The Breaking Point Consensus on Gaza is rapidly shifting as famine looms and Israel escalates.

ON OCTOBER 25, 2023, just two weeks into Israel's siege of Gaza, Egyptian-born author Omar El Akkad reposted a video on X of a leveled city block, writing, “One day, when it’s safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.

- Sam Adler-Bell

Palestinians running toward aid packages parachuted into the northern Gaza Strip on August 7.

His words, reposted 58,000 times, captured a widespread preemptive despair. The hypocrisy of global liberalism, it seemed, would accommodate barbarity until the precise moment that its own survival required a brazen revision. Twenty-one months later, that bitter prophecy, almost claustrophobic in its parsimony, seems more likely all the time: We will not account for this crime until it has been accomplished.

Over the past few weeks as starvation in Gaza, long in the making and orchestrated by Israel, has reached unprecedented levels—nearly 12,000 children under the age of 5 are suffering acute malnutrition, according to the World Health Organization—politicians have finally risked criticism of the regime responsible. Even stalwart defenders of Israel, such as New York representative Ritchie Torres, have begun to question the war's aims. On July 28, Marjorie Taylor Greene—no ally of the Jewish state—became the first Republican to call Israel's actions a “genocide.” On July 30, 27 senators from the Democratic caucus voted for Bernie Sanders’ bill to halt firearms shipments to Israel, up from just 15 who voted for similar resolutions in April. Key holdouts remain—including Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand—but as a former Biden official told Politico, such a result was recently unimaginable.

In the media, the New York Times, long accused of cowardice and printing propaganda on Israel’s behalf, published a damning investigation of starvation in Gaza, igniting the wrath of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who told Fox News that the paper “should be sued.” “I am actually looking into whether a country can sue the