. Lord Sumption, a former UK Supreme Court judge, has called the blocking of food a war crime. Bob Geldof has directly accused Israel of routinely telling lies. One third of Labour MPs want the UK to recognise Palestinian statehood, and the Prime Minister has said that it is a question of “when, not if”. The only real issue is when recognition will exert the most leverage on Israel.
Yet all this pressure will come to nothing without the intervention of President Trump. “Netanyahu only listens to Trump, and even then only sometimes,” Emily Thornberry, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said. “But nothing is going to move without him.”
The way in which Sir Keir has paid court to President Trump has been unpalatable for many in the UK. They have found the obsequiousness distasteful in the face of the President’s chaotic, egotistical, and often destructive personality. But the realpolitik is that it is necessary.
Western leaders must tell the President, with straight faces, that only he can do this. Only he can end the starvation; only he can end the killing; only he can bring the hostages home — not because he is the US President, but because Donald Trump has the strength of ten presidents.
Nauseating, perhaps, but true. If it is a choice between our pride and their survival, the choice should be clear.