THE Israeli government’s scheme forcing hungry Gazans to go to “secure distribution sites” run by the secretive Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, only for the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to repeatedly shoot some of the hungry Palestinians, looks like a very cruel theatre. To understand Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruthless plan, it is worth trying to understand the vicious “counterinsurgency“ the United States ran in Vietnam.

Faced with a nationalist uprising against colonial rule in Vietnam, the US decided one of the best approaches was “food denial.”

In 1961 US president John F Kennedy signed a secret national security action memorandum titled Defoliant Operation in South Vietnam.

It called for “a selective and carefully controlled joint programme of defoliant operations in Viet Nam starting with the clearance of key routes and proceeding thereafter to food denial only if the most careful basis of resettlement and alternative food supply has been created.”

The US rained huge amounts of poisonous weedkiller, Agent Orange, on Vietnam to “deny food” to the ordinary Vietnamese people. Civilians were then offered the chance to be “resettled” and offered “alternative food supply.” They could move to new, heavily policed villages called “strategic hamlets” to escape from the food shortages caused by Agent Orange.

These strategic hamlets would be policed by vicious militias recruited from “loyal” Vietnamese — it’s food as a weapon. Because the US saw  “Vietcong” guerillas had popular support, they tried to force the population to choose between supporting the rebels or eating. If they moved to the correct areas, and did the right things, they could get fed.

The US scheme in Vietnam was a copy of British strategy used to stop a rebellion in the the then colony of Malaya in the 1950s, which also involved destroying crops with defoliants and forcing ordinary Malayans into heavily policed “new villages” to cut them off from the rebels. The British called the plan “Operation Starvation.” Britain also fought the “Mau Mau” rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s by forcing Kenyans into similar “barbed-wire villages.”

It’s easy to think the IDF’s actions in Gaza are simply cruel, unreasonable “revenge” or designed to just kill as many Palestinians as possible, while doing some dubious food distribution as a distraction to the international community. Plenty of people in Netanyahu’s government have those motivations. But this also looks very like a more complex “counterinsurgency” plan formulated with the US to try force Palestinians into compliance.

Israel has done the “food denial.” It hasn’t had to use Agent Orange (which also poisoned both Vietnamese and US troops, causing many terrible birth defects). Israel simply cut off all food entering Gaza, removed UN food distribution. It also destroyed local crops and disrupted water supplies.

Now Gazans are desperately hungry, the IDF is trying to force them to comply through limited food distribution. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) postures as an independent group, but was founded on an Israeli government initiative and is co-ordinating with the IDF. By taking control of food distribution in this “privatised, militarised” way, the GHF can be a tool to force Gazans to be displaced from their homes or otherwise compliant with Israel’s orders.

The GHF was designed by US management consultants the Boston Consulting Group. Worried that lack of international support for the GHF would mean its absolutely un-humanitarian tactics would be exposed, Boston Consulting then cut off all involvement and sacked their “partners” who were most involved. Because of this break, internal details of the scheme are being exposed, notably in leaks to the Washington Post.

Boston Consulting’s own staff rebelled when they understood the GHF was designed to use hunger to force compliance, saying their involvement left their firm “potentially complicit in a system that enables population transfer and ethnic cleansing.”

Documents from the firm’s design work on the GHF also shows how close the scheme is to the Vietnam and Malaya models — the plans for the scheme include building a version of “strategic hamlets.” According to leaked papers, its plans included resettling Gazans to “humanitarian transition areas” (HTAs), which the Washington Post described as “heavily surveilled compounds,” and ”issued identification cards to secure temporary housing or access to aid.”

Internal documents show Boston Consulting was worried these HTAs and the food distribution centres would be seen as “concentration camps with biometrics.”

This comparison is being made by the consultants who designed the GHF, not some external critics of the scheme. The British “barbed-wire villages” and “new villages” in Kenya and Malaya and, to a lesser extent, the “strategic hamlets” programme were also compared to concentration camps. To be clear, this means camps that “concentrated” and  suppressed a population. Many did suffer and die in all of these camps, but they were not “death camps” designed to systematically kill all their inmates. But the comparison is still deeply disturbing.

I want to focus on the Vietnam-Malaya counterinsurgency strategy because it might give us some guidance as to what Israel will do next, and what we can do about it. If, as seems, Israel is running a “counterinsurgency” the IDF will continue to kill civilians, but it will also try to coerce them using food, relocation and attempts to establish local militias to police new settlements.

Netanyahu has admitted hiring Gazan criminal gangs who are reportedly working as “security” for the GHF, so these may be an attempt to establish such militias. Hiring local “mafias” and criminals is a longstanding CIA response to local resistances, so here again Israel is learning from Western “interventions.”

This counterinsurgency strategy is also a joint Israel-US scheme. Israel may have pitched the US-style plan in part to get US support, which Israel badly needs. This means that US consultants helped design the plan, US executives are running the GHF and US mercenaries are helping run “security” for the scheme. We can expect continued US involvement, possibly with support from private, corporate and clandestine organisations among US allied nations, like ourselves. Israel relies on Western support, which gives us a duty to protest, but also provides targets for that protest.

Follow Solomon Hughes on X at x.com/SolHughesWriter.