How can there be an argument about starvation in Gaza? If a tenth of the news account are not doctored, if a tenth of the videos of people running and stumbling—and in some cases dying—as food aid is dropped in parachuted bundles from planes are true, Gaza is a starvation catastrophe.

As American Indian history is my current passion, I look to my own country. My mind goes to the burning of cornfields and the killing of buffalo—the deliberate destructions of Native foods—as settler America overwhelmed Native America. Maybe the most brutal story of forced starvation as government policy occurred in 1863-66, when Christopher (Kit) Carson marched 10,000 Navajo (Diné) from their homelands in Grand Canyon country hundreds of miles to the Bosque Redondo in what is now eastern New Mexico—a reservation set up to Christianize and assimilate the people. Carson first conducted a scorched earth policy across the Navajo homelands. He burned villages, slaughtered livestock, and destroyed water sources in order to reduce the Navajo to starvation and desperation. And then the “Long Walk” to Bosque Redondo. (Given only lard, flour, and salt on the Long Walk, the Navajo developed “frybread,” but that is another story.)

History has more stories, and the situations in Sudan and Yemen today—and the UN’s frantic efforts to get food to the people—tell us that starvation is not past tense.

But what about Israel? Have the Israelis deliberately withheld food aid? Not allowed trucks to pass? Proclaimed that UN efforts were tainted by a handful of Hamas activists among their hundreds of employees? Let’s not argue that now, but in times that require truth telling, we know for certain that Israel has not allowed foreign journalists to enter Gaza and see for themselves what is true and not true about hunger and devastation there. This Israeli prohibition—and the hundreds of Palestinian journalists working for foreign media who have been killed in Gaza—will come to haunt Israel.

Because the truth will out. Eventually more bodies will be found beneath the rubble. Eventually, some of the children at the edge of starvation will recover and tell their stories. Most Americans did not believe, or pay attention to the use of starvation as tool of conquest as we displaced Natives and took land across America. General Sherman had to see the starving Navajo to disband Bosque Redondo. But he did.

More recently, we Americans did not acknowledge the extent of the Nazi holocaust until it was all over, until American troops liberated Buchenwald and General Eisenhower demanded that reporters and Congressional leaders be brought to the camps to see the starving people and the dead bodies. Eisenhower’s greatest leadership might have been exerted then, when he made sure that the holocaust was documented, and, more than that, that leaders—Congressional leaders, news reporters, and even Germans from nearby villages—experienced it directly as the liberation occurred.

My friend, the late Jack McClaran, was a 19-year-old tanker and among the liberators. Decades later, in a room full of students and his Wallowa County neighbors, Jack remembered precisely the prison and feeding the starving prisoners. They could not, Jack said, give them solid food, but made some kind of gruel they cooked in their helmets. All those years later, he gathered up a chuckle to tell us how one of the prisoners assigned to him wondered at the food. It was the best he’d ever eaten.

Today, I think of what we now know of Native Americans in our history. I think of Jack, and of General Eisenhower, and the orderly way that they brought starving Jews and others—Gypsies, homosexuals—back to life. Jack was one of thousands following orders, doing his job, and bearing witness, which he could summon 50 years later. Eisenhower was the man in charge with the wisdom to capture the horrors the men were seeing and reinstalling basic human decency in a place and among people who had not seen it in the Nazi years.

My horrible hunch is that what will eventually be called the “Netanyahu Years” will have secrets as big as the Nazi furnaces. That we will find Israeli Kit Carsons, who brutally carry out government policies that destroy homes and hospitals and deny food, electricity, and water to civilians That thousands of bodies will be uncovered in the rubble. But I also know that soldiers who saw atrocities will step forward with their stories—as Jack McClaran did for us. That Israeli and foreign journalists will scour the savaged lands for true stories of this holocaust.

But first there has to be a liberation of Gaza. Food in Gaza. Hospitals again in Gaza. Clean water in Gaza. Shelter that is more than tent flaps and cardboard.

We can show our outrage, but maybe we need a General Sherman or Eisenhower? A man or woman of such standing who can tower over the current devastation and say “enough”?

And then we can pick up the pieces and feed the hungry.

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Image of Eisenhower at Buchenwald from Truman Library