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.
