New York, July 29 - A new nutritional regimen has taken the progressive world by storm: adopt the technique popular in pro-Palestine circles of redefining rampant obesity among Palestinians as “starvation,” by which the dieter’s own excess weight is recast as “thin.”
Proponents of the Gaza Diet took inspiration from the ubiquitous media framing of conditions in Gaza, observing that labels and narrative matter more than metrics. Bathroom scales and BMI charts represent settler-colonial measurement culture, in which objective standards have become synonymous with white supremacism.
Social media influencers have flooded Instagram and TikTok with before-and-after photos that are identical, captioned with phrases like “Day 47 on the Gaza Diet — on the verge of starvation.” Campus activists and coastal city socialists have begun hosting “redefinition circles,” where participants affirm one another’s new self-diagnosis over artisanal oat-milk lattes.
“The Gaza Diet delivers moral urgency and victim status without the inconvenience of actual dietary change,” explained BDS activist Duwazai Saye. “It fits perfectly with the boycott-Israel movement, which, while calling on people, institutions, and governments not to buy anything Israeli, boasts any number of members who honor that principle only for purchases they wouldn’t have made anyway. I, for example, am recording this on a phone with technology developed and manufactured in Israel.”
The phenomenon has, however, generated some pushback even in progressive spaces. Body-positivity advocates and anti-fat-shaming activists see a glaring contradiction. For years they have fought the idea that higher body weights signal any kind of crisis, rejecting “fatphobia,” sizeism, and health-at-every-size skepticism. Declaring a stable or elevated weight “starving” risks reintroducing negative moral judgment about bodies. Some critics within the coalition worry it pathologizes fatness under a new, politically fashionable vocabulary. Others fear it undercuts decades of work against diet culture by implying that being heavier is so undesirable it must be relabeled as famine.
Defenders of the Gaza Diet insist those issues remain marginal or misguided. “It’s axiomatic among progressives that all other causes must yield to Palestine,” argued Students for Justice in Palestine activist Donduwazai Du. “Queers for Palestine understand that - they know, or at least should know, that the people of Palestine want to murder anything with a whiff of non-heteronormativity. But they set aside that small detail for the greater cause. It’s a much smaller ask, in all reasonable senses, for anyone sensitive to fat-shaming to do something similar. There’s no risk, for example, that, unlike LGBTQ folks, they will be dragged to the rooftop to be thrown off, if only because of the effort involved.”
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