People keep saying Israel needs to follow the norms. The Allies actions in Germany ARE WHAT ESTABLISHED the norms. THEY ARE the norms people are calling for. I only read about them because people here on HN last week called that Israel needed to behave the same as the US in post war Germany. But now that they are inconvenient to a narrative I am downvoted/flagged/told they are irrelevant. Because I read and posted more detail on what people on HN were actively calling for.

The Allies did not. This is the number for years decided by bureaucrats, not just immediately after surrender. Go read the articles. The Allies decided on a number based on what they felt their home populations were willing to accept not on 'what they could get in'. And the Allies are considered to have been generous and done it the right way even though they made such considerations and limited supplies. It was until a year after the wars end that the allies allowed third party aid agencies for children into Germany. That was limiting aid, by choice. Just as the target calories were limited, by choice not capability/capacity.

All I know is the article's worst calorie number (1400) for a specific month is around the US allocated amount for many Germans during the initial 3-4 years of post war occupation and higher than those in remote areas of Germany.

Instead of being called crimes, what the Allies did is the basis of establishing the norms people here seem to want followed, and considered one of the better cases of treatment/outcomes. But when I point out the actual real 'norms' to have a discussion around I am downvoted, flagged, and attacked.

I don't quite understand why you keep pointing to post WW2 as a justification.

For 1 we should be looking at results and the situation on the ground, not the guidelines for what's "the proper way to do things". Were people in Germany starving or not, are people in Gaza starving or not? If the answer to either is yes, then it is / was a problem.

Secondly, what we consider ok changes over time. Go back far enough and killing prisoners, taking civilians as slaves etc were all considered ok. We frown on those now.

The Gaza thread on HN last week was talking about how Israel needed to fit to norms. That Israel needed to be like the US in Germany. Which is what got me looking into numbers. I think it's relevant as the Allies in Germany are where the current norms come from.

The Red Cross considers 1500 the floor for the US: https://emergency.lacity.gov/sites/g/files/wph1791/files/202...

not that much to the minimal amount of 1400 the CNN article found occurring. Horrible I agree, but not that far off from the Red Cross floor for aid distribution with the USA.

The UN provides much less calories (currently 552 to refugees from Sudan's war) yet says it can provide more than Israel in aid Gaza. Is the UN anti Sudanese/Kenyans because it claims to have food for 2 million on hand yet won't feed the starving 800,000 in Kenya? If it has food for Gaza's 2 million that is isn't giving out, how can it justify not giving at least part of that to the smaller 800,000 war refugees in Kenya? The UN itself says it's a crime not to give out food in those higher quantities if there are stocks of it. The UN has stocks. The UN does not give those stocks out to those in need, only giving 552 calories.

Maybe you should take a look at the IPC report, which details exactly how they know that Gaza is in the middle of a deliberately created, man-made famine.

Kenya has the ability to grow food. Gaza doesn't. Israel has destroyed 100% of the farmland and shoots anyone who walks around freely outside of a tiny fraction of the Gaza Strip.

The allies' crimes were 80 years ago. Israel's crimes are ongoing.

The allies did not consider 1000 calories an acceptable dietary intake post-war. Here's a report from the Berlin blockade:

https://doi.org/10.2307/4588157

Quote:

    Our clinical and other observations convinced us that 2,000 calories a day was a bare minimum and sufficed merely to keep the population at a subsistence level.

Where "bare minimum" refers to a community with high numbers of women and children doing little exercise or labor. They observed malnutrition in people consuming 1800 calories daily and recommended substantially more than 2000 calories for people doing hard labor.

Go ahead and read here and the many reports cited. The USA settled on 1000 for when airlifts were required, and 1500 otherwise. And wanted to use a lesser number originally. Your article if from 1951, not contemporary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_occupied_Germany

The Red Cross has settled on 1500 as the floor in the US.

https://emergency.lacity.gov/sites/g/files/wph1791/files/202...

If you had read literally the first line of the article, you would see that it discusses the 1948-1949 years of the blockade. The wikipedia article you're citing covers the 10 years after 1945, which includes those years. Even if the years didn't overlap, human nutritional needs obviously didn't double in 6 years.

Of course, if you had read the wikipedia article you would have seen these lines:

    The Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force initially set the ration scale for Germans at 11,000 kJ (2,600 kcal) per day... Once the occupation of Germany commenced, it proved impossible to deliver the intended levels of food...As a result, once supplies which had been stockpiled by the German government during the war ran out, the ration scales were reduced to 4,200–5,200 kJ (1,000–1,250 kcal) per day.

So they didn't set the number to 1000 out of a principled stances about nutritional needs, it was what they could manage actually deliver given the enormous logistical and infrastructure limitations of the blockade.

The LA city (not Red Cross) document is much the same. Again, you've failed to read literally the next line in a document because the Red Cross is cited with the proper figure immediately after the "1500 calorie" figure:

    The Red Cross suggests 2,000 to 2,500 calories per person, per day.

You can also look at virtually any paper ever published on human caloric needs. A population average of 1400 calories/day is famine. For context, in 2021 they had 1800 calories/day available (https://www.gisha.org/UserFiles/File/publications/redlines/r...), which is less than Somalia or South Sudan in the same period according to the latest numbers (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...).