Nobel laureates, top economists urge Netanyahu to halt Gaza occupation, starvation
The first signatory to the letter is Nobel laureate, MIT economist, and co-author of the international bestseller Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu. He shared the letter on X on Friday.
"We write with urgent concern about the spreading starvation in Gaza and the Israeli government's plan to concentrate civilians in a so-called 'humanitarian city,'" the letter says.
"As human beings and as economists and scientists, we call for an immediate halt to any policy that intensifies widespread starvation".
The second paragraph denounces the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel, but adds, "that does not absolve the Israeli government, which controls the flow and distribution of aid, of responsibility".
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
The economists cite the United Nations World Food Programme's data, which shows that nearly one-third of Gaza's 2.1 million residents have endured multiple days without food, and that market prices in the enclave are now ten times higher compared to prices from just three months ago.
They also describe the scandal-plagued, US-backed, and "Israeli-coordinated" Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) as "deadly".
The United Nations says that since May, more than 1,700 people have died while seeking aid from GHF sites. Palestinians have called it a "death trap".
"Under the guise of relief, the proposed 'humanitarian city' would relocate hundreds of thousands of Gazans into a confined zone, stripping them of freedom of movement and basic dignity," the letter says. "It is unconscionable for Israel to treat civilians as liabilities".
The letter is referring to a "humanitarian city" that Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz proposed building in Rafah, which former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said would be a "concentration camp".
Warning to Israel
The Israeli army already controls at least 75 percent of the strip. Last week, Netanyahu announced his intention for a military occupation of Gaza City, which would mean a complete Israeli takeover.
Governments around the world, including allies like the UK, France, Canada, and Germany, have condemned the move. The Trump administration has said it leaves the decision to Israel.
Why Gaza's genocide ranks among the gravest horrors of human history Read More »
"In light of mounting evidence of mass starvation and human-rights violations, European governments may well impose targeted sanctions, inflicting severe damage on science, trade and employment. There are already early signs of that," the economists say.
They warned that ratings agencies are likely to continue to downgrade Israel's sovereign debt, driving up borrowing costs just as the state faces massive reconstruction and defence bills. Skilled workers, especially in the tech sector, would also likely leave Israel, they added.
In addition to walking back a Gaza takeover plan and opening the borders to aid trucks, the letter calls on Israel to immediately "issue a formal declaration [which] reaffirms Israel's commitment to human rights and international law" and "pursue in good faith a ceasefire accord".
The economists said they want "Western leaders to actively work to ensure that these policies are implemented", and that only by doing so can Israel "preserve its democratic character".
The letter makes no mention of genocide or ethnic cleansing. Over 61,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began.
Along with Acemoglu, the Nobel Prize-winning economists of the 23 signatories include Angus Deaton; Peter A Diamond; Esther Duflo; Claudia Goldin; Eric S Maskin; Roger B Myerson; Edmund S Phelps; Christopher A Pissarides; and Joseph E Stiglitz.
Together, their research and consultancy have helped shape the economic trajectory of much of the western world, including institutions like the International Monetary Fund.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Middle East Eye
14 minutes ago
- Middle East Eye
Israel is the last vestige of European colonialism - so Trump defends it at all costs
At a July rally in Des Moines, Iowa, Donald Trump used a telling turn of phrase. While touting the benefits of his recently passed tax-and-spend bill, the American president remarked: 'No death tax, no estate tax, no going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases, a fine banker - and in some cases, Shylocks and bad people.' 'Shylock' is, of course, a reference to the Jewish moneylender in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and is widely recognised as an antisemitic trope. The Anti-Defamation League, for example, called the president out for his comment, while Trump, for his part, later claimed ignorance of the term's anti-Jewish connotations. It might be possible to write this off as an isolated comment, but Trump's gaffe is part of a larger pattern of antisemitism linked to his Make America Great Again (Maga) movement. In May, NPR identified three administration officials with close ties to antisemitic extremists, including a man described by federal prosecutors as a 'Nazi sympathiser' and a prominent Holocaust denier. More recently, Trump's erstwhile ally Elon Musk has come under fire for antisemitism once again when his Grok AI bot launched into antisemitic tirades praising Adolf Hitler. All of this contrasts sharply with the Trump administration's stated goal of combating antisemitism and its unapologetically pro-Israel posture. On 29 January 2025, Trump signed an executive order titled 'Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism', providing a pretext for his administration to pursue deportations of pro-Palestine student activists like Mahmoud Khalil. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters One month before his gaffe in Des Moines, Trump followed the Israeli military's lead by bombing Iran and pulling out of negotiations over their nuclear programme. Even Musk felt obliged to make pro-Israel gestures when he toured the sites of the 7 October Hamas attack in a highly publicised visit in November 2023. Odd alliance How do we explain this alliance between the seemingly antisemitic Maga movement and Israel? Analysts usually point to two major factors. First is the power and influence of pro-Israel lobbying groups, donors, media figures and political operatives, famously analysed by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Second is the role of Christian Zionists in the Maga movement, including prominent figures like the current American ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. Huckabee has explicitly stated that his pro-Israel approach is rooted in his belief that the rapture is imminent and that Israel will be the site of unfolding Biblical prophecy during the end of days. While these factors both play an important role in shaping the Maga-Israel alliance, neither explains the deep intensity of the Trump-era American right's attachment to Israel. The core of the Maga-Israel alliance is not about votes, theology or even security: it is a project of historical amnesia. It seeks to erase the moral and political lessons of decolonisation I believe a more foundational impulse is at work, one tied not only to theology or lobbying power, but to historical memory. This impulse lies at the intersection of multiple programmes currently underway - all intent on rehabilitating colonialism's reputation. These include suppression of teaching and speaking about the colonial past, active justification of colonialism's historical crimes, efforts to undermine recognised international humanitarian law and struggles against active decolonial movements. The Maga-Israel alliance should be understood as part of a broader effort to suppress the memory of colonialism's atrocities and to create a sanitised narrative of colonial history in order to resuscitate colonialism in the present. In the Maga version of modern global history, Israel has come to represent the symbolic last vestige of European colonialism still allowed to flourish, and Palestine stands in for the last unresolved case of anti-colonial resistance. Supporting Israel, then, is not just a normal matter of American foreign policy; it is a proxy battle in culture wars over history, identity and the legitimacy of settler colonialism. The Maga movement has mobilised around a common sense of nostalgia for a past in which white, western, Christian civilisation exercised global dominance. Commentators reflecting on Trump's first term often associated this notion with a desire to re-establish the belief systems of the United States in the 1950s, the dawn of the so-called 'American century'. In his second term, it seems more appropriate to interpret Maga nostalgia as invoking, not the era beginning in the 1950s, but rather the one that began a century earlier at the peak of Euro-American colonialism. Colonial land grab As a recent article in the Monthly Review pointed out, it was no accident that - after opining about the possibility of adding Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal as new American territories - Trump hung a portrait of James K Polk in the Oval Office. Polk served as president from 1845-49 and oversaw the largest territorial expropriation of land in US history after the Mexican War. In the Maga worldview, the era of Anglo-American power ushered in by colonial land grabs at this time brought order, democracy and prosperity in its wake. The post-World War Two era marked a decided turn in the other direction, and the massive movement for decolonisation in the 1950s and 60s upended the worldview of Polk and others like him. The United Nations (UN) Charter was drawn up at this time and was based on the principle of sovereign equality among all nations. This implied that unequal relationships of domination and extraction between nations, such as the relationship between coloniser and colonised, should be undone. Israel has distilled western colonial war techniques, but fails to quell resistance Read More » Article 2 prohibited member states from using force to acquire territory and foresaw the resolution of disputes undertaken in a manner that ensures international peace as well as justice. By the 1970s, the number of UN member states had more than quadrupled. The British, French, Russian, German, Dutch and Portuguese empires were dismantled, and their territories returned to governments representing the indigenous inhabitants from the pre-war era. Because of the United States' unique role in creating and sustaining the post-World War Two order, Maga supporters imagine their country can sidestep critiques of the decolonisation movement. I have written elsewhere about how the circumstances of the battle between colonial powers on the one hand and the Nazi regime on the other have allowed for a kind of global amnesia to take place with regard to the legacy of racism in creating the world we inhabit today. The Maga narrative is just one particularly virulent example of this broader western cultural tendency. Middle America is obsessed with World War Two, as we can see in popular culture like the History Channel. A survey conducted in 2016 found that fully 70 percent of military history programming on the network dealt with the single conflict of World War Two. The Maga movement plays on this popular fixation on "the good war" to whitewash American history and deny any link between nationalistic pride in their own country and the kind of antisemitism associated with the Nazi movement it fought against. Israel's role The importance of Israel's role in this story is in inverse proportion to its small territorial size. The creation of a state for the Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust has allowed Maga republicans - along with the broader western world - to imagine that history's most uniquely horrific crime has been answered for in the American-led postwar order. This narrative element produces a double effect for those who retell it. On one hand, the creation of a Jewish state in the wake of the Holocaust allows western powers to imagine themselves as just and righteous, even as many of those same powers had collaborated in or turned a blind eye to its unfolding. The foundation of the state of Israel is a form of symbolic restitution, allowing western culture to wash its hands of the stain of antisemitism and to imagine that they have made amends to the aggrieved Jewish people. On the other hand, excessive focus on the Holocaust as a singular crime in need of restitution deflects attention from the many other atrocities committed on a similar scale by western colonial empires. Palestine is not just a contested land; it is the last mirror in which the West might see the truth of its colonial past For example, scholars estimate that upwards of 10 million people were killed due to King Leopold's forced labour regime in the Congo Free State, while the Bengal famine caused by official policy led to the deaths of 3 million people in British India. In the US, scholars have called the loss of life associated with American colonisation an 'Indigenous Holocaust', estimating the number of Native American deaths from 1492 onwards at 4.5 million. Making amends for these crimes and others like them would require political and social reorganisation on a world scale. Instead of coming face-to-face with this global reckoning, western culture has chosen to hyperfixate on one specific case in a small bit of territory on the Levantine coast. Israel as we know it today took shape in the context of the Mandate for Palestine, founded in the wake of the First World War (1914-18), when Britain and France split up the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire among themselves. But while the rest of the Mandates were eventually returned to governments representing the indigenous inhabitants of the territory from the pre-war era, in Palestine, Jewish settlers from Europe - who had created a new political identity of their own based on historical-religious claims - were recognised as sovereign. Today, Palestine is the only colony founded in the late imperial period that has never undergone a decolonisation process. Algeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa were all sites of European settlement and indigenous dispossession from 1850 to 1950, and all eventually experienced some version of decolonisation. This is why efforts to acknowledge Israel as a settler-colonial state have stirred such controversy; to do so would be to say that Israel is out of step with the moral arc of the modern world in which colonialism is understood as a crime rather than a civilising mission. For Maga ideologues and their global counterparts, it is precisely Israel's status as the last bastion of 19th-century-style colonialism today that makes flocking to its defence attractive. In their eyes, the revisionist Zionism of Netanyahu and his ilk is a shining example of what the West 'should have' done: established a firm grip, refused to apologise and dealt harshly with native resistance. The Maga movement celebrates Israel, not in spite of its colonial character, but because of it. In their eyes, Israel is the living rebuttal to decolonisation, multiculturalism and the whole post-1945 liberal international order they are in the process of dismantling. In this sense, the Maga-Israel alliance should be understood alongside efforts to suppress teaching critical race theory and suppress what Trump calls the 'woke agenda'. It is an effort to turn back the clock to an earlier era and put the genie of progressive decolonisation back in its bottle. Maga nostalgia Maga nostalgia for the 19th-century heyday of colonialism is not an isolated phenomenon. One need only look to Vladimir Putin's Russia, which has launched a war of territorial conquest in Ukraine in an effort to undo Soviet efforts acknowledging Ukrainian nationality a century ago. Similarly, Trump's ally Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has praised the American colonial cavalry and denied the existence of an ongoing genocide against indigenous groups in the Amazon. When US Secretary of State Marco Rubio opined in a January 2025 interview that 'eventually [the world is] going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet', he was talking about returning to an era of imperial competition not unlike the one that culminated in two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century. Israel and Trump: From euphoria to anxiety Read More » It is no accident that Rubio's comment echoes similar statements made by the anti-liberal Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, whose book Multipolarity: The Era of Great Transition has influenced radical circles on the right and the left. The core of the Maga-Israel alliance is not about votes, theology or even security: it is a project of historical amnesia. It seeks to erase the moral and political lessons of decolonisation and to re-legitimise the colonial worldview. It allows the Holocaust to be remembered in isolation, while any acknowledgement of the millions killed in colonial atrocities around the world is suppressed. Palestine is not just a contested land; it is the last mirror in which the West might see the truth of its colonial past. And so, the mirror must be shattered. Palestinians and those who sympathise with them must be silenced, not because they are wrong, but because they remember. And in remembering, they threaten to unmake the myths upon which the American empire depends. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Al Etihad
2 hours ago
- Al Etihad
Eight Palestinian civilians killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza
16 Aug 2025 11:30 GAZA (WAM)Eight Palestinian citizens were killed and others injured early Saturday morning when the Israeli occupation forces bombed a house in the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip and a tent housing displaced persons in Khan Younis in the sources at Al-Awda Hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp reported that six people, including four children, were killed as a result of the Israeli occupation forces' bombing of a house in the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Israeli drone bombed a tent housing displaced persons in the Mawasi al-Qarara area, north of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, killing a Palestinian and his death toll from the unrelenting Israeli genocidal aggression on the Gaza Strip on Friday surged to 61,827 civilians, according to medical sources. They said that the total death toll in the Gaza Strip has climbed to 61,827, mostly women and children, and the casualties to 155,275 since the onset of the Israeli aggression on the Strip on October 7, 2023.
Middle East Eye
8 hours ago
- Middle East Eye
Israeli police arrest protesters condemning the killings of journalists in Gaza
Israeli police in Haifa arrested protesters condemning the killings of journalists in Gaza, Al Jazeera reported on Friday. Footage shows demonstrators holding photos of Al Jazeera's Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh. Both were killed along with three other Al Jazeera staff and a freelance reporter in an Israeli drone strike on a journalists' tent in Gaza outside al-Shifa hospital on Sunday.
