Episode 35: Solving hunger in Gaza with Prof. Yannay Spitzer

Ask Haviv Anything

Haviv Rettig Gur

History

4.9 • 640 Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2025

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Professor Yannay Spitzer is an economic historian who has studied food and hunger. His efforts over the past month to get real reliable data on hunger out of Gaza and publicize it to Israelis, data that is neither delayed nor politicized like the many claims of rampant hunger made over the past 22 months that turned out to be either inaccurate or untrue, helped change the conversation in Israel and surge aid into the strip.

Professor Spitzer joins us to explain what went wrong, why Israeli officials thought there was much more food available to Gazans than there really was, why the UN's own numbers seem to agree with them even now, why it's so hard to get food to ordinary Gazans - and what all this tells us about the state of Hamas and the future of Gaza.

This episode was dedicated by an anonymous sponsor to the memory of the remarkable Herbert Pagani, artist, composer and author, and in particular to commemorate the essay he shared on French TV in the mid-1970s titled “Plea for my Land,” a powerful and timeless defense of Jews and Israel that should be heard by all. Pagani was a self-described leftist and humanist, and a passionate defender of Zionism.

You can find “Plea for my land” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPpYQGv_jDI

Please join me on Patreon to support this project: ⁠www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠.

If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [email protected]⁠.

Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Habib Anything.
0:09.6	Professor Yanay-Szvizel helped me understand. He didn't know he was doing this. It was a tweet of his.
0:15.8	He helped me understand a couple weeks ago that everything in Gaza had changed.
0:22.4	I had already said on podcasts or live streams back in May, things like, this could mean hunger,
0:32.1	Israel don't screw this up.
0:33.9	I actually have a tweet like that with harsher words than that.
0:37.1	There was a whole theory, a
0:38.3	calculation that we could stop aid, create pressure, increase the protests against Hamas.
0:45.3	It's kind of a shocking misunderstanding of Hamas by people who should understand Hamas. Apparently,
0:51.3	the people who suggested this plan, who came up with this plan, are army intelligence, the same brilliant minds that gave the actually successful,
0:59.0	astonishingly successful campaign against Chizbalah. Israel in Gaza is floundering,
1:07.0	looking for a strategy. There was a good strategy, and then it didn't work, and then another
1:10.0	good strategy, and it didn't work, and then another good strategy, and it didn't work, and then another good strategy, then it didn't work and then another good strategy and it didn't work and then another good strategy and it didn't work. It always made
1:14.3	sense. It never got the job done and there isn't a serious debate. It's so politicized. Nizeniao
1:20.3	made a decision about now surging aid into Gaza two weeks ago Saturday in a way that prevented Smotrich
1:25.8	and Ben-Gvier, his great-win coalition partners who opposed
1:28.3	aid from being at the table to vote on it. So much politics is influencing this fundamental question.
1:33.3	And this past week, Smothertrich has finally said, you know, maybe leaving aid out is actually hurting the war effort.
1:40.3	Maybe we should put aid in. Good morning.
1:43.3	It's been a deeply frustrating thing to watch.
1:46.3	There's a tremendous amount of lying out there. I also believe that the Israelis have engaged
1:50.3	in what is both morally an enormous problem and strategically a massive setback because this
	...

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