Starving Gaza: The Weapon Older Than Rome
How Israel’s siege echoes the fall of empires — and why community is Gaza’s last aegis
Yesterday, the leaders of the UK, France, and Canada released a joint statement opposing the expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza — as if starvation were merely an inconvenience, not a policy. As if death could be paused like a video stream. As if the daily images of Israeli bombs reducing starving children to ash while they slept in flimsy tents hadn’t shattered what little moral authority these men still clung to.
Starmer, Macron, and Carney may be out of touch with their people, but even they must sense the ground is shifting beneath them.
The language was the kind of cant governments spew when they want to sound sorrowful but remain blameless — “Strongly oppose.” “Denial of aid is unacceptable.” “We strongly support a ceasefire.” These words ring hollow — a liturgy of moral abdication.
What do our so-called leaders really mean?
That the sight of children burning alive, bellies bloated from hunger, has become too grotesque — and too routine — to ignore?
That over 14,000 children under five, suffering from acute malnutrition could die if aid doesn’t get in — and that the optics of doing nothing are now too toxic to stomach?
That bombing soup kitchens and bakeries like the schools and hospitals before them, severs Gaza’s last lifeline?
So here we are — not because they care, but because the charge of complicity now threatens to stick.
Because the unvarnished truth remains: what Israel executes, they permit — a tragedy sustained not solely by force, but by leaders with the power to intervene who chose not to.
Welcome to the grotesque now — where the West wears moral bankruptcy like a crown. Where its institutions rot under the weight of hypocrisy. Where Gaza burns not only from bombs, but from the silence of those who should be screaming.
And we think we’re civilised? What is happening in Gaza is not new. It is ancient. Older than Rome. Older than Troy. A siege is not merely a military tactic — it is a philosophy. A doctrine of absolute control. Psychological and physical annihilation wrapped in one slow-motion massacre.
Israel is not only bombing people and buildings. It is erasing community — the last aegis the oppressed have against their oppressor. In Gaza, no one begged. No one slept rough. Not because they had much — because they had each other. That is their strength. That is the marrow of their resistance. And that is what Israel is trying to starve out of existence.
Starving Palestinians into submission — not yet achieved, but relentlessly pursued — is only the latest entry in history’s ledger of siege and famine. Carthage. Jerusalem. Athens. Their populations devoured by hunger wielded as a weapon. But famine as strategy is carrion logic — it consumes the hand that sows it.
Rome erased Carthage — only to echo its own ruin. Napoleon’s blockade of Britain choked France. Britain bled Bengal of grain — killed millions, lost the empire. The blade cuts both ways. A state that weaponises hunger writes its own epitaph.
What happens to a nation that believes victory lies not in battle, but in slaughtering the innocent? What becomes of a people who think security can be bombed into existence? They become Rome in its twilight — vicious, paranoid, and doomed.
Israel’s siege of Gaza — a near-total blockade of water, food, fuel, and medicine — is not incidental. It is policy. Deliberate. Strategic. Designed to make survival impossible until resistance collapses or dies out altogether.
This is not war. It is an assault on our shared humanity. The slaughter of women and children, the use of starvation as a weapon, violates Lex Naturae — the Natural Law inscribed in every conscience — the sacredness of innocent life. This slow erasure of a people through hunger and displacement breaks the deepest bonds that make us human. Yet those who claim to defend civilisation deny, even now, what it is — an abomination.
And still, France, Britain, and Canada issue statements about ‘opposing the expansion of military operations in Gaza’ were some minor inconvenience rather than a festering wound of conscience. They speak of peace whilst arming the butcher. They quote international law whilst watching it unravel before their eyes.
There is no pause in starvation. No ceasefire in disease. No humanitarian corridor wide enough to feed over a million hungry souls. These are not “collateral damage.” This is the plan.
And yet, these same nations pretend to lead. To guide. To moralize. From what moral high ground? The one paved with dead Gazans?
History is replete with examples of states that believed themselves invincible — until they weren’t. Nations do not usually fall from invasion. They collapse from within. From corruption. From hubris. From forgetting that power without principle is poison.
Rome didn’t fall because the barbarians came. It fell because it stopped believing in the Republic. Because its elite gorged while the provinces starved. Because it mistook military might for moral authority.
Britain did not lose India because it couldn’t fight. It lost India because it could no longer justify ruling it. America — and its regional enforcer, Israel — is now learning this lesson too. Not just in Gaza, but in Ukraine, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran. Across the Global South, disillusionment howls through the streets. Its alliances are fraying. Its soft power crumbling. Its hard power increasingly challenged.
And Israel? It has gone full Roman — militarised, paranoid, lashing out at everyone. Its apologists brand anyone who dares speak out against the horror it inflicts on Palestinians as “anti-Semitic” — or worse, accuse them of blood libel. Yet security cannot be bombed into existence.
In my previous article, I detailed how the dichotomy played out between the Cold War physicists, Oppenheimer — Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds — and Weinberg — Now I am become Life, the sustainer of worlds. The same dichotomy is playing out in Israeli politics.
On one side: the Oppenheimers of the Israeli state — Israelis who believe that strength lies in destruction, that fear is better than trust, that the world must bow or burn. On the other: the Weinbergs — those who remember the meaning of justice, who still believe in coexistence.
But the Oppenheimers are in charge. And they are leading Israel down a path from which there may be no return.
For decades, the West has lectured the world on how to behave. How to vote. How to trade. How to mourn.
No more.
The global majority are no longer listening. They are building a new world order. Not one of death and destruction, but of choice. Multipolarity is not a threat. It is a relief valve. A chance for nations to escape the stranglehold of exceptionalism.
The new world order is not positioning itself as a new hegemon, but as a mediator — one that understands the death and destruction of colonisation, the arrogance of empire, and the cost of moral blindness.
What will history say of this time?
That the West knew.
That it saw the bodies heaped in rubble.
That it heard the cries of the starving.
That it witnessed the largest cohort of paediatric amputees in history — many subjected to traumatic amputations without anaesthetic — and chose to look away.
That it allowed Gaza’s annihilation to unfold in real time, obscured by bureaucratic euphemisms like “disproportionate response” and “operational necessity.”
Israel’s deep internal divisions mirror those of dying states. While the majority supports Netanyahu’s scorched-earth campaign, a plurality watches in horror. But the government speaks for them all. And the world listens — not to the dissenters, but to the messianic, ethno-supremacist extremists who dream of a Greater Israel built on yet more annexed Arab lands.
Oppenheimer held the atom — and chose to destroy. Weinberg held it too — and chose life. One became Death. The other, Life. Israel now stands at that same crossroads.
It can choose occupation, siege, annihilation — and eventual ruin.
Or it can choose peace, justice, dignity — and perhaps, survival.
But the window is closing. Fast.
As for the West?
It long ago forfeited any claim to moral authority — if such a thing was ever truly its own. What remains is but the death rattle of one of history’s most brutal and bloody empires. History will neither forget nor forgive those complicit in humanity’s latest horror.
And Gaza? They have been brought to the brink — the edge of extinction. And still, they are there. Not because they are spared fate, but because they endure it. Unlit, yet luminous. Voiceless, yet speaking. Still breathing. Still human.
He spent a decade running his own finance firm before trading spreadsheets for fieldwork. For over twenty years, he led humanitarian operations across West Asia — working with refugees, torture survivors, and communities trapped in conflict. Having witnessed empire’s reach from Gaza to Baghdad, he now writes from where policy meets pain.
— Darrin Waller